#id.kim jennie

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LOADING INFORMATION ON JAWBREAKER’S MAIN VOCAL, LEAD RAP OH JUA...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: Juniper CURRENT AGE: 23 DEBUT AGE: 19 TRAINEE SINCE AGE: 17 COMPANY: KJH ETC: this member is a vocal/performance soloist

IDOL IMAGE

oh jua is first marketed to the public as the adorable, slightly androgynous toddler born to a famed producer/rapper and his wife, an equally famous actress. she lives in the spotlight from then on, whether she’s particularly interested in it or not. in the early years her image is made for her, constructed by her parents and an editing crew. insightful, odd, sensitive - she’s a cute kid to watch and her childlike fascination with her father’s production equipment is endearing. but the show ends and soon she fades away, present only in the occasional social media update.

later, she is juniper. a product of singular focus, shaped into something fierce and feminine at once. it’s an image that suits her. she is lucky - her quick wit and familiarity with the way of the celebrity world have afforded her the insight needed to navigate image making all on her own. she presents herself as clever, sweet, a bit snarky but never too much - just enough to be funny, every quip chased with bright laughter and a smile that accentuates still rounded cheeks. she does what she has to do to get airtime, to be noticed - flirts here and there, acts up on social media. nothing too terribly incriminating, but just enough to get comments. enough to get articles. is she doing okay, they ask. she’s so pretty but what’s going on in her head? she’s trying too hard, stranger and stranger lately. she’s abrasive one minute and demure the next, what’s up with her? she’s too much, her gaze hawklike, charm or charisma overflowing. so yeah, there are scandals, blemishes and rumors that tarnish her image, but at least she can feel, in some way, as if there is a truthful part of her out there in the world, something unfiltered. though, of course, such an idea is foolish to consider reality, with each minor buzz creating photo as vetted at the next, a curated image of free-spirited pseudo rebellion.

juniper is, in the end, marketed as genuine. that’s the schtick that sticks. when jawbreaker is announced, behind the scenes, juniper is worry incarnate. by the time jawbreaker is seeing some success, she is hope against hope. she builds a name for herself on the back of endless efforts, of attempting to demonstrate the kind of skills worthy of an all around talent. they market her as this creature of destiny, born into what she is becoming - born to be a star.  the captivating visuals, the sultry voice, the surprisingly sweet and sour back and forth of her disposition. kjh wants the world to see her as authentic, as engaging. equal parts fierce and fun, as if it weren’t hard enough to project one image alone. they make her into a sympathetic figure, struggling with her passion for music but never being recognized for it. they put her onto shows that build sympathy for her. she’s genuine now, she’s sweet and she’s focused and she’s a little bit soft. she’s a bit of an underdog despite everything, despite the name cache. she gets bullied but she keeps her head up. she sasses and snarks on running man but they put her into a haunted house and she’s a mess of tears and childish, plaintive whimpers.

she’s exhausted and more than slightly frustrated, but with proper management comes greater expectations, she thinks, and puts her nose to the grindstone again. anything for opportunity. they push her producing and media play like she’s some kind of budding genius, like she’s inherited her father’s greatness, and as much as she wants it to be true she feels, intensely, as if this is in itself a ruse, just a marketing ploy, as if the authenticity of the songs she’s been hoarding on dusty hard drives is called into question just by the way kjh is pushing them into the world, like some kind of narrative being spun around her without her control.

at least when she was an instagram attention seeker she was controlling the narrative. but more and more, kjh is spinning her up in stories and she feels entangled, a fly caught in the spider’s web, spun up in silk.  so here she is. juniper, attention seeker, artsy, slightly worrying, maybe crazy, genuine, genius - a girl of muddled perception and lackluster dance skills, a girl with more connections than talent or a girl born to shine, depending on who you ask. a weirdo or relatable, a problem child or a prodigy, she is a polarizing figure with a lot to prove.

