Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me) (Santa Baby Remix) - LISA
This song is a reworking of LISA’s single Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me), which itself reinterpolates the classic Sixpence None The Richer song. I feel unsure which lyrics are borrowed wholesale, and which have been changed. Kiss Me already has somewhat strange lyrics (beneath the milky twilight?) and my memory of them has been partially overwritten by an expertly produced horror reworking of it called Kiss Me (Kill Me). I strongly recommend the video if you’re okay with descriptions of body horror; there are no jumpscares, and the visual content is mostly animated text on a creepy-looking 1990s computer monitor, with some blood/flesh imagery.
I realized I gave you a lot of visual detail about that video (the horror sits mostly in the plot, so I wouldn’t consider the video spoiled). This is because I am very careful about consuming visual horror content, as it can easily make me permanently more afraid of the dark. At night, I do not quite hallucinate shambling horrors, but they start to feel very probable to me. Surely, if I keep looking at the dark patch on the edge of the streetlight, I will see a person that is too still to be a person standing there, and their head will begin to rotate towards me like an owl’s, revealing exposed flesh and rows of teeth. The shadows are not dripping down the walls, scattering into insectlike vibrating pieces when they hit the floor, but they would. I have some mental subprocess that is always eager to churn out horrors, and after about 1:00am in the morning, if I am sitting alone in the dark, it is difficult to suppress.
I watched horror movies as a kid and teenager, because it seemed kind of stupid to be scared of fake monsters. There is a part of me, even now, that feels like I should learn to not be afraid. When I talk to other people about this, they often agree that horror movies make them more afraid, but starting from quite a low baseline of night horrors.
Speaking of horrors, let’s talk about k-pop? My impression that is is awful to become a k-pop idol, more awful than becoming a North American celebrity, mostly comes from a 30,000 word essay on the k-pop industry:
Aspiring K-pop stars go through a nightmarish training gauntlet for years which includes 16+ hour work days (including school), borderline-starvation diets, extensive behavior restrictions, and a variety of other abuses, just to have a shot at becoming an idol. Meanwhile, Western pop stars… don’t. I mean, they certainly train a lot and work hard and face their own difficulties, but somehow the West produces great pop stars without these abusive training camps.
LISA is the first K-pop solo artist to reach 1 billion streams on Spotify. Her training started when she was 13, and she lived in dorms run by her entertainment company for four years before her debut. It’s hard for me to imagine middle schoolers separated from their parents, sleeping only 3-4 hours a night, and being okay. On the other hand, I’m not confident that the training regimens of aspiring k-pop idols are categorically more gruelling than the standard 12-16 hour school (+ near-universal tutoring) day in South Korea. A 2019 survey of young South Koreans found that over 75% “views South Korea as ‘hell’,” which I assume referenced the “hell joseon” meme. I don’t like to imagine an engine of man-made horrors sitting behind the music I enjoy; one prefers to imagine pop stars happy. I hope LISA (now under independent management, with a net worth about as high as Zendaya) is happy.
The horrors persist but so do the little treats,
Tessa