The Classics
What Kim Se-jun found on MeTube was a special music video from a channel he subscribed to.
The video showed nothing but a woman painted in watercolor — a single figure standing at the prow of a ship, facing a sea whipped into fury by a raging storm.
"Nice arrangement..."
A smile touched Kim Se-jun's lips as the music washed over him. It was a song rearranged for traditional Korean instruments.
He scrolled through the comments.
And then another comment caught his eye.
The moment Kim Se-jun read it, his mind lit up as if someone had thrown open a window onto daylight.
"The classics...?"
"Yeah. The classics."
The classics. Stories handed down through the ages — tales that nearly every Korean had grown up hearing.
Kim Se-jun swallowed once, then spoke again.
"What about Simcheongga?"
"Simcheongga?"
Kang Yu-na and Cha Tae-gyu's eyes went round. Curiosity filled both their faces as they echoed the question in unison.
I knew it.
Watching their interest take hold, the corners of Kim Se-jun's mouth curved upward.
"The story of Sim Cheong and Sim Bong-sa. I want to use the two of them as the concept."
"So you're saying I play Sim Cheong, and oppa plays Sim Bong-sa — a duet?"
Kang Yu-na's eyes sparkled as she asked, and Cha Tae-gyu straightened out of his slouch.
"It's original, I'll give you that."
Cha Tae-gyu clicked his tongue, running through Kang Yu-na's catalog in his head. Of all the songs she had released, not one had ever taken a concept like this.
And it could lock in a much wider fanbase.
Kang Yu-na's core audience was in their twenties and thirties. Unfortunately, among the uncle fans in their forties and beyond, her firepower had always been relatively weak. But a song like this might well catch on with those older men. It was a song that could seize the heart of any father who had a child of his own.
Kang Yu-na, who had been lost in thought, smiled.
"Sim Cheong. She's a compelling character, isn't she?"
"She's been loved for hundreds of years. There's a reason the classics endure."
"And there's no character more familiar to the public."
"Exactly!"
At Kang Yu-na's words, Kim Se-jun snapped his fingers. It was a story already beloved by the masses, one that had spread across every kind of medium.
"She's been done in pansori, of course, but also in opera and musicals. There's no law that says we can't make her into a pop song, is there?"
"That's right!"
Kang Yu-na snapped her fingers right back at him and met his eyes, smiling. She had sung pop songs while playing every kind of woman. She had been the tragic heroine drowning in sorrow. She had been a fresh-faced student. She had been an ordinary woman dragging through a gloomy day, and a star shining brighter than anyone alive. But she had never been a girl who gave up her life for her father.
"I'm in. This is going to be fun!"
Kang Yu-na said it with a bright, open smile, and Cha Tae-gyu nodded.
"I'm on board with the concept itself. But Simcheongga is a massive story. Can you really tell all of that in a four-minute song? Even the pansori takes hours to perform."
Cha Tae-gyu's question was a fair one, and Kim Se-jun already had the right answer.
"I don't think we need a full beginning, middle, and end. It's such a familiar story that if we show just one scene from Simcheongga, people will understand it instantly."
"Ohh..."
Cha Tae-gyu clapped his palms together in admiration.
He's right. If we title it Simcheongga and let them hear just one scene, people will slip into it without any trouble.
"Do you have a scene in mind?"
Kim Se-jun kept producing good ideas without a hitch. Cha Tae-gyu's gaze, which had regarded him with such displeasure at the start, had already turned favorable. Inwardly amused by that shift, Kim Se-jun answered.
"I think that scene would leave the deepest impression."
"Which scene?"
"The scene where Sim Cheong throws herself into the Indangsu. Yu-na as Sim Cheong in the instant before she falls — and me as Sim Bong-sa, lamenting as he watches her. Wouldn't that work?"
"That's good. That's really good."
"I like it..."
Both of them nodded of their own accord. The picture formed naturally in their minds. And at the same time, another question occurred to Cha Tae-gyu.
