It's Not Even the Same Universe Anymore.

🎼Silverhair Express (Jang Kiha Remix)_Hyukoh

I love music with rich narration.

When narration and spoken-word-like rap were popular,

90s music was, of course, also to my taste.

But I’ll get to that later.

I like Jang Kiha.

His unpredictable uniqueness, his color so distinct,

he’s like a black that doesn’t mix.

Listening to his rambling hums, which are neither quite speech nor song,

brings a sense of peace to my mind.

It’s a peace that comes from the feeling that it’s proven

there are quite a few strange people in the world besides me.

Personally, there are a few songs where I think

Jang Kiha’s narration truly shines.

While writing this, I suddenly felt the urge to change direction

and write about Jang Kiha’s “Geureoge Wae Geuraesseo” (Why Did You Do That?).

I’ll suppress that impulse for now.

I’ll save that for next time.

The music I’m going to discuss now is Hyukoh’s “Silverhair Express,”

the Jang Kiha remix version, which I recently heard through music recommendations.

The original version features beautiful instrumentation with almost no vocals,

“Forgetting or being forgotten,

Love, don’t be sad”

and only Hyukoh’s voice and humming echoing like an echo.

The remix version features a part of author Kim Choyeop’s book

If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light,

narrated in Jang Kiha’s deadpan voice.

As if mocking “Love, don’t be sad,”

cynical words are mixed in and pour out like stars.

But strangely, I find comfort in it.

Rather than getting lost in sentimentalism from formal comfort,

I prefer to forge my own comfort amidst realistic words and situations, even if they’re despairing,

and prepare for a tomorrow where I can rise again.

Because I believe in the solidity of self-comfort rather than clumsy comfort from others.

💿

In the past, breaking up didn’t mean this.

At least back then, we were under the same sky.

On the same planet, sharing the same atmosphere.

But now, it’s not even the same universe.

People who knew my story came to me for decades, offering words of comfort.

Saying, “Still, you are in the same universe.”

And to take solace in that fact.

**

Forgetting or being forgotten,

Love, don’t be sad

**

But if we cannot even go at the speed of light,

what meaning does the concept of “the same universe” even have?

No matter how much we explore space and expand the boundaries of humanity,

if there are always people left behind there…

If we cannot even go at the speed of light,

what meaning does the concept of “the same universe” even have?

Aren’t we just increasing the sum total of loneliness that exists in the universe?

**

**

**

After discovering this song,

I looked into Hyukoh’s album Sarang-euro (With Love), which contains the original track.

Hyukoh has always titled his albums with his age at the time of production,

but when he released this album, he named it Sarang-euro instead of “26.”

While reading the album description, I found an article about ‘love,’ the universe’s greatest conundrum.

Following Kim Choyeop’s If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light,

my list of books to read has grown again, now including Jang Seok-ju’s On Love.

📎

Love is difficult and complex the more you know it, thus unsolvable by reason,

existing in the form of what Hegel called “the most peculiar contradiction,”

yet love is, still, uniquely, almost the only alternative that

reaches out to us groaning in the valley of contradiction and absurdity.

That is why we repeatedly ask questions about the essence of love.