The “Beautiful Mind” of Xdinary Heroes

How the band’s new era takes their surreal storytelling to new heights

In the “Beautiful Life” music video, Xdinary Heroes play dirty and bloody characters who are left for dead after chaotic fights against unknown enemies. At the end, they stand up and directly face their foes, who remove their disguises to reveal they are cleaned-up versions of themselves. As the bruised and beaten version of Jooyeon suggests it is time for the other side to surrender (“Why don’t you wave your flag… is it white?”), his face grows blurry. The cleaned-up Jooyeon sings the final lyric while staring right at the now-glitching version of Jooyeon: “No one’s here to love you.” Slowly, then all at once, the beaten-up members glitch into thin air. After the cleaned-up Jooyeon sneers and the screen goes black, a question appears on it: “What’s real in your reality?”

This ending is aptly ambiguous and anticlimactic. Xdinary Heroes are the winners and the losers, the aggressors and the victims, the “real” and the virtual ones, and the ones who are gone and the ones who are here to stay. They demoralize and destroy themselves and follow that up with a “This is just the beginning” message, and like their past eras, the irony is the point. In the world their songs and music videos exist in, illogic is logic and sense is nonsense. “Beautiful Life” and the corresponding album, Beautiful Mind, continue their traditions of inverting preconceived notions, exaggerating life’s absurdities, and sparking conversations as to what “real life” even is.

Virtual Reality

In the “Origin of Xdinary Heroes” series, the computer puts the members together for a “Battle of the Bands” game. After putting on virtual reality headsets in separate locations, the members quickly develop synergy and watch their band’s ranking rapidly rise. The internet facilitates their increased confidence in their musical skills, and their reliance on and appreciation for the web is why many of their song and album titles have computer-themed language: Open♭eta : v6.1, Hello, world! (named after a common sample sentence in online language-learning programs), Overload, Troubleshooting … Songs like “UNDEFINED” celebrate cyberspace in less direct ways, mentioning how they can be “Finding a new face… continuously,” can “break all the rules” in virtual reality, and don’t have to “conform to the same mold” as anyone else. The identity limitations in “the real world” are nonexistent in the virtual one, a message the song “XYMPHONY” shares:

“The world that was only noisy / Now makes sense… A life that was pressed randomly / A hopeless time that I thought was dead / Revives… A symphony that will never be extinguished.”

From just a few coincidental clicks, the members change their entire lives and even create additional ones! This empowering realization about how quickly and limitlessly they can remake their worlds fuels them, and as their musical storytelling has expanded over the years, they have gotten more audacious in what they revise. They cast heroes as villains and vice versa and treat their rule-breaking as being exactly what they are supposed to do.

Questioning Everything

Realizing how easy it is to exploit life’s contradictions, Xdinary Heroes do so to their advantage when rebranding terms. They allude to losing a game but declare themselves the victors in “Money On My Mind”: “Honor falling / I’m just gonna rock the world.” Following the “Freakin’ Bad” era, they describe something as “freakin’ good” in “UNDEFINED.” In the “Hair Cut” music video, “ARE YOU A VILLAIN OR A HERO?” appears on a mirror. Text at the start of the “Test Me” music video reads, “IF YOU RIG A RIGGED SYSTEM, ARE YOU A VILLAIN OR A HERO?,” and that video shows them rigging their way into a contest from which they have been unjustly disqualified. (In yet another example of irony, something they have been praising - technology - is what becomes their opponent; their rival is a robot.) That video ends with a “WANTED” poster flying towards the screen that asks, “ARE THEY VILLAINS OR HEROES?”

A poster in the Troubleshooting era short film reads, “Are you alive or just eXisting?” (That short film also alludes to definitions being malleable with the comment “Would saying everything was all meaningless make us feel better?”). They frame existing, not dying, as the opposite of living. Key to living a life that is truly meaningful, rather than just existing through one, is making sense of the related question that is posed at the end of the “Beautiful Life” video: “What’s real in your reality?”

