NAME: Rosalie Kang; “Amethyst”
FACE CLAIM: Im Jinah
AGE: 26
TITLE: The Fame
OCCUPATION: Lead Singer of The Gemstones
𝐁𝐔𝐁𝐁𝐋𝐄𝐆𝐔𝐌, 𝐁𝐔𝐁𝐁𝐋𝐄𝐆𝐔𝐌, 𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐘 𝐏𝐎𝐏!
𝐀𝐍 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐄𝐖 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐆𝐄𝐌𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐍𝐄𝐒 𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐃 𝐒𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐄𝐑,
𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐄 𝐊𝐀𝐍𝐆
𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚐 𝚜𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚔𝚜 𝚓𝚘𝚋𝚜, 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚟𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚖𝚊𝚔𝚎𝚜 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚞𝚗𝚒𝚚𝚞𝚎!
The Gemstones aren’t strangers to having their day in the sun. Known for their sweeter-than-sugar pop attitudes, but notorious for their ever-changing roster, and for those that remember, their abrupt rebranding from rock to pop, one of the lone constants remains their lead vocalist, Amethyst, or Rosalie, as she would introduce herself as. It’s almost inconceivable that she was the former front-liner of rock band, Bitch Frenzy, as she sits, legs crossed primly, in the media room of Fusetone with her shimmery little dress and her picture perfect smile; it’s hard to see her as anything but the All-American gemstone sweetheart she is now, and I’m sure that’s the way Fusetone and the band prefer it.
But following that train of thought makes me curious about whether or not she has any lingering regrets, so I ask, “If you could do anything in the world for a living, what would it be?”
“Anything in the world?” She answers, looking genuinely pensive for a moment before it fades. “Well, it would still be this, wouldn’t it? What more could I ask for? The girls in the Gemstones are my family,” she continues, brows furrowing for a moment, a minute drop of her smile, like a wisp of cloud just passing by clear skies. “Being able to work with all of them and share our music with the world is already the best way to make a living. I wouldn’t change anything. Why? Not a fan of our work?” She teases.
“No, not at all,” I backtrack quickly, and truthfully, I am a fan, both pre- and post-rebranding. “But it must get tiring, so I imagine you would like to go on vacation. So, if you could travel anywhere, where would you go?”
“I think I should like to go to New York City,” she muses. “I’ve been a city girl all my life. Put me anywhere other than a city and I don’t think I’d know left from right. Going abroad is probably too big a wish right now, isn’t it?” She asks, looking wistful. “A girl can certainly dream.”
“I’m sure you could go abroad somewhere,” I prompt, trying for an encouraging smile, thinking it may brighten her mood.
Instead, she purses her lips in a nervous frown. “No,” she says with a surprising amount of conviction, shaking her head. “Better stay where I’m safe and sound. Stay home, where it’s familiar, comfortable… Bit of a homebody, me,” she jokes weakly, as if suddenly aware of the heavy tone of her words.
“Okay,” I relent. “What is one thing that makes you different than anyone else?”
“Is it presumptuous to say my voice? I think every singer wants to say their voice makes them different from everyone else.” She grins. “I had my rock days, and now I get to sing pop songs, so I feel like being able to dabble in both genres is pretty unique. Other than that,” she trails off, thinking hard but looking the most relaxed she’s been this whole interview. “Oh,” she exclaims after a beat. “I’m a great whistler; a lot of people say I’m just like a little songbird.”
Here is the retelling of Little Red Riding Hood that is devoid of lies:
The Wolf comes into Little Red’s life wearing a suit and tie, and she ushers him indoors, and he says, “My, my, what big eyes you have. My, my, what a pretty face you have.”
And she says, “Why thank you sir, but what of my hair? What of my lips? What of my body? Are they good enough to eat?”
The Wolf answers, “Well, yes, they are! But…”
“But there’s something not quite right,” he says, sitting himself in the living room and thinking quite hard.
“What if I do this?” she asks, changing this way and that. “Or this? Or this?”