"Hold on. I don't mean this as a slight against you, Se-jun, but... can you actually do it? Singing from the heart of a father who's about to lose his daughter? I'm a father myself, so I can say this — watching your child die in your place isn't an emotion you can just express. Not easily."
The feelings of Sim Bong-sa. It was an emotion far too heavy for a man barely in his mid-twenties to understand.
Imagine my daughter dying for me... Shit...
Cha Tae-gyu shook his head quickly, cursing inwardly. He'd rather die himself. It was a feeling he didn't even want to imagine. Just thinking about it made his chest feel as if it were tearing apart. And that wouldn't even be the half of it. Life itself would become hell.
Kang Yu-na, hearing him, looked at Kim Se-jun with a fairly serious expression. Her own emotions as Sim Cheong wouldn't be easy either — but they were nothing compared to his.
"Oppa, do you think you can do it?"
She asked it with a set face. Looking at the two of them, now quite earnest, Kim Se-jun smiled faintly.
After the meeting with Kim Se-jun ended and he left, Kang Yu-na and Cha Tae-gyu stayed behind in the office to talk.
"Confident he can do it better than anyone in the world... Is that just overconfidence?"
"I think he really is that confident. But you know your proposal is off the table now, right?"
Where Cha Tae-gyu was half-skeptical, Kang Yu-na believed Kim Se-jun's words without a shred of doubt, and she dragged the last of her sentence out as if she were teasing him. Cha Tae-gyu's face crumpled, then he slowly nodded.
"Fine. We drop the featuring. We go duet. Given the concept of the song, featuring wouldn't work anyway."
"See? If we'd gone duet from the start, you wouldn't have been late and everything would've been fine."
"If it were Lim Tae-hyun, maybe. But if a rookie does a duet with you, Hyoun Group is going to have something to say — guaranteed. Featuring was the appropriate level."
Duet versus featuring. At a glance the two words didn't seem all that different, but in reality they were. A duet was a song built together. Featuring was closer to a supporting role. Naturally, going duet rather than featuring would reduce Kang Yu-na's share of the spotlight — and Hyoun Group, which had acquired his company, did not want that.
They would have understood if it were Lim Tae-hyun. Kim Se-jun was a different story. His album had done well, but compared to Kang Yu-na it was pitifully modest. Cut Kang Yu-na's share for a singer like that? He could already hear the Hyoun Group executives' endless stream of curses ringing in his ears like an auditory hallucination.
Persuading them would fall entirely on him. Whether they would understand the way he did was another question entirely.
"Hah. Guess I'm heading into another war of words."
Cha Tae-gyu shook his head in dismay, and Kang Yu-na looked at him for a moment before she spoke.
"I'll go with you. I'll help."
"Oh. Really? You always insist you hate going to those places. Why this time?"
Cha Tae-gyu brightened at her words. If she came along, persuading them would be considerably easier. Kang Yu-na smiled as she answered.
"This song. I think it's actually going to be really fun. We have to get permission — no matter what."
To Kim Se-jun, once a gayageum master, Simcheongga was an intimately familiar work.
Gayageum byeongchang — singing a passage of pansori while plucking the gayageum. It was a performance Kim Se-jun, as a gayageum master, had presented often. Among the passages of Simcheongga, "Sim Bong-sa Goes to the Capital" was one of the most celebrated in gayageum byeongchang, and a sung passage Kim Se-jun himself had performed many times.
"In other words, I've already been Sim Bong-sa more times than I can count."
In the Ares Music practice room, Kim Se-jun smiled as he ran his hand over his gayageum. That was the ground on which he had been able to tell Kang Yu-na and Cha Tae-gyu, without hesitation, that he was confident. He had acted out the heart of a father who had lost his child over and over. And he had the experience of delivering profound emotion to the people who had watched those performances.
"The emotion isn't the problem. If anything, the problem is the song..."