IDOL HISTORY

CHAPTER ONE.

it begins, in a mild winter in atlanta georgia.

juniper oh is born to loving parents in a hospital, in a particularly normal situation. in fact, it is perhaps alarmingly average. the delivery lasts the average amount of time, the doctor is mostly average, though perfectly competent, and the whole experience goes largely according to plan. it’s really nothing special.

the first year of her life follows this pattern.

she is a cooing babe in buckhead, nestled in a truly affluent area of atlanta, making pilgrimages to duluth to the gigantic h-mart there, so that her grandmother and grandfather can buy the ingredients for the traditional foods they still cherish, despite having left their home country many decades ago, by now.

it’s a nice life, a busy home, eclectic and warm. her mother sings in the shower every morning and her father’s collection of star wars legos is incredible. she’s loved, doted on, cherished.

CHAPTER TWO.

when juniper is two years old, however, she’s uprooted. her parents move back to seoul, to the careers that have afforded them such luxury in life. her father is a hip hop artist, her mother an actress, and juniper? juniper, once an unassuming but adorable baby, is now a celebrity child. at two years old this means nothing to her, there’s no context for it. just people who twitter and giggle when they see her father, just cameras that appear in her house overnight. they hide themselves, these cameramen, inside little white play houses she’s not allowed inside.

people start to recognize her on the street. dote on her, tease her boyish haircut and her obsession with succulents, the way she looks just like her father. she meets people with more money than sense, idols and actors, hosts and mcs. they dote on her too, put her on their instagrams, tag her dad for the likes, for the clout. they come over to play with her while the men with cameras are there.

her childhood is monetized, publicized.

by three years old she hates it. she’s tired of strangers commenting on her appearance. she doesn’t like them touching her hair or pinching her cheeks. all these people who know her name, strangers that call out to her with a familiarity that does nothing but breed stress in her bones before she should know what such a thing feels like. to his credit, by the time she’s able to verbalize this, at four years old, her father pulls them all off the show immediately. but maybe the damage is already done, to the formative child psyche.

CHAPTER THREE.

juniper oh goes by oh jua now, the name with which she was registered on the korean family trees. she’s in an english intensive kindergarten and after school she’s trucked off to various lessons. ballet and art, chinese characters and math. her father is working on an album and she sits on his lap in the studio. he lets her play with the dials and toy with buttons, lets her croon into the microphones. he records songs with her, burns them to cds to put in the car, lets her hear her own voice and his together. he asks her six year old opinions on his next title tracks and laughs when she calls some of them too noisy.

years pass in this way, and as she grows people pay less attention to her, more distance between her and her childhood brush with fame. she still appears on instagram from time to time on her parents’ accounts, and her father talks about her on occasion. dedicates songs to her, talks about her in interviews.  he’s open about the struggles he’s been through, and she’s nearing nine when she begins to understand the magnitude of it. of the witch hunts and scandals, of her father’s depression. it’s always been there in little ways but she grows older now, old enough to understand it in bits and pieces.

but only bits.

CHAPTER FOUR.

she’s ten years old when her dad decides to send her to america again, to live with her grandparents. the korean school system is gruelling even for a child. the pressure to keep up is intense, and at ten her peers are already in hagwons until well late into the night. her father sees in juniper much of his own anxieties and uncertainties and doesn’t want her broken down by a system born to grind you down.

all those years of immersive english schooling come in handy now, but it’s still hard. at ten years old picking up the language is quick but not as fast as it could be but learning the social ropes is even harder. she often finds herself feeling lost, up in the air, torn between worlds. the summers spent in seoul and the years spent in atlanta. one moment the child of somebodies, the next a nobody in her own right.

she loses herself in music and in art, in books and poetry, drowns in it until she begins to feel a little better. a little more grounded. it’s the normal way of the teenager and all that, to lose yourself in art to feel connected to something, to express the emotions that well up weighty and heavy in you in untamable waves.

