Award shows deliver spectacle by design, such as dresses, jokes, tension, applause. But every so often, someone steps up to the microphone and gives us something real.
That happened when K-Pop Demon Hunters and its original track Golden earned the Golden Globe, with artist and writer EJAE of the movie’s musical group HUNTRIX, at the center of a win that felt less like a victory lap and more like a reclamation.
What stunned wasn’t just the recognition but the sincerity.
EJAE didn’t use her speech to self-polish; she shared the unglamorous part. She spoke about being told “no” for years, working toward a dream that didn’t materialize in the way she first imagined, and grieving the version of herself who once thought singing would be the only path.
Instead, storytelling, world-building, and writing opened a different door, and that door led her right back to the music she thought she’d lost. There’s something poetic in that full-circle moment: the voice returned, but on her terms.
That spirit pulses through K-Pop Demon Hunters. Beneath the slick visuals and supernatural humor is a character, and a film, that quietly insists on agency, identity, and understanding your self-worth.
Golden feels like an extension of that narrative: a song born from the private work of believing in yourself again, even after the world insists you shouldn’t.
Listening to her speech, I found myself unexpectedly emotional. As a writer and educator juggling multiple creative identities, I know what it’s like to have a dream reroute, and to love something deeply, hit resistance, and wonder if the universe is nudging you toward a different expression of the same passion.
It was important for me to see that the dream was never gone; it was evolving. It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn repeatedly and hearing it on a stage like that made me feel less alone in the process, and I’m sure many others felt the same.
And maybe that’s why this win mattered beyond headlines.
It reminds artists, perfectionists, late bloomers, and anyone who’s ever whispered “maybe it’s too late” to themselves, that the story isn’t over until you decide it is.
Rejection isn’t failure, but sometimes it is a push for you to growth and realize where you are meant to be.
Awards matter in the industry. But speeches like EJAE’s matter in the world. And it’s because they remind us that we’re allowed to start over, reroute, and grow more than once, even if it's once for survival, and once for the joy that stems from hard work.
And that believing in yourself and making your dreams happen when others might have pushed you down and made you feel like less than is the best lesson of all.