While Xdinary Heroes frequently take joy in flipping terms upside-down, “Beautiful Life” alludes to the confusion that can arise from doing so:

“Look around! Can you feel what’s real?... Salute to the intangible king / Was told to kill for my peace…”

More contradictions that they wrestle with:

“Ignorance is strength… A world that says truth is a lie / A trial that shows a lie is the truth.”

It is hard to wrap one’s head around how the source of one’s confidence (the power to mold one’s own worldview) can also be the source of one’s confusion. Not only that, but the things that feel as “real” as can be can quickly disappear, like the band’s ranking in the game, and like the virtual alter egos who turn to dust in “Beautiful Life;” things that seem fleeting can actually be permanent, like their physical presence in “Beautiful Life,” and like the online images that both change and never disappear, since the internet is forever; and the tool that bolsters warped understandings can also be the tool that enables greater personal clarity, since the internet enables both accurate and inaccurate self-conceptions. As a short film from the Troubleshooting era puts it:

“There are times when reality feels surreal. When everything around seems fake, and the truth is hard to find… the emotions we [feel] are true. Even if not, I believe we’re connected. Reflecting on the people who understand my world…”

Even the one thing they express the ability to completely believe in - emotions - is followed by a condition: “Even if not…” Following this with a reference to staying “connected” and remembering those who “understand [their] world” brings to mind the online community where their story began. Xdinary Heroes have told themselves some things and acted as if those things are true to the point that they do not recall what they considered “true” before that. To make sense of their newer and self-created realities, they turn to the internet - which is what caused their confusion in the first place!

Just like the Troubleshooting era acknowledges how much of defining “real” comes from something subjective (feelings), “Beautiful Life” wonders how some things become unintelligible noise in someone’s life while other things become part of one’s meaningful “XYMPHONY.” They wonder which sounds drown out the others:

“Between the truth and a lie, who’s louder?”

In other words, “Which version of yourself is the realest one?”

The more Xdinary Heroes control their own narrative, the less certain they seem of it, which explains the urge to, as they sing in “Beautiful Life,” break the “ironic screen.”

Living for an Audience of One

The “Test Me” music video offers a funny reality check about how much people’s self-perceptions can differ from the perceptions others have of them. Xdinary Heroes rock out like there’s no tomorrow in a subway car, but when the camera pans to a neighboring car, the passenger appears just miffed by a little muffled noise nearby! To Xdinary Heroes, what’s “real” is their icon status (as they cast themselves in “Beautiful Life” and in their virtual jam sessions, they are “intangible king[s]”!); to a fellow passenger, their presence is just a noisy nuisance.

As fleeting as that comedic moment is, it holds a key moral of Xdinary Heroes’ story: People should not bother waiting for permission to live on their own terms, because there are neither guarantees about ever getting that permission nor guarantees about others’ perceptions resembling what they imagine. This group is saying, “Less people are paying attention to you than you think, and you can’t get inside the minds of those who are paying attention anyway, so why not play music and live life like nobody's watching?!” This mentality motivates them to live as if up is down and down is up, ultimately determining, “Who cares?! Probably no one! No one whose opinion matters more than our own, anyway!” Their music video antics, from expressing themselves via graffiti (in multiple eras) to breaking out of jail (in “Break the Brake”) to rigging a rigged contest (in “Test Me”), show they don’t care about being labeled troublemakers. They act as if they have zero social media followers, zero people they seek Instagram “hearts” from, because after all, “No one’s here to love you”!

The more Xdinary Heroes live on their own terms, the further from reality their views of themselves seem, but the freer they feel to ignore those who want them to match a different view of “being normal.”

Living it Up on the Edge of Death

In addition to corruption and nobility, truths and lies, and fakeness and reality, Xdinary Heroes gleefully dance on another tightrope between seemingly opposite concepts: life and death. They constantly taunt death and treat it as not actually guaranteed. Their tone is disarmingly upbeat in songs like “Ghost” and one of defiance mixed with callousness in songs like “Happy Death Day” (in which they frame a birthday as just a celebration of being one year closer to death!) and “Hair Cut” (which has a music video set in a spooky theme park, establishing an atmosphere of dangerous thrills lurking around every corner). And in “Beautiful Life,” a bright piano accompanies their line about getting to use their “song of love” to “haunt you forever”!