CHAPTER FIVE.

when she’s fifteen she begs to return to seoul. at sixteen her father agrees. she auditions and enters sopa, seoul’s premier school of performing arts, as a vocal studies student. her father is proud of her but he’s hesitant, too. when she expresses a serious desire and a growing aptitude to pursue life as an idol, he’s skeptical to say the least.

all this almost killed me, junebug, he tells her, it’ll destroy you. you’re too soft for it all.

and maybe he’s right. but when kjh reaches out to her she takes the audition anyway. when they offer her a contract she begs him to sign it. promises him she’ll keep her head on straight, she’ll be careful. that she won’t lose herself in all of this. but she already has and they both know it. she was lost the day she was born, as if all of this has been coded into her dna. she’s had this desire in her since she first sat babbling in front of slides and knobs and dials and buttons on her father’s knee.

she passes the audition and signs the contract, her life etched down in blood, her soul traded away even if she doesn’t know it yet. she enters as a trainee and the buzz starts right away. it’s a subset of people uniquely groomed to know who her parents are, to have expectations of her, and right away she begins to fall short of them. her dancing is subpar, her rapping mediocre, her voice throaty and reverberating but not yet trained. she’s only been at this for a year and it shows. they cry nepotism and favoritism and she burns. seethes.

breaks her back to work twice as hard, a thousand times harder. she’s desperate and hungry for it, desires recognition in her own right, acknowledgement for herself and not as an extension of anyone else. father, mother, etcetera.

CHAPTER SIX

when debut comes, it comes with strings attached. narratives to be woven and opportunities presented. they end with a label of her as main vocal and lead rap and she struggles a bit with this. feels like the acknowledgement of her rapping talents - growing now, admittedly - to be premature. more media play than anything else, an easy extension of who she is in relation to her father. it pressures her to redouble her efforts on that front, to push herself further and further. they give her resources and groom her budding songwriting talents, encourage her to be honest. within the bounds of the image and appropriateness given to her, after all.

she kind of hates it. doesn’t love the way they only pick up the songs they can make into their girl power narratives. they don’t take the ones that ring truer, more raw. they like the ones that pop and flare and she gets it, there’s a narrative to push here, but if they want to market her as being this genuine creator shouldn’t they encourage her to genuinely create? put out the things she has honestly told, things she has breathed her heart into? but that isn’t what they want. and when she complains of this to her father, she finds now that there is a sadness in his eyes alongside the sympathy, as if he’d known this to be the inevitable conclusion all along. this in itself has her bottling up her frustrations, putting a lid on them. because she is proud of what she’s put out, she’s proud of the music she’s made and the way that they’ve been progressing, a steady upward trajectory, one of her title tracks taking their first win. so she pushes it all away, tamps it down to paint a smile over her features, an airy refrain of everything is fine, everything is fine.

CHAPTER SEVEN

with greater attention comes greater responsibility. they feed her into the machine and wait for her to spit out hits, allowing her to save up tracks for a promised solo debut. when it finally comes it’s more vocally focused than anything she’s done before and she thrives on that, is thrilled by that. and perhaps in direct contention to that, kjh follows up by putting her onto unpretty rap star, the famed (ish) survival rap show. and survive she does, for better or worse, and gains little out of it but a continued difficulty negotiating her own sense of identity. who is she? the shadow of her father? and extension of him? is she famous in her own right, as juniper oh, is she gaining any of this on her own merit? she wants so desperately to believe that her progress has been due to her own capabilities. she wants to believe that sopa took her on because she had promise, that kjh saw something more in her than the promise of media play and a unique vocal tone. she wants to believe that the “lead rap” tacked on her name has meaning, that she’s worthy of the success she had on the show.

she’s given the chance to work with huge names in the industry and she wants to believe that this is real, that she’s earned this, but the more she gains and the higher she climbs the more she doubts her foundation. the more fearful she is that brand deals roll in because of her mother, that attention is thrown her way because of her father.

but more and more those old insecurities arise. more often she finds herself doubting that any of this is real, more desperate than ever to prove herself and surer and surer still that she doesn’t deserve anything she’s earned.

