#singing lessons

I've said before on here that I was raised with a lot of privilege. I've been given tons of lessons - large group, small group, private - for all sorts of things. Ski, tennis, violin, swimming, dessin, watercolor, various languages, traditional Asian calligraphy, etc.

One thing that I was never put in for was singing.

There's a lot of pain associated with singing in my family of origin, mostly due to my dad being highly dysfunctional and my mother being tone deaf and rhythm deaf (even though she loves music). Dad and my younger brother have perfect pitch. I do not. My dad was an excellent self taught singer, but he used it mostly to lord it over other people, and especially his wife and children. As a consequence, as he got older, none of his ajushi peers ever invited him to fun singing related outings (noraebang etc) because he was so obnoxious about it. And my dad completely silenced his family. We tried singing happy birthday to him a few times in my childhood, and he was so nasty and dismissive about how much we sucked that we stopped doing that altogether. Then, later in life, my father fell ill with a series of health problems and now he can't sing at all, because he can't do the breath control and his voicebox is ruined. If I put this conclusion in a novel everyone would find it cheesy, but real life is actually very cliche.

But the damage is done. Even though my father's children all voluntarily study music even into our adulthood, we absolutely don't do anything musical together at all, because we associate trying to do musical things with each other with pain. I was on a road trip with my brother once and we both sang along to a song and surprised each other with how good the other one was.

You can do that? You can sing?

And then all this sadness came surging up from my stomach to tighten around my throat and I couldn't talk for the next hour.

There's pain associated with singing as an adult, too, for non-family reasons. It came to a fortunately abrupt end with COVID, but we used to be 'forced' to go to noraebang as part of corporate outings in Korea. Women all uniformly hated this, because all the senior and executives were (AND STILL FUCKING ARE) men, and there's only two types of men who want to go to noraebang at the end of a corporate dinner that involves drinking: rapists, and then voyeurs who want to witness women fighting off humiliation without getting their own hands dirty.

At some point it became my role (like, women came up to me to ask me to 'do it again, please please' on the day of a hweshik) and mission as the only out feminist who wasn't afraid of being hated by men to bring these weird outings to a swift and resoundingly sober ending, while still appearing cooperative. I chose the saddest, sappiest songs from the past, Korean classical trot ballad songs, things like Lee Mija's Life of a Woman that came out in 1975, and sang them as early as possible, with as much volume as I could force out of my throat. The songs are extremely Confucian and absolutely not sexy, because they're designed to cope with post-war-and-on-going-dictatorship trauma. It would effectively 'kill the mood' and my noraebang turn (not the first woman but definitely the second and at latest, the third) was the signal for all the women to start packing up and the men would sourly go, Oh that's a classic song, what a nice choice, and be visibly pissed.

In short, not a happy association.

Spending the past year closely watching the recording process for pop songs put out by my favorite kpop boys and girls made me feel, finally, like I should maybe fix my relationship with singing. This is the first step.

This is the song we're working on:

And yeah, the women who all were working women coming in from a day at the office that signed up for this class were all capable of reading music and reading lyrics in English and singing a Lady Gaga song. Koreans are high achieving, for sure. Damn.