Strictly speaking, this song wasn't his. He was joining Kang Yu-na's song as a duet partner. There was no rule that said he couldn't contribute to the composition — but stepping forward first wouldn't look good either.
"She'll make it well. It's Kang Yu-na, after all..."
A slight concern. But because he trusted Kang Yu-na as an outstanding artist, Kim Se-jun set his worry aside and sank into practice.
A famous bar in the heart of Gangnam's entertainment district. In the largest of dozens of rooms — a room only VIPs could enter — a young man's cold voice rang out.
"What did you just say? Say that again."
The man tossed back a glass of whiskey, swept his hair back with his right hand, and asked. Across from him, a stout man hurriedly refilled the glass.
"Kean turned us down in the end."
To be precise, Kang Yu-na is the one who refused.
He couldn't bring himself to say the rest. He could already predict exactly how that walking bundle of pride would react the moment he heard it.
"Why did they refuse?"
The slight frown as he asked the question made Park Young-ho, CEO of Stein Entertainment, feel his heart clench. Lim Tae-hyun's fans would squeal that even that face was decadently handsome — but Park Young-ho knew better. Lim Tae-hyun, the male solo singer with unmatched popularity and a fanbase all his own. Right now, his mood had turned very, very sour.
"Well... the concept of this song, I think..."
"Have a drink, CEO."
Lim Tae-hyun cut him off and held out the liquor, and Park Young-ho glanced at his own glass. It was already full of whiskey. Without hesitation, Park Young-ho downed it in one go and held the glass out again.
"That can happen. Sure, that can happen, but..."
Lim Tae-hyun leaned in as he poured, and the liquor overflowed the glass and soaked Park Young-ho's hand.
"What have you been doing all this time, CEO?"
"....!"
Park Young-ho couldn't easily answer the question, asked with a thin, unpleasant smile.
This little shit, I swear...
The hand Park Young-ho had extended with the glass trembled. He wanted nothing more than to put a fist through that arrogant brat's face.
Goddamn it.
But he knew. He could never do that. Lim Tae-hyun wasn't just a singer belonging to his company. The enormous sponsors standing behind him — a single breath from them and his company would lurch as if it had been hit by a typhoon.
"I'm sorry, Tae-hyun. I was too complacent about this. It won't happen again. You know how I operate, right?"
Park Young-ho lifted his deeply bowed head and hid his feelings behind an awkward smile. Lim Tae-hyun snorted a laugh at the sight, stopped pouring, pulled out a tissue, and wiped Park Young-ho's hand with both of his own.
"That's just it, CEO. You know how much I like you, don't you? Why do you keep disappointing me?"
Watching Lim Tae-hyun wipe his hand with a sudden bright smile, Park Young-ho had the illusion that hives were breaking out on his own skin where it met Lim Tae-hyun's through a single sheet of tissue.
This psychopathic little shit.
"Come on, now. Have a drink. It won't be like this next time, will it?"
At his words, the glass emptied. Lim Tae-hyun downed it in one swallow, chewed a piece of the fruit that had been served with the drinks, and asked,
"So then, Kang Yu-na's going out solo this time?"
Ah... goddamn it.
Park Young-ho's face hardened again at the question.
"Th-that's... it seems like she's doing a duet with another singer?"
For an instant, Lim Tae-hyun's entire body froze as if it had gone rigid.
"Hah... She turns me down, and then does a duet with someone else?"
Park Young-ho felt a cold sweat run down his back as he watched the man spit the words out in sheer disbelief.
"Who is it?"
"Huh? Ah, Kim Se-jun, apparently. There's a singer at Ares Music. That... rookie who debuted early this year..."
Crash!
The moment the words left his mouth, Lim Tae-hyun hurled the glass in his hand to the floor. Shattered fragments of glass carpeted the ground, and Lim Tae-hyun's icy voice rang in Park Young-ho's ear.