#id.bio #id.kjh #id.jawbreaker #id.kim jennie

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LOADING INFORMATION ON JAWBREAKER’S MAIN VOCAL, LEAD RAP OH JUA ...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: Juniper CURRENT AGE: 23 DEBUT AGE: 18 TRAINEE SINCE: 16 COMPANY: KJH SECONDARY SKILL: Producing (Pop / R&B)

IDOL PROFILE

NICKNAME(S): june, junebug (via her father) INSPIRATION: Her father, though he’s not an idol (but a rapper/producer in his own right), inspired her to pursue music. Her interest in the idol world came from various of his celebrity friends as she found herself interacting with them over the years. SPECIAL TALENTS:

mimicking her father’s rapping style impeccably

identifying songs that various popular sound samples have been

breaking things

NOTABLE FACTS:

made her debut as a “celebrity” on her father’s instagram the day of her birth.

followed that up with an appearance on a celebrity dad reality show when she was aged 2-4 years (international) - was known for being a bit odd, sensitive, and androgynous.

was known for being an “instawhore” and general attention seeker during the long periods of her.oine’s hiatuses.

IDOL GOALS

SHORT-TERM GOALS:

for the moment juniper is single mindedly focused on proving her own worth. she’s seen first hand, now, how tenuous the lifespan of a group can be, how even a stellar debut and high effort can be frittered away, and she is wholly determined to propel herself forward at whatever costs.

she is taking full advantage of kjh’s recognition of her budding producing skills and begging them to listen to as many of the songs she’s worked on over the years as she can, all but fully begging them to include the tracks on upcoming jawbreaker albums.

LONG-TERM GOALS:

while she is an idol for the moment, she knows that dancing is not her strong suit. she’s not necessarily terrible thanks to training and exhaustive effort, but she will admit she puts less time into the skill than others. as a result, she aims to establish herself as a digital queen in the future - the type to sweep charts, feature in numerous collaborations, and be known more as an artist than as a performer. her long term goal is to move to a role as a solo artist that is known for promoting her own work, for her various featurings, and for an extensive network of connections in the pop/r&b corner of the kpop industry.

IDOL IMAGE

oh jua is first marketed to the public as the adorable, slightly androgynous toddler born to a famed producer/rapper and his wife, an equally famous actress. she lives in the spotlight from then on, whether she’s particularly interested in it or not. in the early years her image is made for her, constructed by her parents and an editing crew. insightful, odd, sensitive - she’s a cute kid to watch and her childlike fascination with her father’s production equipment is endearing. but the show ends and soon she fades away, present only in the occasional social media update.

later, she is juniper. a product of singularity, shaped into something fierce and feminine at once. it’s an image that suits her. she is lucky - her quick wit and familiarity with the way of the celebrity world have afforded her the insight needed to navigate image making all on her own. she presents herself as clever, sweet, a bit snarky but never too much - just enough to be funny, every quip chased with bright laughter and a smile that accentuates still rounded cheeks. she does what she has to do to get airtime, to be noticed - flirts here and there, acts up on social media. nothing too terribly incriminating, but just enough to get comments. enough to get articles. is she doing okay, they ask. she’s so pretty but what’s going on in her head? she’s trying too hard, stranger and stranger lately. she’s abrasive one minute and demure the next, what’s up with her? she’s too much, her gaze hawklike, charm or charisma overflowing. but what else is she supposed to do, when her company won’t promote her? when this is her only outlet, her only way to get out there, to get noticed? the pictures she takes, god, what is she doing? what a tryhard. does she only party? where’s her bra? does she think she’s that artsy, this stupid hipster? so yeah, there are scandals, blemishes and rumors that tarnish her image, but at least she can see “her.oine” in the headlines for once. at the very least her family name should be able to keep her afloat, at least until her company figures out how to promote a damn idol group.

