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fmdtaeyong · 3 years

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like a rockstar : taeyong marketing breakdown

a headcanon & playlist on how titan’s taeyong is marketed as a product and brand.

headcanon

word count: 491 words, not counting the tvtropes quote.

a successful celebrity can’t exist without marketing. some celebrities are all marketing. ash, for one, wouldn’t be where he is today without bc entertainment’s well-oiled marketing machine painting him in a desirable light and smoothing out his rough edges into something shiny.

the image the name taeyong provokes now isn’t quite the one it would have provoked a few years ago. the role of maknae burdened ash’s image for years. a sense of brightness is expected of any idol, but the youngest of a group is expected to show it, even in a group like titan that has never been about bright concepts. whether that means being babied by the older members or having a certain underlying innocence to him.

when he went solo was when his image gravitated further away from being dictated by his place within a group. as he earned recognition for his own name (or rather, his own stage name) and got attention from a new crowd, he was able to pave a path that painted with the brush of an artist, a little less bound by preconceived notions about his role in titan. when the scandals stamped to his name went from fumbling over formalities and dating a well-loved actress to controversies less easily painted as endearing that came at the same time he began to present himself differently visually, bc had to bank on the leeway of an artist tinge to his image saving him.

ash has never been marketed as an ideal boyfriend. titan has that covered in the group already and an outed relationship before he’d begun to make a name for himself individually prevented that from being a rational path. some fans still fall into the trap of babying him, but overall, taeyong is now known as the more serious and reserved type. satisfactory fanservice is a non-starter, so they make their own fantasies out of his mystery and “edginess” and a brooding stage persona. bc has done damage control where they’ve had to and let his music and fan projections paint the rest.

out of all of the classic boy band member tropes, ash would solidly be considered a purveyor of the bad boy / rebel trope within titan and out of it for that matter. to quote tvtropes:

“the one with a rougher edge to him. he's the one wearing the black shirt and jeans or leather jacket in those videos where they're not all wearing matching clothes. if he's really edgy, he may also have a tattoo. put in to cater to those girls who want bad boys.”

bc read the first two paragraphs of the tv tropes page for all girls want bad boys and said ‘yeah, this should work’. the bad boy / rebel angle tends to get played up within fandom a lot more than among more casual listeners to his music, who get a heavier dose of the ~artist~ part of his image since that’s meant to appeal to them more anyway.

ash has very purposefully been trying to lean more into the artist aspect of his image lately because he isn’t a fan of being painted as some kind of bad boy fantasy when he doesn’t consider that an accurate representation of him at all.

playlist

this playlist gives a semi-chronological cataloging of the image associated with taeyong since around 2016/2017. some parts of his image have remained consistent, while others have changed either by purposeful marketing, unavoidable consequences of media discussion around him, or simply altered fan narratives for him. some parts of this are less about how he’s marketed and more about very one-dimensional fan narratives crafted around him, but overall it gives an idea of the feeling associated with him as a product and brand. (some of these songs were used in image playlists on ash’s previous blog, but i made sure at least seven of these are new. i wanted to include ones i’d used before as well for a comprehensive look on his new blog since some aspects of his image have changed.)

this honestly also doubles as a list of the songs you’d find the most results for if you looked up taeyong fan edits.

i. death of a bachelor | i’m cutting my mind off, feels like my heart is going to burst / alone at a table for two, and i just wanna be served / and when you think of me, am i the best you've ever had?

ii. daydreamer | a jaw dropper / looks good when he walks / is the subject of their talk / he would be hard to chase / but good to catch / and he could change the world / with his hands behind his back, oh

iii. wildest dreams | he's so tall and handsome as hell / he's so bad, but he does it so well / i can see the end as it begins

iv. style | cause you got that james dean daydream look in your eye / and i got that red lip classic thing that you like / and when we go crashing down, we come back every time / cause we never go out of style, we never go out of style / you got that long hair, slicked back, white t-shirt / and i got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt

v. crazy beautiful | and he picks you up / and he sets you down / and that's the way / he thinks and he walks and he plays around downtown / but the truth is, he's still got a scar / as plain as others / to get his way to a scarlet heart

vi. ready for it...? | knew he was a killer first time that I saw him / wondered how many girls he had loved and left haunted / [...] / some boys are tryin' too hard, he don't try at all though / younger than my exes, but he act like such a man, so

vii. radio | now my life is sweet like cinnamon / like a fuckin' dream i'm livin' in / baby, love me 'cause i'm playing on the radio / how do you like me now?

viii. like i would | he, won't touch you like i do / he, won't love you like i would / he don't know your body / he don't do you right / he won't love you like i would / love you like i would, like i would

ix. i wanna be yours | secrets i have held in my heart / are harder to hide than i thought / maybe i just wanna be yours / i wanna be yours

x. strange love | they think i'm insane, they think my lover is strange / but i don't have to fucking tell them anything, anything / and i'm gonna write it all down, and i'm gonna sing it on stage / but i don't have to fucking tell you anything, anything

xi. my oh my | yeah, a little bit older, a black leather jacket / a bad reputation, insatiable habits / he was onto me, one look and i couldn't breathe, yeah / i said, if he kissed me, i might let it happen

xii. bad reputation | i don't give a damn 'bout my reputation / never been afraid of any deviation / and i don't really care if you think i'm strange / i ain't gonna change

xiii. starboy | i'm tryna put you in the worst mood, ah / p1 cleaner than your church shoes, ah / milli point two just to hurt you, ah / all red lamb' just to tease you, ah / none of these toys on lease too, ah / made your whole year in a week too, yah / main bitch out of your league too, ah / side bitch out of your league too, ah / [...] / look what you’ve done / i’m a motherfuckin' starboy

xiv. into it | i'm just fucking lucky i was born with it / a hundred million people couldn't deal with this

xv. like a rockstar | put me in designer then put me in the dirt / keep my legacy alive like a rockstar / lifestyle, on the edge, can be unforgiving / see i worship the dead, they worship the living, yeah

#* | character development.#* | queued.

