LOUD, identity, narrative voice, and queer art in K-pop
The narrative voice of song lyrics being indeterminate enough to resonate with experiences that aren't necessarily the writer's own is the default state of pop songwriting. LOUD has a strong queer reading because that resonance is strong there, but I do think there's even more to it.
The exclusive construction, that is, the construction rejecting all other interpretations, of the identity of the narrator of a song is actually pretty limited in means, practically speaking. Most songs would never announce "this song is from the point of view of me, the writer/singer," so this identity construction is usually only done in the text through direct description or reference to real characters and events. It can also be built through external means that aren't in the text at all: MVs, interviews, the writer/singer's known identity, genre conventions, songwriting and composition conventions, etc.
These paratextual means are pretty difficult to pin down in K-pop, where personas are tightly maintained and the idea of the narrative voice being the singer's, writer's, or composer's is tenuous when those roles are split among so many people, which makes a solo writing credit a unique and exciting opportunity for interpretation.
In the text of LOUD, the narrator ("I") and addressee ("you") are both left ungendered and undescribed, but notably, masculine and feminine gendered terms are deployed as a field of (gorgeous) people. Many pop songs, especially K-pop songs, due to the Korean language lacking grammatical gender, are entirely and effortlessly gender neutral, which makes this read like a deliberate choice. Of course, it seems like an obvious reading is that the narrator is explicitly bisexual.
However, I pretty much believe Lily's paratextual words in interviews and on Bubble when she says her lyrics on LOUD were both internally and externally inspired, and agree with them when she says the lyrics are broadly applicable to forbidden love. It's worth noting that means I'm taking her words as being offered freely and honestly, and not being a misdirection for safety or said under coercion.
It's technically possible I'm wrong about all of those, but I feel comfortable assuming they're true for our purposes today, and not too comfortable assuming the opposite. If wrong, there is a case where this interpretation isn't relevant, but it's one that's troublingly unprovable as a matter of the nature of the fan-idol-industry triangular relationship. Importantly, though, if true, it's also different from her words being exhaustive. They can be authentic words while still choosing not to divulge certain things about her experiences or identity.
For the queer experience to be deeply constitutive of the meaning of the song but not the exclusive reading of it, it must be the case that the subjects (narrator and addressee) of the lyrics do not necessarily need to be perceived as queer for the lyrics to be coherent. I argue this is true of LOUD in that it's using gendered terms to present "boys and girls" not as the singular preference of a specific subject, but that it is establishing "boys and girls" as a field that any subject would survey before discovering who they love, which is a structure that explicitly rejects the assumption of masculine-feminine coupling, rather than leaving that assumption alone to colour interpretations of the text.
This makes it a text still based on a rigidly binary gender structure, but one that explicitly rejects heteronormative readings while not explicitly rejecting heterosexual ones. Most pop songs, even with indeterminate subjects and/or a singular, explicitly gendered addressee, aren't structurally capable of the former in the way LOUD is under this interpretation.
Not only does the experience LOUD describes resonate with the queer community because it's so representative of theirs, I think it's actively creating interpretive room for queer readings, while allowing them to be co-present with other readings rather than those readings subverting each other when created. I interpret it as an act of queer art in that way despite its non-exclusivity.