Something Not Quite Right

The thing about covering politics after years of music journalism is that everyone is performing and nobody is trying to be subtle about it.

Music dressed its artifice up in something worth listening to. A hook. A voice that made the construction feel like truth for three and a half minutes. The senator in your inbox had no such courtesy — three paragraphs of strategic non-answer to a question you'd spent two days getting cleared. The question had been simple. The answer had been architecture. Designed to look like a response while committing to nothing.

You read it once. Then again. Then closed the tab.

Your coffee was cold. It was eleven-fourteen in the morning.

The office had the energy of a Tuesday that wasn't trying. Keyboards at varying speeds. Someone's phone going to voicemail. The anchor above the news desk had delivered bad news so many times the delivery had become a register rather than a response. You'd stopped hearing him months ago, the way you stopped hearing traffic after enough years in a city.

You had a desk by the window. Today it was grey outside — the kind of grey that hadn't decided anything yet.

You were considering lunch when Jamie dropped a folder on your desk.

"Before you say anything," she said, pulling the chair from the empty desk beside yours and sitting on it backwards, "hear me out."

You looked at the folder. Thin. Assembled quickly. Then you looked at her. Jamie had a specific expression for when she'd already decided something and was managing the process of bringing you to the same conclusion. She was wearing it now.

"The last time you opened with that, I spent four days in Busan interviewing a man who collected antique rice cookers."

"That piece got shared forty thousand times."

"He had forty-seven rice cookers, Jamie."

"Forty-nine by the time you left. You said so yourself." She tapped the folder. "This is different. This is your lane."

"I don't have a lane anymore. I'm general desk."

"You have a lane. You're pretending you don't because it's easier than admitting you miss it."

You didn't answer. Which was itself an answer, and you both knew it.

She leaned forward on the chair back. "IU cancelled her showcase run. Third cancellation in six weeks, all citing vocal rest. Her agency put out a statement that says nothing with a great deal of confidence — standard language, artist health, scheduled return, grateful for fan understanding. The kind of statement that answers every question except the ones worth asking."

"Vocal fatigue is real."

"I know. I'm not saying it isn't." She held up a hand. "But JYP put out a nearly identical statement six weeks ago about a mid-tier act. SM last month. Different company, different act, same bones. And there's a venue booker I spoke to yesterday — completely off the record — who said he's had two cancellations in the last month from acts citing the same thing." She paused. "He used the word pattern. Unprompted."

You went quiet.

"Who else," you said. Less a question than the beginning of a list.

"That's in there. What I could find in two days. I think there's more."

You looked at the folder without picking it up yet.

"Culture piece," you said. "Industry transparency. The gap between what agencies say and what's actually happening."

"It's whatever you find." She stood and returned the chair to its desk. "You still have contacts over there?"

The question had the casualness of something thought about before being asked.

You had contacts. The way you had scars from an old injury — present, functional, occasionally inconvenient to explain. Jihyo still texted on your birthday. One line, warm and brief. Irene had your number and used it once a year, which by her standards was practically correspondence. There were others. A stylist gone independent. A venue booker with twenty years in the industry and a good memory for what didn't add up. A music director who'd stopped returning your calls when you moved desks but might pick up again if you framed it right.

Loose threads. The kind that frayed if you pulled them wrong.

Whether you wanted to pull them was a different question from whether you could.

"Some," you said.

"File me something by end of next week. Preliminary findings. Doesn't have to be the whole picture." She was already walking back to her desk. "And go in through the side door. If they're coordinating statements, they're coordinating other things too."

Then she sat down and you were alone with the folder.

Outside, the grey sky had made its decision. Light rain now, the suggestion of more. You picked up your cold coffee, drank it, and opened the folder.

Four statements. Different agencies, different lengths, different levels of corporate warmth. Identical in what they were actually doing.

You read the IU one first. Fifteen years of output. A public persona built on a specific kind of transparency. Which made the vagueness of this statement land harder by contrast. Vocal fatigue. Prioritizing health. Grateful for fan support during this period of rest.

You'd seen this construction before, not in music but in politics and crisis communications. Statements released on Friday afternoons when nobody wanted follow-up questions. Pending medical clearance was doing enormous work in the second paragraph, creating the impression of a clinical process without committing to a timeline, a diagnosis, or a definition of what clearance even meant. The JYP statement was warmer in tone. More effusive with the apology. Same bones underneath. SM's was three sentences. Every word load-bearing, none of them useful. You almost respected the efficiency.

You set all four out side by side and looked at them the way you looked at things when you were trying to see the shape rather than the content.
Same architecture. Four companies. Four acts. Three months.

You made fresh coffee and went back to your desk and picked up your phone.

Jihyo picked up on the third ring, clearly mid-lunch. After some catching up — the politics desk, the rice cooker piece she'd apparently read and resented enjoying, the Friday croissants that counterbalanced nothing — she went quiet when you got to the reason for the call.

"I don't have anything specific I can tell you," she said. The phrasing was careful in a way Jihyo's phrasing usually wasn't.

"I'm not asking for specific. I'm asking whether the ordinary explanations fit."

"I think when the ordinary explanations are working very hard to explain something, that's sometimes worth paying attention to," she said slowly.

Not a confirmation. Not nothing either.