What is Jisoo actually singing on Addicted?

Jisoo in her latest MV for Addicted

In K-pop, singing in your native tongue is either an artistic choice or a desperate survival move. Enter Jisoo, operating entirely on vibes, awkward stiffness, and a language strategy known only to heaven and her production team. She has just released her second single after Click from a yet-to-be-named upcoming full-length album. This time, the song is given a far more ambitious, three-syllable title: Addicted. Widely noted for possessing the least English fluency within the Blackpink lineup, the move from a single Click to a trisyllable in one release cycle represents a staggering leap in lexical courage. The hook intro had our ears pricked up. We are suppose to hear “I’m so addicted”, but it came out with only two syllables intact. She half-sang, half-chanted those words in quick succession. We were shocked: was Jisoo singing about fellatio?

We were listening to the song for the first time on Spotify. But we had to turn to YouTube to watch the MV so that we could turn the close captioning on. To be sure, we were not hunting for an innuendo. We needed the high-contrast text at the bottom of the screen because the signal and the lyric no longer matched closely enough for us to trust our ears. Even the close caption confirmed it, twice: “Dict”. It can’t possibly be the lyrics. Our brain was trying to resolve the contradiction. If she were indeed chanting about a “dict”, her opening line—“Every kiss”—suddenly took on a far more terrifying, literal gravity. We listened on, surviving the inane words, and arrived at the chorus, and thankfully, the captions read: “You got me so addicted/Got me so addicted/Got me so addicted to you”. But caption clarity is not vocal truth.

With YouTube closed captioning on

We turned to our Sennheiser 650, fully aware, of course, that these headphones are not some hyper-clinical stethoscope, but we like ours because of its natural midrange reproduction. Vocals usually come through very clearly on it. On Addicted, our eardrums picked an unmistakable “you got me so dict dict”. The surrounding syllables lost prominence. So our ears latched onto the strongest acoustic event in the phrase. The word ceases to arrive as ‘addicted‘. It persists as dict. By the second pass of the chorus, “so” becomes the sound of the word that suggests drawing something into the mouth. Pair that very closely to “dict”, going deeper is not necessary. It is only one word, but the others around it are so simplistic—“I’m so addicted/You got me so addicted”—it is forced to lug the entire chorus across the finish line like a buffalo pulling a broken cart.

Glossing over syllables is worse than our fellow countrymen’s penchant for dropping auxiliary verbs. But at least “I addicted to you” is understandable because the meaning survives intact. When what we can discern is mostly “dict”, the whole chorus, if not the song itself, becomes unstable. The lyrics are not only banal—“you’re so hot, I’m melting in my shoes”—but the title hook itself, chosen to compensate for that banality, is also the most acoustically compromised. A strong hook usually produces an involuntary response: you hum along. You can hear it through the supermarket PA, a speeding-past GrabFood rider, one surviving earbud, and still know what the singer is saying and what part you’re supposed to join. But with Addicted, we ended up performing a phonetic audit on it, lest what we hear is attributed to a dirty mind. Jisoo defenders will undoubtedly dismiss our reaction as 夸张 (kuazhang)—dramatic, hyper-literal, and excessive. But the song practically invited it.

Screen shots: jisoo/YouTube