What Does SOYEON's 'I'm gonna TOESA' Mean? Korea's No. 1 Is a Resignation

Korea's No. 1 song right now is a resignation. 'I'm gonna TOESA', the title track of SOYEON's first full-length solo album, came out on 7 September at 6 pm Korean time and took its time to arrive. It entered Spotify's daily chart in Korea at No. 116, reached No. 2 on 21 September and has been No. 2 or 3 every day since; from 27 September it has been No. 2 each day, behind RESCENE's 'LOVE ATTACK'. On the Circle Digital Chart, the national chart, its first four weeks read 66, 2, 1 and 1. When we read Melon, the country's largest home-grown streaming service, early on 10 October, it led both the Top 100 and the daily chart, with RESCENE, I.O.I's reunion single and YENA's 'Catch Catch', at 15, below it. It went to No. 2 on Spotify in Taiwan too, and its video has 21,104,382 views.

'TOESA' meaning: the Korean word for leaving your company

Toesa (퇴사) is what Korean office workers call walking out of the company they work for: the word for resigning, used about a job rather than about a relationship. The Korean title, 퇴사할게여, is 'I'll quit' with its last syllable bent into a cute, text-message spelling, so it reads less like a letter to the personnel office than a note to a group chat. The English title keeps the Korean word, which is why so many listeners abroad end up typing 'toesa meaning' into Google. The title made some fans ask whether SOYEON was leaving her agency, CUBE. She has said on television that it is not about her own job.

A resignation that turns into a romantic day

She opens by announcing it. There is nothing she will miss; she never meant to live this hard in the first place; she has done it for a long time and swallowed it hundreds of times. She will pack calmly, not look back, and wish everyone well on the way out.

The chorus answers the obvious objection. Ipal cheongchun, 'two-eight youth', is an old idiom for sixteen, the spring of life, and she uses it to shrug: so what if she regrets it, she is young, and the door is right there. The weather is good, the wind is good, and all of us end up as grandmothers anyway, a line that arrives 56 seconds in. Looking back, she sings in English, “It was a romantic day”.

Verse two is her new free time. She suggests a meal, since she has plenty of time these days, and promises never to cancel plans again, at which point a bracketed voice in the lyric, heard at 1:29, says she is lying. Then a trip, and a bucket list: travel around the world, become a novelist, sing without worrying. The bridge, the loudest passage on our meter, asks the listener not to stop her today. If she regrets it one day she will call it romance, and she will be a romantic grandmother looking back on this day.

What she borrowed from a 2005 job-seeker's song

Soon after the release, some listeners heard a song by the band EX in it: 'Jal Butakdeurimnida' ('Please take good care of me'), which won the grand prize at MBC's University Song Festival in 2005 and which Koreans have long heard as a job seeker's song after an interview. SOYEON answered on MBC's Radio Star, aired on 9 September: she said she had wanted to pay homage to EX and had asked the band's singer, Lee Sang-mi, for permission before finishing the song. Lee Sang-mi also appears in a challenge video for the song, which she says was filmed in August.

So we put the two recordings through identical software. They are not the same song in disguise. Our tempo reading for 'I'm gonna TOESA' is 117.5, in A major; for EX's song, in the version on the band's 2007 album, it is 103.4, in G major, 14 beats a minute slower and a whole step lower. To our sound classifier, EX is a rock band from its first second to its last. SOYEON's first 28 seconds are bouncy and light, the classifier's top guesses being funk and children's music, and it only puts rock first in her last 44 seconds.

The borrowing is in the manners. EX's singer starts with a polite hello, admits she rambled from nerves, has a drink to cheer herself up, asks to be forgiven one mistake, sings a wordless na-na, and sums it up in English: “It's a beautiful day”. She says goodbye at the end, thanks the listener and asks again to be taken care of. SOYEON keeps the polite speech, a wordless sing-along (her la-la for EX's na-na) and the English verdict on the day, and turns the story around: the 2005 song is how a working life starts, the 2026 one how a job ends. Even the album's Korean title, 끝내주는 인생, uses a verb EX sings near the start, kkeutnaejwosseoyo, which means 'it was awesome' and is built on the verb 'to finish'. The English title is 'What a Wonderful Life'.

The same week, Akali's voice

On 8 October at 6 pm Pacific time, Riot Games released 'Know My Name', the anthem of this year's League of Legends world championship, performed by its virtual group True Damage. SOYEON voices Akali, the group's rapper, alongside Coco Jones, Vic Mensa and Sofía Reyes. The video, built around the T1 player Faker, was watched 5,648,136 times in its first 21 hours. True Damage is due to perform the song at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on 14 November.

Why it keeps winning

Our reading: the title is one everyday word that every Korean with a job has thought about, the chorus arrives 36 seconds in, and the la-la gives the people in the challenge videos something to sing together. The homage helped as well. A charge of copying became a story told by both singers, with the original singer taking part in a challenge video. And the subject needs no explaining to anyone who has dreaded a Monday.

Our bet: in the Circle Digital Chart for 25 to 31 October, the week IVE and ILLIT return with new music, 'I'm gonna TOESA' is still in the Top 10.