While making a mockery of death, they treat life as something that can be done over as simply as restarting a game level. They throw caution to the wind and feel invincible (giving more meaning to the Beautiful Mind song title “Supernatural”). What makes them feel the most alive are the things that most strongly suggest an imminent downfall. Their mindset is essentially, “The higher the risk, the higher the reward, and the more worthwhile and exciting the rebirth.” They say “So what?!” to reminders that death has to come before a rebirth, laughing at those who think that will scare and stop them! This is evident in “Beautiful Life,” both when they act born anew once their old selves dissipate and when they wield a fire extinguisher against their enemies. They are the only ones with the power to extinguish their own flames, a thought as emboldening as it is dangerous.

Several B-aides on Beautiful Mind indulge in the pain of a death before the gain of a rebirth. In “George the Lobster,” they liken molting to being reborn, saying not just that it is their time to “shed another layer,” but that not molting would be worse than death:

“Even the dizzying risk of death, I don’t mind it… Just risk it, no looking back.”

They go on to say:

“[T]he more I shatter, the stronger I become… I’m immortal, closer to death than ever.”

In “Diamond,” they describe the pressure required to make a diamond as another struggle worth enduring, even if they are “crushed” and “left to die”:

“Every doubt I felt / It buried me alive / They left me here to die… Emerging, out of all the lies / To step into the light.”

These new songs bring to mind the older song “Break the Brake,” which describes getting “close to Heaven” during a near-death experience.

Risks invigorate Xdinary Heroes, and, like their videos and songs dramatize, the bolder those risks get, the more alive they feel and the closer to death they seem! And death does not scare them anyway, because they “feel what’s real” is that they are immortal!

Conclusion

With morbid humor and a devilish demeanor, Xdinary Heroes tackle heavy topics in quirky and convoluted ways. Their rebellious video behavior and allusions to the afterlife, both then and now, serve a deeper purpose. They are constantly challenging the audience to reassess and redefine labels, encouraging coloring outside the lines by example, and treating the dangers of living out of those lines as actually the reasons to do so. Fears and doubts that loom large over “ordinary people” are inferior playthings in the minds of these “eXtraordinary” ones! They are as unstoppable as they believe they are. Their lives are what they make of them, and they make them subversive spectacles!

More Thoughts on Beautiful Mind

As strong as Xdinary Heroes’ thematic continuity is, it is also worth taking a moment to appreciate the new album on its own.

Beautiful Mind is a stellar addition to the band’s discography. From glitches to the uses of reverb to sound effects including alarms and a ticking clock, the songs match their ambitious and layered contexts with experimental choices and attention to detail. Each song is one-of-a-kind and defiant in sound and lyrics alike.

The tracklist order is also excellent. They start with “FIGHT ME,” and like their action-packed music videos, it is climactic from the get-go! They close with another rousing one, “BBB (Bitter But Better),” which celebrates having “the real thing,” a fitting nod to the reality-making about which their music explores (In yet another example of their compulsion to redefine things, the “BBB” stands for something else on a flier in the Troubleshooting short film: “BEAT,” “BLISS,” and “BONFIRE.”)

The best percussion is in “Diamond” and best guitar-playing is in “George the Lobster,” but if one could only listen to one song from Beautiful Mind, it would need to be “Beautiful Life.” The structure is downright grand when compared to the current wave of under-three-minute singles. It is refreshingly unrushed, building up to and coming down from its dramatic moments in a way that allows for maximum impact. Its twists and turns keep listeners on their toes and, ideally, remind them how important the bridge is! “Beautiful Life” takes listeners on a journey, with moments of light and darkness, fierceness and frivolity, and a host of other contrasts, which is perfect for a group whose narrative foundation is built on juxtapositions.

Check out previous writing about Xdinary Heroes here, check out other deep-dive essays here, and read about more of the best new music here!