“Siren” by Taeyeon, Tuesday, August 1, 2023 (repost)

Two summers ago, Taeyeon released her first single from the album she released on Valentine’s Day last year, INVU. The disco-infused lead single, “Weekend,” wasn’t completely indicative of the album's style. With a variety of ballads, house, and dance songs, INVU is a solid third record from the now legendary former Girls’ Generation vocalist. Today’s song, “Siren,” is a power ballad located as track 6 of a 13-song album.  It’s a song about an unhealthy relationship that beckons the speaker to stay in it. Ultimately does she dive in or get out of the water?

 

An ancient painting of sirens in 
The Odyssey. Source.

CRUEL FANTASY. Today’s song, “Siren,” uses the image of a mythical creature from ancient Greek and Roman legends. Creatures with beautiful songs that lure sailors to perilous shallow, rocky waters appear in Homer’s The Odyssey. In book 12, Circe advises Odysseus not to listen to their “honey-sweet tones” that “bewitch everybody who approaches them.” But the cunning Greek epic hero takes the warning as a challenge. He asks his crew to cover and plug their ears with wax and to tie him to the ship’s mast so that he won’t take the ship to land. From those lines in the epic poem and from the mythology itself, sirens seem to be a symbol of sexual pleasure that is the final step that takes a “reasonably good man” into sexual depravity. In antiquity, sirens were depicted as either bird-like or mermaid-like creatures. Some have said that the myth of the sirens was really the low visibility at sea and the yelps of sea-lions, and a bit of hallucination, seeing something on the rocks through the mists. 

Starbucks logo depicts a double-tailed siren. 
Image source.

EVEN IF WE KISS EACH OTHER FOREVER. Siren myths appear in literature and culture throughout the ages. Starbucks’ logo is perhaps one of the most common examples in our everyday lives. Siren mythology appears in Anberlin’s “Take Me As You Found Me,” a song about a divorced couple who are still love each other. A siren (or mermaid) appears in Copeland’s video for “I Can Make You Feel Young Again,” dragging the fisherman to the bottom of the lake. But the word siren in English doesn’t usually bring the mythical creature to mind in everyday conversations. Instead, we think of the mournful, high-pitched sounds related to an emergency: a fire, a bank robbery, a tornado, missiles launched. Are the two words related? It seems that we started using siren to describe the sound of steamships as late as 1879. The usage of the word migrated to land and it now sounds like the intro to Anberlin’s “Hello Alone.” Plugging the etymology back into today’s song, Taeyeon describes a magnetism to an unhealthy relationship. He’s a siren beckoning her to the dangerous rocks. She hears the warning siren, and others can see that there’s danger. What happens? Is there an ambulance chase? Is it a fifty-car pileup that causes a collision in the other direction? Or does she sail away? 

Read the Lyrics on Genius.

Lyric video in Korean, Romanization, and English: