가장 얇은 가죽

From the perspective that our body is a machine that burns various nutrients to move, the things we feel are delicious are the ones that hold comparatively more of the nutrients we need to survive. An individual who felt that things rich in what’s needed to sustain and move the body were “delicious” would have tried to take in a little more of those nutrients.

An individual who tried to consume more of the delicious things would have survived more than one who didn’t. From this we can infer that we evolved in the direction of consuming more of what tastes good.

Let’s think about cooking from that angle. We usually find grilled meat more delicious than raw meat. Grilling meat changes the structure of the protein, and that helps raise the efficiency of digestion.

So cooking, in a sense, is outsourcing the digestive process to the outside. If digestive efficiency rises, then even eating the same amount secures more of the nutrients needed for survival — an advantage from the standpoint of how efficiently the machine runs — so we would have evolved to cook whenever possible.

When we cook, we face the process of prepping the ingredients: peeling skins, removing bones, refining the raw material, fermenting it, and so on. Put simply, it’s the process of leaving only the tasty parts.

Now let’s look at humans. There was a time when the word “multi-persona” was all the rage. Simply put, it means everyone owns several masks. Across relationships — work, friends, family — we live revealing only the parts we want to reveal in each domain. Of course, all of those are also a part of oneself. Just as an onion is still an onion no matter how many layers you peel.

Humans, too, like ingredients, have a core that emerges when you strip all of that away. And there also exists the desire to prep oneself and face the self inside the skin. After all, there are accounts of people walking the Camino de Santiago to face their whole self. And artists sometimes take out and display the very core of themselves, stripped of all the plastered-on ornaments — like 담예’s [가장 얇은 가죽] (roughly, “The Thinnest Hide”), which I’ll introduce this time.

The album cover of 담예’s [가장 얇은 가죽] displays a person trying to tear off the thin membrane clinging to their face. The Korean word for face, “얼굴,” becomes rather interesting when you break it apart. Split into “얼” and “굴,” “얼” means, by dictionary, “the most important part of the spirit,” and “굴” means a cave or hole. So “얼굴” can also be read as a cave holding the most important part of the spirit.

There are two ways to reveal what lies inside a cave. The first is for someone to go into the cave and tell you what they saw inside. The second is to dig up all the ground around the cave, artificially lowering its depth. From this angle, what the first track, “뜯” (Tear), reveals is clear. From the album cover onward it displays the act of tearing off the membrane stuck to one’s “face” by one’s own hand, and at the opening it shows the torn-off state itself. This album is the act of prepping the ingredient called 담예 and leaving only the tastiest cut.

The album divides into a first and second half around “archie’s Interlude”: the first half lays out stories about oneself and the friends around them, and the second half spreads out stories about love.

It’s striking that an album exhibiting oneself devotes about half its running time to stories about relationships, because it reads as meaning there is no human who can stand entirely alone. You know the saying — humans are social animals. In that sense, the credits packed full of friends on an album that exhibits the self come across as warmth.

We go through life wrapped in dozens of layers of persona, calloused like hardened skin. Perhaps that’s why an album like 담예’s [가장 얇은 가죽] reaches the ear. Because in an age when everyone is heavily armored, it tears off the hide, complaining that it’s stifling, and displays the prepped self without so much as a seasoning. That’s fitting for someone who keeps “반골기질친구들” (contrarian-spirited friends) around.

And in the human world, this kind of storytelling has always offered vicarious satisfaction. If living feels oddly stifling, 담예’s [가장 얇은 가죽] might give you a strange sense of release.