“Ah, that’s just right,” he says, and gobbles her right up.
—————————————————————————–
Rosalie is born and raised in the heart of Los Angeles, and is altogether dissimilar and exactly the same as some of her peers from small podunk towns who come to LA to try and become somebody. Her mother was a singer in her prime, and Rose reads an old interview with her mother. It goes like this:
INTERVIEWER: You have a daughter now; what do you hope she inherits from you? Well, surely your voice. What sort of wishes do you have for her since it’s her birthday today?
JUHYUN: I hope she doesn’t get my voice.
JUHYUN: Otherwise she might want to be a singer too one day.
She is dissimilar from her peers in this aspect: she never once experiences the disillusionment after the industry shows its true colors — she is exactly the same in this: she still lets herself get swallowed up.
—————————————————————————–
Despite her mother’s hopes, she does inherit musicality from her, but it sees little more exposure than daily performances by the dinner table, stirring renditions of An Itsy Bitsy Spider. She lives a sheltered if not restricted life for the first portion of her childhood, fiercely sheltered from all aspects of fame. It doesn’t bother her; she hadn’t developed an appetite for it then, content with simply basking in her parents’ love. That changes, though, when her mother passes away on her 19th birthday, and the paparazzi follow her and her father all the way to the memorial. There are more waiting when they arrive, and her father tries to shield her from them as best he can, wrapping an arm around her and lifting his jacket with the other, but the flashes still ingrain themselves on the backs of her eyelids, nauseatingly bright.
It keeps going: the shouting, the flashing, the lens jutting into her space, and like a melancholy ocean churning out tempestuous waves, her sadness crashes into anger. She springs out of her father’s embrace before he can think to hold her back, and shoves a camera out of her face. The paparazzo advances, and she shoves him too, shattering the camera, yelling some incoherent half sentence, tears flowing, unbidden though they are. Her father comes to his senses and yells at them to back away before redoubling his efforts to see them safely in. By the time the service is over and she leaves the church, the photos are already developed and spreading.
And suddenly it feels as if the world knows who she is.
And she can’t get enough.
—————————————————————————–
She starts Bitch Frenzy soon after, and part of her is in it for the music, because that’s all she has left of her mother, but part of her, deny it though she might, is in it for the fame. For the glitz, and the glamour, and for the taste of her name as it slips off people’s tongues.
Bitch Frenzy is a hit — well, it’s a hit in the sense that people don’t ignore them and don’t hate them, a hit in the sense that they attract the attention of Fusetone. It’s the beginning of the end the moment suited executives come out to see them and to sign them, wolf fangs hiding behind their greasy grins, assuring them that if you sign, the world will know you. She certainly doesn’t know it then, but she certainly can’t say that if she were allowed to do it all over again, knowing what she knows now, she wouldn’t sign on that little dotted line.
She pushes the group into signing, wheedling that this is what they’ve been playing shitty venues for: a platform in which they get to spread their music farther than they could ever dream of reaching by themselves, and one by one, the members agree.
—————————————————————————–
First, it’s small things like makeup and hair, and her members grin and bear it. Then it’s things like dresses and public appearances, and then, and then, and then. It’s a slow overtake of everything that made Bitch Frenzy, well, bitch frenzy, and one day, she wakes up and they’re The Gemstones, and she’s got a little shimmery dress on, surrounded by faces she doesn’t know, and Pearl and Amber are paying life and limb for breaking their contract. Little sacrifices that she’s slowly acclimated to making, hoops she’s all too eager to jump through.
Why, for the fame of it all, of course.
—————————————————————————–
There are restrictions on where she goes and who she goes with and how big she smiles and what she says and what she wears, bars and bars and bars on a gilded cage. And yet, she knows, as long as she never strays, people will come to coo over her, to love her, to adore her.
The guilt will be temporary, will die with her, she reasons; the silver screen her image will live on in is forever.
The flashes go off when she leaves her house, and she takes a deep breath and smiles for the cameras.