juniper is, in the end, marketed as genuine. that’s the schtick that sticks. when jawbreaker is announced, behind the scenes, juniper is worry incarnate. by the time jawbreaker is seeing some success, she is hope against hope. she builds a name for herself on the back of endless efforts, of attempting to demonstrate the kind of skills worthy of an all around talent. they market her as this creature of destiny, born into what she is becoming - born to be a star.  the captivating visuals, the sultry voice, the surprisingly sweet and sour back and forth of her disposition. kjh wants the world to see her as authentic, as engaging. equal parts fierce and fun, as if it weren’t hard enough to project one image alone. they make her into a sympathetic figure, struggling with her passion for music but never being recognized for it. they put her onto shows that build sympathy for her. she’s genuine now, she’s sweet and she’s focused and she’s a little bit soft. she’s a bit of an underdog despite everything, despite the name cache. she gets bullied but she keeps her head up. she sasses and snarks on running man but they put her into a haunted house and she’s a mess of tears and childish, plaintive whimpers. she’s exhausted and more than slightly frustrated about starting over, but with proper management comes greater expectations, she thinks, and puts her nose to the grindstone again. anything for opportunity. they push her producing and media play like she’s some kind of budding genius, like she’s inherited her father’s greatness, and as much as she wants it to be true she feels, intensely, as if this is in itself a ruse, just a marketing ploy, as if the authenticity of the songs she’s been hoarding on dusty hard drives, ignored by singularity for years, is called into question just by the way kjh is pushing them into the world, like some kind of narrative being spun around her without her control.

at least when she was an instagram attention seeker she was controlling the narrative. now, kjh is spinning her up in stories and she feels entangled, a fly caught in the spider’s web, spun up in silk.  so here she is. juniper, attention seeker, artsy, slightly worrying, maybe crazy, genuine, genius - a girl of muddled perception and lackluster dance skills, a girl with more connections than talent or a girl born to shine, depending on who you ask. a weirdo or relatable, a problem child or a prodigy, she is a polarizing figure with a lot to prove. 

IDOL HISTORY

oh jua, also named juniper, has been constructing her image since she was born. or more accurately, since she was about twenty months old. born in atlanta but brought to korea at sixteen months old,  her family settled in with a multi-year stint on television to re-establish their presence in the wake of a witch-hunt style scandal that had left her producer/rapper father returning to america for the time surrounding her conception, carrying, and birth. to reduce the stress and be near his family, ostensibly. the theme of the show was dads taking care of their children, in a distant ancestor to the return of superman show, but on a more “documentarian” basis - less cute activities and more stressed celebrities. and, in jua’s case, the unlikely treat that was growing up with a camera in your face and comments rolling in online. the show wasn’t wildly popular or anything, but it was out there, it was happening, and by the time she was three years old she hated it. she was tired of people recognizing her, strangers coming up to coo at her and touch her hair, her father showing her off like an accessory. the man was a notable musician in his own right and her mother an actress, though neither were traditionally the idol type. he wrote, composed, and produced his own music and his fame mostly came from a fluke that would only have been possible  in the days before the hyper-saturation of the market. so her childhood photo albums are professionally done and feature clippings from various advertisements she’d been in. her childhood videos? they’re just reels from the show, edited down to remove the other families that had featured. once they left the show when she was five, the pictures and videos mostly stop. she exists as an accessory, as it were. she doesn’t mind that too much. she spent much of the rest of her childhood in relative obscurity, aside from showing up in social media pictures or the occasional article here or there, when her father took her somewhere or they were out to lunch with someone worth writing an article about. fame felt natural to her, and also inherently unpleasant. frankly, none of the people she knew who were famous (and there were many such aunts and uncles)  seemed all too happy about it either, skulking around to try and clutch at their own dwindling shreds of privacy.

she spends a few years in atlanta with her grandmother, who had moved long ago, eager to find a life away from her homeland. they’ve always been an odd bunch, the ohs. her father has saddled her with the names to prove it. jua is normal enough, but juniper, and the myriad nicknames that stem from it are not. he’d grown up abroad and in korea, a back and forth that left him an odd mix of worlds, always on the outside looking in. despite his experiences with that, positive and negative, he does the same for jua. her life is a back and forth. plane rides and intensive language courses. from day one she’s been an odd thing, an offbeat little duckling of a girl, and this only exacerbates the issue.

