#exo_sc

230726 | Sehun & Chanyeol - Gimpo Airport to Japan (for the "Waterbomb Tokyo 2023") 🇰🇷🛫🇯🇵

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3/5

EXO-SC

The 1st Album [‘1 Billion Views’]

EXO - SC’s study of Idol Culture and Friendship

Warning: Features Low Quality screen captures because Internet connection struggles. 

This is, without a doubt, the point where it struck me that EXO-SC’s latest song, “1 Billion Views”, is not the typical flex-song about how popular the artists are, or even another love song cast into the lingo of YouTube views. “1 Billion Views” mixes glitchy phone screens, brightly clothed k-pop idols, and some 4th-wall-breaking to explore our smartphones change our relationships. 

“1 Billion Views” by EXO-SC on YouTube

1 Billion Views is Korean idol group EXO-SC’s first full album. The album has a retro aesthetic, with green matrix backgrounds, tube televisions, and neon skylines featuring in the concept images.  The title track of the album is “1 Billion Views”, a groovy, funk house-inspired track with a catchy hook. It has everything that makes a good summer song. The lyrics (at least in the English translation) are fairly straightforward: “I look at you 1 million, 1 billion times, (and you look damn fine)”. You could dedicate this song to your lover. If you are a k-pop fan, you could dedicate it to your favourite idol. If you are a k-pop star, like Sehun and Chanyeol, you could dedicate it to yourself and just bask in the knowledge that your fans have probably fawned over you a million, billion times.

The MV, with its bright neon alleys, chock-full CGI, phone-browsing moments add a different dimension to the entire song. Notifications, alerts, reminders interrupt our view of Sehun and Chanyeol. They conduct live videos and comments flood the screen trying to get the attention of the idols. Sehun and Chanyeol play slot machines made of fan comments as if trying to decide who they should pay attention to—and the fan who gets a response has hit the jackpot.

Vocalist Moon’s bridge says, “Play me / Don’t make me feel lonely,”; it’s an invitation to take part in this slot machine game, where the feeling of having immediate interaction at our fingertips takes away our loneliness. Flood the comments, keep tapping the heart button, and the repetition makes it more likely that you will be noticed. So, if your phone says, “Alert! Your favourite idol has started a live,” you must login in to reaffirm your love now. If one listens to the instrumental version of “1 Billion Views”, one can hear the words “There is no past / There is no future” whispered before the hook. Truly, when we must constantly reaffirm our love in the present, the past and the future do not have any meaning. Once the live is over, it is over. You could certainly watch a replay, but the affection you could show your idol when they were live, in the now, can no longer be conveyed.

You aren’t only repeating your questions and your love for your idol every time they go online, you must also re-affirm your relationship with your friends in the same way. Especially in the times of social distancing, our primary means of contact with our friends for many of us is video calls and Instagram updates. We express our dedication to our friends by loyally liking their posts and acknowledging their stories. The repetition of online interaction is the metric of how close someone is with you in real life. Some of us have online friends as well, and as intimacy becomes increasingly defined by the number of times you interact with a person online, the boundaries between virtual and real relationships blur too. 

There are also people who have taken to posting pictures and videos of previous vacations, and the more times you feature in these posts, the more you affirm your friendship in the present. We survive the present by simulating our past as a group. If we do not respond to these posts as soon as we receive the notification, the project has failed. A response too late is not only creepy but also useless; nobody cares about your response to a five-day-old post because it has already received its screen time. The more you interact, the more posts you show up in, the realer the moment becomes. If you do not, perhaps it shows that you are alone and friendless. We bring the past and the future together in a virtual, public, online present. We muse over memories several times—if not a million times. In this repetition, there is no past and no future--only now.