Project Chat-shire
2. Zezé
The second song, Zezé in my opinion is the greatest song IU has ever created and just such a masterpiece in songwriting, that I seriously think she’s one of the greatest songwriters alive even in comparison to Western artists. As you guys obviously know from the pedophilia accusations (which sound as ridiculous as they actually are), Zezé is about
My Sweet Orange Tree (
Meu Pé de Laranja Lima) by José Mauro de Vasconcelos. In this book there’s yet again another twelve year old child from an underprivileged family, and this time it’s a boy named Zezé. Basically what happens is that Zezé is a mischievous young boy whose family often beats him (abuse) for being so. When the family moves to a new house, Zezé finds that he can communicate with an orange tree and he becomes best friends with it. However later, he meets a man named Manuel Valdares while pulling a prank, and the man humiliates him in public but inadvertently offers Zezé his friendship and becomes the true fatherly figure in his life.
So that’s where IU’s interpretation of the novel comes in, and I think it’s just absolutely brilliant. In her song, she writes from the perspective of the orange tree addressing Zezé. The tree sends Zezé backhanded compliments, calling him beautiful, innocent, lovely but also saying that there’s obviously a cunning, dark, and dirty inside of him that he’s hiding which makes it okay for the tree to harbor nasty thoughts towards him.
Just look at these great verses:
It’s amusing
Look at the tail of your lips rising
I can tell by your laugh
You’re definitely mischievous
Ah ah your name is really pretty
I want to keep calling it
The things I cannot say
Those bad thoughts are lovely
Like a flower bloomed
Look at the two cheeks turned rosy
You’re really innocent
But you’re definitely cunning
You seem transparent like a little child
Something about you is dirty
There’s no way to find out
What it is living inside you
Right now, above your head
There may be a floating sun
But I vaguely see
Dark clouds filled inside you
In this way, IU is commentating on how the people in the public treat her, lauding her at a very young age for being innocent, cute, and the Nation’s Little Sister but in the same breath hating on her for being cunning, sly, and foxy beneath her image.
If the verses seemed creepy and pedophiliac, that’s because they’re supposed to be. Just like how Zezé’s first friendship that makes him happy is the orange tree, IU’s relationship with how the public viewed her was also important and made her happy because they praised her and adored her. But just like a talking orange tree, the love she receives from fame is just a fantasy and is so vapid it vanishes easily. Fame and the public aren’t her friends; her family and the people around her are, just like Zezé and Manuel Valdares. Since IU has come to that realization, when the tree tells Zezé to “climp up me” in the song (which is directly taken from the novel), it’s not welcoming but instead ominous, malicious, and frankly sexual. That’s where we get this other amazing verse from:
Zeze hurry and come up the tree
Put your lips on the leaves
Don’t joke around
You can’t hurt the trees, you can’t
Zeze hurry and come up the tree
Take the youngest leaf here
Take away the one of a kind flower
IU comments on how even when she was just a young girl, she was sexualized and fetishized by the people controlling her career and the public. The lolicon imagery here is intentional; she’s pointing out the rampant pedophilia in an industry that can’t protect a young girl. That also explains the visual on the album with Zezé in a pin-up pose. That’s why I found pedophilia accusations to be so ridiculous. Knetizens were so quick to accuse IU of pedophilia which even at the time sounded so random and contrived just because they didn’t even take the time to at least try to understand the song’s meaning. IU even tried to illuminate it during her V App stream, but they still didn’t understand that they’re the ones being called out in the song. Obviously, IU is still a company-controlled public celebrity and can’t explicitly complain about the Korean public, so she was forced to write an apology letter about how she isn’t good enough of a songwriter yet. That’s ********. People just need to
listen to her.