as she gets older, fewer and fewer people still recognize her. she gets involved in her dad’s music, follows him to the studio, sings along with him. she takes vocal lessons when he notices her natural talent, takes music theory lessons when she shows interest in that. they don’t want her to be famous, they say, which is ironic considering. they want her to be happy though, and with the two of them as artistically inclined as they are perhaps it’s not a surprise that she is apparently following in their footsteps, genetically predisposed. or at the very least seeking out the familiar, things she grew up around. the thing about being oh jua, about being juniper, about being a semi-present fixture in the public lives of her father and mother is that she has never truly known a time when there weren’t strangers who knew who she was. they send her to america to live with her grandmother for a few years, in the hopes that this will afford her some mental distance from it all, but long summer vacations mean a return to korea to be with her mother and father, and it’s only a few years anyway. she skips the hell of korean middle school, at least. she returns in time for high school, at the promise of admission to sopa, and has promised herself already she will summarily forgo the entrance examinations. this is, it would turn out, a much better idea for her in the long run. the stress of korean school culture, even at an arts school in a subject area where she can excel, is nearly too much. she has always been prone to sensitivity, to over-feeling, to an ardent fountain of anxiety that wells up in her. she is too much like her father, her mother comforts her one night, fingers soft in her hair as she smiles sadly.

she’s approached by singularity first, and maybe that’s the only reason she signs with them. in the moment it’s almost a whim. she’s not sure she wants this, the idol thing. her father doesn’t want it for her - look what celebrity has done to me, he says. look at the strain it put on our family. look at the madness and the witch hunts. you can’t handle that, he tells her. i almost couldn’t, he admits. but she wants to be strong. she wants to be oh jua, or juniper, as herself. not as the shadow of a girl behind two great people. she wants to be great in her own right, to find her path. maybe it will be easier this way and maybe not, but the glitz and promised glamour is enough for the girl to give it a try.

they offer her a role that would give her a chance to rap and to sing, and she likes that. she likes the idea they’ve got in mind. after time spent training, she even likes the company alright. when debut rolls around, she even likes the goddamn song. the problems come after that. singularity is small, and close to broke, and the fact of the matter is they just aren’t promoting them enough. one track a year, generally speaking, isn’t enough to help them stay above water, isn’t enough to keep them high enough on the charts that they can really stand out. the only thing that’s keeping them from completely flopping is raw talent - singularity also shells out for good songs, when they bother, and the girl crush concept is fresh enough that it stands out, leaves an impact. still, it’s not what she envisioned. they’re not even close to letting her produce her own stuff, let alone anything for the group. she’d love to spin off into a solo act at some point, but given the rarity of their own group promotions, it hardly seems likely.  after spending five years of her career trying to keep singularity from allowing her.oine to flop by doing anything she literally could to keep them in the headlines, up to and including making a fool of herself with overdone artsy bullshit posts on instagram and twitter, her hardwork is rewarded….with the abrupt closure of the company.  jua is numb, when the news comes. from the actual news, at that, since no one at singularity had the decency to alert them ahead of time. unsurprising considering the amount of embezzling that had been going on. disgusting.  the girls are in a state of panic for a few hours. a few days, when just as suddenly news comes to them from the company, this time. there’s been a buyout, that’s the first news. the second news is that that means all the girls are going along with the general company assets and resources. jua’s head reels. starting from the bottom is demeaning. she hates it, hates the idea of debuting again. she hates that they’ve stolen their discography, that they’ll never be able to perform those songs, unless legal battles pan out well. she decides, however, that it’s better than disbanding. it’s better than dissolution. sure, the her.oine chapter has closed, but jawbreaker is off to a good start. something is better than nothing. if she has to beg her way through more demeaning schedules, grovel her way through more pointless interviews and bow ninety degrees to her hoobaes until her back breaks, she’ll do it. whatever it takes. 

because they’re letting her into the studios over here at kjh. giving her a chance at the resources she needs. they’re putting them on varieties, getting them brand deals, putting them into their own vlive series. it’s everything they should have been doing all along. she’s exhausted and she’s frustrated and, okay, her pride is a little hurt. but for the chance at the solo she’s always wanted, the chance to perform with her girls, well, she’ll take it.

#id.bio #id.kjh #id.jawbreaker #id.kim jennie