“The Lover Boy is Dead…” | “Lover” by Stray Kids’ Hyunjin
I’d never given much thought to the format of songs before this project. But the inherent repetition lends to the expression of so many emotions. I’ve already found myself repeating…
I’d never given much thought to the format of songs before this project. But the inherent repetition lends to the expression of so many emotions. I’ve already found myself repeating what I’ve said in previous posts, and I’m only sixteen songs into a discography that is a few hundred songs long. And I’m going to do it again.
“Lover” once again brilliantly uses this circular, repetitive format to portray heartbreak, grief, regret, longing, and memories, much like “Still Here” and “4419.”
Let’s look at the lyrics.
Couple disclaimers: I’m a pretty new STAY, and I don’t speak Korean. I am using my limited SKZ knowledge and the English translations from Genius. These are my own thoughts based on those translations and not meant to be a definitive interpretation.
Here is the audio to listen to as you read the lyrics.
This song was dropped unexpectedly – as the SKZ-RECORDS and SKZ-PLAYERS usually are – on Hyunjin’s birthday. A little gift from him to us. And he spoke briefly about the song in his birthday live later that day. He said he wrote the song about a year ago, recorded a guide track, and left it alone for a bit.
And then he rerecorded it several times. With his voice struggles and it changing so much over the last year, he kept thinking something was off. In the end, he said he recorded it three or four times. And then he was so pleased with how it turned out that he asked the company if he could do a video to go along with it.
The concept, he said, came from him being a lover boy: “So the storyline is the lover boy is dead… ‘If it’s not you, I don’t think I can be with anyone else…but didn’t you love me? Did you ever love me at all?’”
I compared this to “Still Here” earlier, but the main difference, I think, is how much time has passed. In “Still Here,” it’s obvious quite a bit of time has passed since the event that was the source of the grief. The walking circles has been going on for a while, memories are maybe fading and they’re trying to hold on to them. In “Lover,” it feels more recent, like the breakup has just happened. It’s more raw, a little angry. They’re at very different stages of grief.
There are a few really heartbreaking lines that really show this:
You once did love me, though? Right, right?: It’s the double “right” that really drives the point home. The “you really did love me once” is bad enough, but adding the “Right…right?” hurts.
Lover, lover, love is gone, no matter what I say: “Not matter what I say” implies trying to stop it, trying to keep the relationship together.
Oh, this is too much to handle while sober / I don’t want to drink no more, no more, no more: Some back and forth here. It’s too much to handle while sober, but he doesn’t want to drink anymore. A vicious cycle.
Loved her, loved her, loved her so much in my rose-tinted memories: Reference to rose tinted glasses. Was it actually good or remembered better than it actually was?
Why’rе you acting like it’s me, it’s all my fault, you mean? / Thеn again, you were always like that: There are little hints like this in a lot of the lines, that it wasn’t as good as he was remembering, that maybe it was a good idea to not be together anymore. This couplet shows a really relatable feeling. Fighting for or fighting with – “why’re you acting like it’s me” – and then the resigned acceptance that that’s how it’s always been. They’ve had this argument before. It feels tired.
We both know, honestly, things were off from the beginning: This comes in verse 2 and is the nail in the coffin of what’s hinted in the last line we looked at – it doesn’t sound like a very healthy relationship.
Tell me how to get out of this, now I’m done with you: “I want out. How do I get out?”
The “lover boy is dead” concept is really evident. Whatever went down in this relationship, it ended badly. He did not want to break up, even though there are little moments that show the relationship wasn’t the greatest from the beginning. Either way, he is shattered.
And as I mentioned in the introduction, the repetition only adds to the feeling of devastation. In moments of grief and heartbreak, you get stuck on things – on certain moments or on the pain that feels like it will never end. And it doesn’t feel like there’s much of a resolution. It’s just the intense despair. That’s where “Lover” and “Still Here” are similar again – it’s just going around in circles with no apparent arc or change, telling the story of one moment of misery and reflection.
Now, there was a lot of discourse around Hyunjin’s use of female pronouns. The vast majority of Stray Kids’ songs don’t have gendered pronouns. They either use pronouns referring to themselves – us, we, my, our, etc. – or “you.” This serves a lot of purposes, of course. It allows fans to see themselves in their music regardless of gender. It feels more intimate in general, less disconnected. (It feels like they’re singing to me rather than about someone like me.)
And it makes it easier to fit several interpretations into a song. They don’t have a lot of romantic love songs in their general discography to begin with, but even the ones that lean more toward romantic love can be read as platonic or family love because of the use of “you” instead of a gendered pronoun.
Many also use this as a way to hint at the members’ sexuality, and while that could be true, we just don’t know. I’m not here to start shipping wars, discourage you from shipping, or discount any hints that may or may not have been given by members over the years. I love a good ship. And in my personal opinion, I think there have been hints the members have given.
