Like Water at Two: Good Art, Lived Art
I’ve been postponing writing about Wendy’s Like Water EP for so long, but here I am, two years after its release. Let’s start by underlining that to me Like Water is a testament to Wendy the consummate virtuoso and a call to revisit the idea of good art.
The odds weren’t in Like Water’s favor upon its release. Like many of their generation peers, Wendy’s group Red Velvet falls under the latest trend of groups’ solo debuting the most popular members before their main vocalist. At 19 minutes, Like Water is shorter than the debut album of fellow SM’s main vocalists SNSD’s Taeyeon and f(x)’s Luna. In addition to the EP’s discounted length, the intro of the titular track “Like Water” is too close to Remioromen’s 2006 hit 粉雪 “Konayuki” for me to cherish it. Even Wendy herself didn’t go too hard on the tracks — no crazy notes like the C6 in her “Season of Love” high school performance or crazy runs crowned with Bb5-B5 from “Oh Boy” to “Ladies Night.”
Instead, what delighted me the most is how much of Like Water’s vocal arrangement is dedicated to Wendy’s lower and mixed registers, following the pattern of her many 2020 co-work — themselves could’ve been compiled into an EP with track numbers equaling Like Water’s. The arrangement may owe it to her working on it during her year of rest. Or maybe it’s due to, as Wendy said often in her Youngstreet broadcast, her trying new endeavors. Although “Like Water” doesn’t mark the lowest note in the EP, the co-title track “When This Rains Stops” and subsequently “Why Can’t You Love Me” and “The Road” do (Eb5). “When This Rain Stops” is also the strongest track for me, for it shows that all a good ballad needs to help it become more of itself is a piano and an exemplary singer. It’s the most representative song of her as a person and an artist, and a homophonic double entendre can be drawn from the title, which SM acknowledges at the end of its MV. What’s a more personalized work than that, then?
As a whole, Like Water exemplifies the musical instrument Wendy masters best: her voice. In one single line of “Like Water,” she starts with a vocal fry and ends with a B4. You too will find high notes up to F5 either belted or sung in head voice as well as a crescendo from a whisper to vibrato with such ease. The sheer wonder of said ease brought me back to what football journalist Rob Hughes said about Juventus’ legend Zinedine Zidane in a 1997 Juventus v. Manchester United match: “An injured Zidane with only one healthy leg could still teach the other 21 players on the field how to play football.” (Yes, I couldn’t stop thinking about Wendy as a fantasista, after that one line I wrote). All the well-intonated notes, all the well-placed supports, and all the dynamics (in music: range of loudness) a recovering Wendy showcased in Like Water could still teach her peers what it meant to sing. And just like what British composer Gustav Holst said about the human voice, “the most beautiful and the most difficult instrument to master,” what a voice Wendy has.
I do, admittedly, admire other details outside of the music of Like Water and consequently do not treat it as a self-contained art object, per the tradition of New Criticism. If you factor in all of its preceding trajectories — a workplace safety negligence, a workplace accident, then a long hiatus from all workplace matters, Like Water can read like a biography of self-rediscovery. The packaging of the EP tells you that you have to sift through its flower petals to get into the musical body, the literal CD. It is flowers most beautiful that can only grow on the best soil composed of raw, broken-down matters. In a way, the design reminds me of the fictional disease hanahaki (flower vomit), where the beautiful petals only come from a disease that tortures the inflicted. I remember at first dreading that Wendy’s career post-hiatus would revolve around the hanahaki-like romanticizing, and I’m glad I was proven wrong. Had you told 2020 me that post-Like Water Wendy would be working with living legend Yang Heeun and colleagues 10 years her junior alike, singing popera and soul alike, rubbing elbows with the Blue House’s honorees and interviewing Captain America alike, or even having a small moment of rebellion as she changed the lyrics to “Best Friend,” I would’ve asked if you’d abused one too many Seroquel in your system.
Like Water then, seen from a Whitmanesque perspective, contains those multitudes. Wendy’s struggle and strength can exist at the same time, not necessarily as opposites. It is also, just as Tennyson observed, a part of all that Wendy has met before and during her hiatus, be it people, moments, moods, and all the highs and all the lows. Like Water is its singer’s talent, its back work and frustrating moments, its creative team huddling up against Jeju’s wind. To me, it is two yellowing ticket print-outs of Red Velvet’s La Rouge’s Japan tour that I ended up refunding and that one time in the middle of a night drive, overwhelmed by the sight of the COVID-19 mass graves in Rorotan, North Jakarta, I had to pull over as the “다시 한 번 날 들려주기 위해 breathe again” part played from my car’s audio system. It is how and what music makes people feel.
Ultimately, other than measurable pedantic technicalities, I don’t really have a strict assessment metric to deem a piece of music bad. Bad music, after all, is one that hasn’t found its right audience. Like Water accompanies me in making sense of what has taken place since 2020 not limited to just the global pandemic and its consequences but also of how art survives and in return sustains people, its artist and enthusiast alike. As a writer, I have faith in that kind of art. And, as Like Water shows, if your art saves one person, even if that person is you yourself, it is still one good art.
