“Way Back Home” by Shaun, Tuesday, February 9, 2021

 

In 2018, South Korean indie rock band The Koxx’s keyboardist, Shaun, debuted with a solo single that immediately went to number 1 on the K-pop charts.  Obsessed with chart numbers, K-pop fans cried foul. But were the charts manipulated? How could a relatively unknown singer-songwriter blow up the charts? The world of K-pop is rather cutthroat when it comes to fans and from my research it seems that the matter hasn't been settled to anyone's liking. Still, how can an artist or record company manipulate the charts? The Korea Herald explains. Once the song had topped the charts, it was everywhere in Korea and even made waves in other countries. Shaun worked with English singer-songwriter Connor Maynard to produce an English version. This version has been misappropriated by Justin Bieber online.

MY LONG, LONG JOURNEY ENDS NOW. The Mandela Effect is a situation that people (often large groups of people) misremember the facts of something that happened in the past. The situation gets its name from people who claimed to remember that they had heard that Nelson Mandela had died in prison back in the '90s. I don't remember exactly when I first heard this song, but it was everywhere. I also suffered from Mandela Effect. I could swear I had heard this song since I had been in Korea. I thought it was an old song from the '90s. But in fact, it has only been out since June of 2018 and I have been in Korea since 2012. I wrote about this on February 1st when I talked about SHINee’s music. K-pop often uses the vaguely familiar in the same way pop music uses the millennial whoop to keep music sounding both classic and new at the same time.

I’LL FIND MY WAY BACK HOME. Poetry doesn't translate well, so of course some of the nuisance is lost in a song. The English lyric translation for this song aren't the same as the Conor Maynard version. Korean is a much more versatile language than English because of the Subject-Object-Verb sentence pattern. Verbs often end in "yo"s, "ah"s or "-nida"s so it's pretty easy to make rhymes in the language. The lyrics of this song deal with an unrelenting love that no matter how you try to quench it continues. It also talks about a journey that the singer takes, but the singer is sure that the path he takes will lead him home again. So that's the message of this love song as we count down the days to Valentine's Day: "I always wind up by your side." 


Lyric Video:


featuring Connor Maynard:


Acoustic performance:


Conor Maynard English version:




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