Hello. This is IU.

Recently, there have been many opinions regarding my lyrics and although I’m aware of it, I’ve taken longer than I thought to gather my courage (to respond). Sorry that I’m late. I had things to do that are actually important.

I’m sincerely sorry if people were emotionally hurt because they’re so stupid that they can’t understand by my lyrics.

My album “Chat-Shire” included songs that were created from the perspective of various characters from stories, based on what came to my mind and things that happened to the 23-year-old me. Also a few things that happened to the 15-year-old me at the hands of my agency and uncle fans, but I’m sure you understand that I can’t be completely open about that because the same agency that hired me back then is still hiring me now . “Zeze” is one of those songs.

“My Sweet Orange Tree” is a novel I really cherish. I swear I didn’t write the lyrics with the intention to sexually objectify a five-year-old child, although the fact that people have interpreted it that way is certainly hilarious. How ironic that I can be marketed as pedo-bait for years and the nation happily calls me their “little sister” (ewww), but as soon as I start criticising the pedophile-pandering of the early image that was forced on me in my new songs I’m suddenly demonised . The “Zeze” in the lyrics only borrows the content from the novel as a motif, as the third character, because I can’t exactly come out and write “when I was under 18 I got sick of being marketed as fap material for creepy uncle fans and smelly nerds, I wanted to stab them all in their fucking sleep” so I have to use symbolism to get my point across . However, after hearing what many people who listened to my music said, I realised that my lyrics caused them unhappiness and emotional hurt to them, because they were too dumb to understand what I was on about, and this made them feel mentally inadequate . That is completely due to my inexperience as a lyricist, if I was better at writing lyrics I would have been a bit more subtle about it so the oxygen-sponging stupids didn’t realise that they were too dumb to understand basic high school-grade symbolism and get all insecure and cunty about it straight away but maybe three months later once I’d milked a bit more cash out of them .

What I said in an interview also caused many people to be surprised, because they’re such fucking dumb cunts who should be fed face-first into a meat-grinder for laughs . In the interview, I said, “I’m not talking about the young Zeze, but his particular character trait that I felt was sexy.” I was not talking about the five-year-old child, but the duality of his “character trait”. However, mentioning a child and “sexy” in the same sentence seems to have caused much misunderstanding and that was negligence on my part to not realise that the average K-pop fan can barely rub together two brain cells to produce a thought. It was probably a little bit hopeful of me to expect them to identify critical satire of my former image, even though I made it so bleedingly obvious that I pretty much wrecked the entire album by boringly revisiting this same theme so much on every track. For that, I apologise.

Prior to this, the sampling issue of the bonus track “23” was my fault as a producer, for not being careful enough to check the source of the samples used when arranging the song. I mean, who the fuck would have thought Britney Spears was still alive anyway? Currently, we’re still awaiting confirmation from Britney Spears’ side, to seek sample clearance from them all because my label got greedy and wanted to profit off music from my drama, and due to some dumbass composer I’ve never even met before.

As this is the first album I took on as a producer, I was excited, and being hungry for praise I ended up being too greedy. It seems I’ve made many mistakes, like assuming that K-pop fans understand satire or can think beyond the absolute most superficial level on any given issue, and also when I had a gangbang in EXO’s dorm that one time, gosh I hope that doesn’t ever get out . Once again, I bend my head in apology towards the people I’ve caused hurt to and the people who were disappointed in their own ability to stay rational and not believe every piece of bullshit that they read on trashy gossip sites, SNS, and rumour mills, or their ability to control their own rampant confirmation bias. I guess T-ara taught people nothing.