But until they come out and say it or start dating someone publicly – both of which are either frowned upon, impossible, or still may not show the full picture of their sexuality depending on the gender of the person they start dating – we just don’t know one hundred percent. And that’s ok! We don’t need to!
That said, the conversations around Hyunjin using female pronouns felt big. I won’t recount everything. Suffice it to say that some saw it as a clear indication of Hyunjin being attracted to women and only women. And! They saw the song generally as evidence that Hyunjin had been in a relationship with a woman that had ended badly. Disappointment came from all sides, and for a lot of different reasons: He’s straight, he was dating someone who isn’t me, he was in a relationship that wasn’t good and that ended badly and that’s sad, etc.
Gee, I wonder why idols don’t date or speak about romance publicly…
(This is a general statement, of course. I know that not everyone was disappointed or upset about this particular detail of the song.)
All I’ll say on that is that, again, we don’t know. We don’t know if Hyunjin has been in a relationship with anyone. We don’t know his sexual orientation.
What we do know is what he told us in his birthday live when giving some of the background. He said that there wasn’t one place that he drew inspiration from. It was a story that he came up with, something dramatic that he wanted to make into music. We know that Hyunjin is great at getting into a role. His stage persona is something he visibly slips into depending on the song and the vibe. He’s also incredibly artistic in the visual arts – in many different mediums! It’s extremely believable that this came whole cloth from his imagination – no prior experience with this kind of heartbreak.
Of course, we know Hyunjin. We know that he feels deeply. He is our lover boy, after all. It also wouldn’t surprise me if he drew from past experience with some sort of heartbreak – romantic or otherwise – or from stories and music he loves. Artists draw from a lot of different places for inspiration.
And personally, I think the use of “her” is really brilliant in the choruses. Switching back and forth between “lover” and “loved her” works so well on a linguistic level. And even though he is referencing a specific “her,” the feeling still resonates deeply. Because the experience of heartbreak is not limited to straight couples or to couples at all.
The sound supports this desperation very well, too. We have these guitar riffs that set the mood immediately and continue almost through the whole song. They finish it out as well, giving that circular effect aurally. It’s a pretty simple track, so it really highlights Hyunjin’s vocals. His singing in the verses are pretty even keeled, the pre-choruses are high, and then they build to the desperation in the choruses – full out, emotional belting.
And the music video is, as Hyunjin said in his live, more of a mood film, an artistic film. There’s not a storyline in the way music videos usually portray a storyline. But the visuals highlight the mood – dramatic lighting, a lot of contrast with dark and light and black and white, rain and lighting, drowning, things exploding. The contrast, especially, drives home the “If it’s not you, I don’t think I can be with anyone else” idea. There can be a lot of black and white thinking when you’re in the midst of grieving. It can feel really hopeless.
My favorite thing about the video, though, is the woman. There are flashes of her mixed in with the flashes of Hyunjin. There are a few times it’s just her or just her face. And then there are times when she and Hyunjin are on the screen at the same time, but they don’t interact. They’re in different rooms or they walk past each other without looking.
And there are a couple times where they do interact – hands clasping at the beginning and standing in the rain together near the end – but both times they’re parting. The hands come unclasped. The woman leaves him in the rain.
In a video that doesn’t have a specific storyline in that it isn’t showing them fighting and then breaking up or showing specific flashbacks, it still tells a story. The lyrics aren’t specific about how they broke up or what led to it either. They’re capturing a feeling, and the video does the same.
This is the first Hyunjin written song I’ve done so far, and I loved exploring his writing style, hearing the behind the scenes of the story he wanted to tell, and then hearing and seeing him bring his words to life so powerfully. And I would be remiss not to mention his vocal struggles over the last year.
It’s still unclear to me what the vocal struggles were exactly. But whatever they were, they were bad enough for him to be afraid he’d have to leave the group.
…Moment of silence for that thought so we never have to think about it again.
And now that I think about it, maybe some of the emotions he pulled from to portray his heartbreak and desperation and not wanting to leave came from the fear that he would have to give up performing and leave his friends, if not in the content (since I’m not sure if his vocal stuff was going on when writing the actual lyrics) than at least in the vocal performance of the song.
And his vocals are amazing! The range he shows not only in pitch but in power is really impressive. I wonder how satisfying it was for him to finally decide that this was the final cut, to see the difference from a year ago when he recorded the guide track in the midst of vocal issues to now. It’s certainly satisfying – and emotional – for me, and I haven’t heard all of the versions he recorded over the last year!
I hope he hasn’t had to experience this kind of pain, but unfortunately, it is part of life. And it is likely he has, even if it wasn’t with a romantic partner. And whether he has or not, he channeled that feeling into a really beautifully heartbreaking song that we get to enjoy.
Is it cheesy to say I’m proud of him? Probably, but that’s ok. For Hyunjin, I’ll be a little cheesy.
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