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slouchyslouch · 5 years

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Taking Back Sunday’s 20th Anniversary Tour

Getting back into the tumblr thing again to find other music writers. Here’s a repost from my Medium account.

The first time I listened to Taking Back Sunday, I was probably around 12 or 13. I was just getting into the so called emo and pop-punk scene. Taking Back Sunday was one of those bands that were easy to get into because there was so much affection in the vocals, you had to yell out the lyrics even when you had headphones on. The show at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver exhibited how old music could still bring together a horde of former (and maybe present) scene kids and unite them in glory.

You could feel a certain excitement in everyone at the venue. My friend and I were grabbing beers only a few minutes before the show was supposed to start. As soon as I saw the now elderly members of Taking Back Sunday get on stage and immediately started playing “You Know How I Do,” I had the most intense urge of just getting into middle of the crowd as soon as possible. The cascading guitars of the song pummelled like a vehicle’s engine getting ready for the long trek. Adam Lazarra started to combust on the stage: “So sick so sick of being tired / and oh so tired of being sick,” a line thematic of my generation’s emo kids. Everybody just wanted to be their own person and not have anyone tell them what to do. My friend and I couldn’t stop giggling about how we were going to see them, and here they are on stage as pumped as they looked 20 long years ago.

Slowly, but surely we made our way towards the mosh pit in time for “Cute Without the E,” a classic by the Long Island band. Adam Lazzara at 37 years old still looks great, a kind of scene Jimmy Page as my friend mentioned at the time of the concert. He doesn’t look like a rockstar that’s dwindled to the fringes of the scene but a man still worthy of the stage. I was aways at awe watching him swing that mic on early youtube clips and here he was as nimble as ever tossing the mic around like a whip easily coiled and ready to lash out. John Nolan looks like a dad now with hair flowing down both sides of his face and a semi-kept beard. He still belted out my favourite echoed vocals, always fighting for space in the song but in reality always complementing Lazzara’s wails.

One of the highlights from the concert was the popular “You’re so Last Summer.” Goosebumps crawled all over my body as soon as Lazarra belted that iconic opening line from the track: “She said don’t!” — the crowd relishing in the song’s luster. High school was such a time of isolation and angst for a lot of these late twenties “kids,” but that doesn’t mean we could relive those times with a sort of nostalgic joy. Everyone gathered for this celebration of music can look back into those times of yearning. It’s always nice to look at ourselves now and realize how much we’ve grown and matured.

After they finished playing the album “Tell All Your Friends,” Lazzara had one of the members of the Maine come out to flip a coin whether to play the albums Louder Now or Where You Want To Be. I wanted them to play the former but the latter got picked to the delight of the crowd. It seemed like the younger generation of Taking Back Sunday fans (probably people my age) would have gone for Louder Now because of the song “MakeDamnSure” but I didn’t mind it. It was one of the bigger highlights of the concert by a mile and probably had given me the biggest nostalgia hit. That was one of the first songs I played live with my first band in the Philippines. Those were the makings of musicians following their own path today. At the Commodore Ballroom that night though, bodies flung against one another in the hopes of feeling each other’s sweat and passion, bits of saliva trickling out of everyone’s mouths shouting out the words of a disgruntled poet about a bad relationship: “I just want to break you down so badly,” a line possibly misinterpreted as putting words into action but is actually meant to convey the deeper sadness of having oneself being put down by a loved one. There’s a willingness to hurt the other person but there is a love that holds it back.

Towards the second half of the album, everything slowed down. Most of the crowd stopped moshing and just kept to their miniature head-banging. It was only during the 3rd part of their set where they played “This Photograph is Proof” and “A Decade Under the Influence” where the crowd gained a third jolt of energy to start another mosh and singing along to the teenage anthems of their childhood for the last hurrah. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” a catchy lyric repeated through Nolan’s angst on the track has been ringing through my head for a few days now. The lyric captures a moment of lingering anxiety before a predicted breakup. The opposite could be said about the whole night.

At the end of the show, I was left with feeling a sense of elation, a sort of transcendence within the present world. There aren’t a lot of bands that can do that. Maybe it was the nostalgia hitting me hard, or maybe it was just my communion with the audience. There’s a sense of intimate unity you achieve when moshing with other people who know the lyrics. It’s a shared dance we’ve savoured in our teenage years, a time when everything was easier even if at the time, it felt like the whole world was against us.

I found out about Taking Back Sunday through one of my good friends from my childhood. He showed me the song “Timberwolves at New Jersey” during our preteens, a time for some of us when we started to consider rebelling against our parents. That intro guitar riff with Lazzara singing, “Get up, get up, come on, come on let’s go!” always got me out of my seat and made me want to start moshing. I long for the days when I was just getting into that emo scene and wanting to be a punk rocker so bad. Most of the people my age at the show could probably say the same, and for that one night we collectively embraced that culture not with a mutinous furor but with a devotion to the music.

#taking back sunday #music review #music #emo #pop punk #live review

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