Thank you again, I really do appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions. It sounds so nice to come to love them from nurturing I can see why you would have a strong attachment now, as you write, like family. How did you become dedicated to Jiyong more, did he make the type of music you liked more?
Of course! Iām always happy to talk about BIGBANG. Iām sorry this will be a very long story again, it is more difficult to write in English. Jiyong is a strange case, because I did not like him that much before he debuted. I was 12 when I first knew him, and he was already in YG. I thought he was very strange and different because all I knew was school and friends but he already had a lot of ideas about his life. He thought about music, that was everything, his life was all about music. He was training in YG but it was mostly cleaning work, he and Youngbae mopped floors and brought water and sorted clothes for everybody else, not just the singers but also the dancers and other people. Even when he was tired he was always excited to talk about music, he was already writing songs. Sometimes he would sing and rap when we asked and say things like ānow imagine this and thatā and pretend he was on stage. But if we laughed he would get sulky! We called him āSandpaper Yongā whenever he did that.Ā Of course I could not understand a lot of what he said at the time, I just thought that he was really grand and different. He was only a few years older than me, but he had school and he worked at a company and he was also writing songs and he had big ideas.
I half admired him and half was fond of him because he really was so hardworking that he didnāt think about his own health. In the early days after they debuted as BIGBANG we were the first VIP, we got very angry when people said they were not handsome enough to be idols and nobody could understand their music. We thought that we were protecting them by fighting against the anti-fans. But Jiyong was the one who told us that we did not need to fight for them. He was very thin at the time because of debuting but he told us that it was his fault that people did not like BIGBANG. He said that he would be responsible for BIGBANG and not make us worry about them anymore. He promised us that he would work harder, that he would fight for BIGBANG and we did not need to be angry and hurt ourselves defending them.
But I think it was after Lie became popular that I became really attached to him. We were celebrating that BIGBANG had finally become popular but we also thought he would change into a real star, he would not come down from the apartment and wave to us and smile any longer. But he didnāt change. He celebrated with us. Then people began doubting that he had written the whole album, because it had never been done before. We were angry that they did not believe him because we had seen the songs he had written, we had heard him when he sang them, we knew his talent when they did not even know he existed. He was depressed during that time, and we did not know how to comfort him or protect him. He stayed inside for weeks working and didnāt come out. Then, when he finally came back, he apologized to us for hurting us. Although we could not protect him, he was sorry that he had broken his promise and made us worry again. Then he told us that he wanted us to push him. He still believed that as long as he worked harder people would grow to love him. He told us that whatever unhappiness we had with BIGBANG we should tell him and blame only him because it was his responsibility as leader to give us a perfect BIGBANG. He said that we VIP must always make him do more and point out his problems so that one day we would not have anti-fans. It is our special relationship with Jiyong. He is very hard on himself and we Korean VIP are hard on him too. Other idol fans will only love their idols. We love Jiyong but we push him, we criticize him, we blame him worse than anybody else too. On his me2day all of our messages talked about what he should do for BIGBANG, what songs he should write for BIGBANG, what he was doing wrong with BIGBANG. At that time we forgot that he was a person too, we only told him to work. And he did. We saw that the lights in YG were on past 4am, and we were happy because we only thought of how this must be good for BIGBANG.Ā
In 2009 when heĀ said he would do a solo album we were excited, and happy that he did well. I loved this album more than the BIGBANG albums he wrote, it was soooo different from Korean music at the time! We were all surprised. But then people doubted him again. I cried really hard for him. He left a message asking why people hated him. We didnāt know how to answer because we also did not understand. He was depressed again, but he apologized for making us worry, he apologized again and again. Then he stopped writing as much. I think he was sad that we did not defend him. I think he realized that we could not protect him, he had to protect himself. He was shyer and less eager to talk on shows, in interviews. If you notice even now, he barely ever speaks in interviews, he lets the other members talk. This was when it started, when he began only saying how he felt through music. In 2011 when many fans left him we were silent, again, as it is our habit. He suffered in silence, and once again we saw the lights on at 3, 4, 5am in YG. But this time we were not happy, we worried for him.
These past two years are the same. We know that he is working like he worked in 2008, in 2010. Now I am older, and I know what it means to work like he does, to write songs and promote albums and do concerts and everything else that he has to do. Before, we took him and his hard work for granted. We thought that of course he didnāt need to rest, he said he was responsible for BIGBANG and he said he wanted to work harder. But now I look back and I see how lonely the road was for him. Even we VIP were harder on him than his worst anti-fans. He has only apologized to us, but we have only blamed him.
I have been a fan for almost 10 years now. I am old enough to see now how rare of a person he is. Because he is a good person, and that is rarer to see in a singer than in ordinary life. He has never wanted gifts, he tells us to donate our money or save it for our future, but when we give him small things he will wear them to make us happy. No matter what he wears, no matter what color his hair is, even now when he is world star Jiyong and rarely in Korea, he is really the same person who I knew 10 years ago. He has given his life to music, to BIGBANG, to VIP, and I can no longer leave him. Jiyong is our family, and we owe him too much.Ā
janainaart
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