Peach. Early 40s baby Atiny. Queer and ND. She/her. 🇬🇧 San bias, egregiously Wooyoung wrecked. 🌈 This is a liberal queer ND trans-friendly sex positive blog that makes reference to shipping.🌈
HUGE DISCLAIMER: I am not implying I think any of the following:
- KQ is a perfect company that is perfectly managed.
- Eden is the best music producer ever and infallible
- Either of these parties have always made the best possible management decisions and perfectly utilized all its talent to the fullest.
HOWEVER.
Some of the commonly parroted fandom beliefs, especially surrounding one Kang Yeosang have nearly forced me to become their downright defenders (Particularly of Eden. As a rule I simply do not cape for corporations, though my stance in this case is a fairly neutral one. Though I don’t dispute the likelihood that they have their management shortcomings, I’m giving the benefit of the doubt that overall they’re doing things...fine...at least insofar as their talent management goes.)
Another disclaimer is that I’m a (photo)card-carrying Yeodoongie. I love this doberman a lot, as a singer, performer and overall cool-sounding guy (He took the time while visiting my home region on tour to go down to the beach and vocally appreciate some seals! How can I not like him?). I’ll be the first to tell you I want nothing for the best for him in his career and life. All the prominent singing parts!
With that in mind, the fandom view of him as this poor downtrodden fellow who is constantly being mistreated by the company and Evil Producer Eden and purposely excluded from having lines is…very silly and honestly a bit embarrassing.
Let's get into it:
I won’t actually go into too much detail on the Eden situation here. For more information on that please see this excellent writing on the subject from @atiny-for-life. I mostly want to address this from the angle of Yeosang and his artistic and professional growth, and by extension that of ATEEZ as a whole. All I will say is don’t believe rumors, and if you like ATEEZ’s music and continue to listen to it, you don’t/shouldn’t actually hate Eden/Eden-ary team all that much! We're at the point where there are multiple instances of Eden being written in as a villain character in AU fanfics. We have certifiably lost the plot (also Maddox sometimes ends up in that mess and it's really just ? what did HE do to get pulled into this??)
A few facts:
- When ATEEZ debuted, ATEEZ members, KQ as a company, and Eden as a producer, were all relatively new and inexperienced in their roles. Not an excuse, just a fact
- It’s plain to hear that Eden-ary’s writing and producing chops were still somewhat in development at that time, I’m guessing due to both experience and budget-related reasons. This will become clear through my discography review series. They certainly had plenty of talent and ability already, and ATEEZ’s early discography is still quite a lot of fun, and good for what it is. But the fact is a lot of their early work is fairly simple EDM-inspired pop, without the level of songwriting complexity or degree of tailoring to the members’ specific strengths, as we are seeing today with their more sophisticated, mature sound.
-ATEEZ is a group with a disproportionate number of singers with low-pitched, dark-sounding voices.
I will just say it: when the group debuted, Yeosang was not the strongest vocalist. His voice is naturally quite soft and does not carry very well, and it has taken a lot of training for him to improve on that front. He also had a decent amount of trouble maintaining vocal stability while moving. He is still not the strongest on this front.
Other members were similarly under-trained (even Jongho!), but some had enough, or their voices just naturally carried a little better in a live setting with heavy choreography, to be more workable at the time. ATEEZ is a performance group, not only a vocal ensemble. When your sets are as dance-heavy as ATEEZ’s, it’s just not a good idea to give a lot of lines to someone who cannot carry them well while moving, especially when that person is one of your key performers! Making a person sing notes they’re not trained to be able to reach easily can even cause vocal damage. A lot of ATEEZ’s discography at that time just sat at a more mid-to-high vocal range as is typical in a lot of pop music. Yeosang does have some lines back then in these upper registers, which is okay when you have the help of production tools, but I would guess it was for his sake as much as the rest of the group’s that they chose not to give him too heavy a vocal line burden.
We tend to bias music over dance as an art form, but Yeosang’s role as a dancer and performer should not be overlooked. Yeo has always been utilized extremely well for his power and grace as a performer, and I think that was reasonably prioritized over his vocals in the early days.
We haven’t heard Yeosang speak as directly on this subject, but we can look at Wooyoung as another example. He is also someone who’s been on the lower end of the line distribution spectrum. As I discuss in his entry in this series, this is partly due to his voice not being quite as versatile as other members. However, another factor is that for much of ATEEZ’s history, he was considered, and considered himself, primarily a dancer! He’s spoken publicly about this, and also about how this has started to change in recent years. But it’s important! In a large group whose work involves many different dimensions of artistic performance, not everyone has to have exactly the same role. We don’t look at Jongho, who obviously tends to have a less central position as a dancer (even though he certainly has the chops for it!) and assume it must be because he’s being mistreated! We might hope that we occasionally get to see more of his skills at that, but at the end of the day we understand that his role in the group is primarily that as a singer, and we’re okay with it. So why can’t we be as okay with someone who’s more comfortable as a dancer?
I would also like to point out that Yeosang is present vocally, from the beginning, just not in the most obvious places. As I lamented in my character study on him, such is the standard experience of low voice parts in ensembles: we are there, you just might not notice, but you would miss us if we were gone. Yeosang is all over the place in ad libs, and harmonizing/doubling other members in lower registers!
I’m not going to comment heavily on other factors that might have impacted his development as an artist or why he might have taken longer to gain confidence as a vocalist. Others have written meta aplenty on this. (Though it is a bit intriguing that both he and Wooyoung, our former BigHit trainees, share this aspect of their development! But this is not the discussion for today). The tl;dr of my thoughts on the matter are: he is a grown man who can handle his own shit; none of us have enough actual information to make a true judgment on the matter; He. Is. A. Grown. Man.
As the production team matured and developed, so did the members. Their talent and discography has evolved in tandem to demonstrate a wider variety of sounds and textures that’s been so exciting to experience as a listener. Alongside this, Yeosang’s involvement as a vocalist has only grown as time goes on. Beginning notably during THE WORLD era, coincidentally when ATEEZ really started leaning heavily into a much darker, edgier sound and aesthetic, Yeosang’s voice started being utilized very deliberately in places like the Halazia prechorus and famous Dune chorus. As one wonderful [YouTuber] put it, these were his “Five-star Michelin moment” and “Maniac chorus” moments, respectively.
He’s put his work in to develop as a singer, and it’s paid off. His line percentage has gotten steadily more competitive with each comeback. Fast forward to the prominent role he’s had in Golden Hour Part.4, both musically and visually. Even with GH3, (IMO, a particularly whiny moment for the Yeosang Defense Squad which inspired a lot of these thoughts in the first place. Don’t get me started on the whole “banned from the gym” panic.), though his line distribution was a bit lower, the parts he did have were very cool “killing parts”, which I don’t consider to be a step down at all.
He’s really come so far as a musician and it’s been exciting to see! However the fact remains that to this day, Yeosang is still one of the weaker/less stable live singers, at least with the type of vocal style required to sing ATEEZ’s songs. Owing probably in part to the qualities we all love about his voice: its deep richness and dark intonation, he not infrequently still has issues projecting and tuning onstage. I’m so excited to continue to watch him grow in this area!
Yeosang’s growth as an artist and idol is interesting both in its own right and in how it’s a parallel to the overall trajectory of ATEEZ as a group (and to a lesser extent KQ as a company). I just believe it’s a disservice to him to just assume he has had absolutely no agency or control over his role in the group or his activities, especially as fans coming from a place of limited information.
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