#47 - My Year With BTS

Oh nooooo this is going to be so earnest I am already feeling my palms getting weirdly sweaty, ugh. Let’s get it!

So, last year, I watched the Butter music video like three days after it came out and it changed my life and I wish I was kidding but those three minutes have altered the trajectory of literally every day of my existence since I consumed them. I’m fully serious. I have listened to a song, watched a music video, or dance practice (or ten), an episode of their variety show—or an entire season of them going to the woods and fucking around in various mansions, their documentaries (shoutout to Dailymotion, couldn’t have done it without you!), them reacting to their documentaries and providing commentary—my all-time favorite bonus feature! Like, I write my six morning pages to this Study With Me video (I only use the last section with the rainfall) every. single. day.

(The ASMR thing started because I was genuinely unable to put my phone down for a few weeks because the compulsion to look up something BTS-related was so strong. There was just so much out there to learn and I love to feel like I know everything and with BTS you gotta wade through like three layers of surface information (that is mostly reductive and weird fandom canon, like the idea that V was raised by farmers) to get to the good shit and once I found it and started having opinions it was over. So anyway, I would put on this video and fill my entire screen with it because then when I was tempted to use my phone or computer, I would see them and get my fix and remember to get through the task, and now I love writing to the sound of rain so even though I’m (mostly) through the truly what I can best describe as ~active addiction feelings around the band but now I’ve integrated them so heavily into the ritual that I won’t be breaking it any time soon.) (Also, yes, I did get really into the bag that Jimin has on his desk in the vid, and it’s a Saint Laurent canvas duffle, and I will truly never spend over $1000 on a canvas bag but fuuuuuuck that buckle hardware is SO GOOD and I love the double strap a whole lot. Jimin has excellent taste in bags. Yoongi is probably my second favorite bag collection out of all of them? The Birkin he took to the airport when they came to visit Biden recently was hilariously large and I didn’t even know they made them that big and I will always be a Kelly > Birkin kinda gal but WOW what a choice, what a carry. Anyway I will stalk Jimin’s bag on TheRealReal forever but unfortunately for me, Saint Laurent is like the one luxury brand besides maybe Hermès and Chanel whose bags really retain their value even on the resale market.) (Also don’t buy Chanel bags, holy shit what a racquet, what a steep decline in quality.) (Could this entire piece have been just a collection of my favorite bags they own? Yes. Easily. Holy shit I want a full closet tour from each of them SO bad you have no idea.)

And it goes beyond content and consumption and also gets into woowoo I’ve become happier through frameworks with which they presented meeee. I am so not one for ~inspirational quotes, but this part of Yoongi’s interview in GQ hit me right in the gut when I read it and has stuck with me since.

Dreams keep changing, don’t they? Who I was six months ago is so different from who I am now, and I’ll be different again in six months’ time.

It was December when it came out, I was still in this very weird limbo in my life where I felt like I was getting over who I had been and was moving into a new chapter but I had no real major wants or desires for myself and that was a drifty feeling that my anxiety latched onto HARD and I became afraid of “losing” myself without having a clear path forward into the future. But the six-month thing really really hit home.

I’ve been using it as a metric ever since. The person who I was in July of 2021 would not recognize the person I was in December, and certainly not who I am today (and not just because this version of me knows where her fucking waist is when it comes to putting together an outfit). I think the key shift in mindset was that I became excited to discover who I was. And I did so with the soundtrack of BTS and August D in the background because anytime I have a low moment, I can just listen to Idol and have Jimin yell “you can’t stop me loving myself” directly into my earholes. And lemme tell ya, that really works! (And when I need to vibe in/through that low moment I put on People, one of my favorite songs of all time.)

Music is healing and human. I love that all cultures, no matter what, make music and sing and dance and clap to beats and rhythms and feel the urge to move their bodies along with it. (I love that we also manage to constantly create alcohol and scrounge for psychedelics and chew on leaves that make our brains go whiiiirrr no matter where we were in the world/in history. Humans are fucking hilarious, we are truly here for a good time and sharing it with others! Eat, dance, be merry!)

I love pop culture in general (obvs) but I don’t know that I’ve ever loved a specific piece of pop culture so much and with such a singular focus for so long. BTS looms so large in my content landscape in ways I never would have imagined when I was first memorizing who was who. Like, this morning I watched their vLive on the M train on the way back from getting my IUD ripped out (also sidenote, if you can/want to donate to Planned Parenthood, please do!). I abhor notifications and popups on my phone. The only two apps that have them enabled is iMessage and the vlive app. End of list.

It’s been a year, the novelty should have worn off by now! I can quickly identify if there’s new content out because I will glimpse an outfit on Twitter and go “I haven’t seen that before” and I am correct. It is frightening even to myself that I can clock a new bucket hat in milliseconds. I was able to identify RM by his calves in an insta photo today. Not normal!!

And a big part of the appeal is the talent, particularly: the dance. (Ironic that the new music video is the first one without choreo anywayyyy.) I love watching dancers break down their choreography, I love learning the choreography (Mic Drop 4ever, it’s so fun but I also want to die after one chorus truly cannot comprehend how they sing through it), I love that performance is such a key part of the overall package. Also, never let anyone say that Jin and RM are not incredible dancers, it truly breaks my heart that it’s become like a ~truth out there in some way and it’s just flat wrong? They dance their asses off and manage to blend in with some of the best dancers I’ve ever seen and their choreo is stupidly hard! There’s a Run BTS episode where they have to guess the dances by watching a random staff imitate their choreo and Jin gets most of the answers right away because he has to try harder than the rest of them to memorize and learn and he does it so well Jin deserves recognition and respect!

Could I make myself cry if I think about any of the members too long? Mmm yeah, probably. Jimin will absolutely make me cry the fastest/hardest but that’s my own shit, clearly. I just think they’ve had to deal with a lot while being some of the most public figures in history and that’s really fucking wild. What I would give to hear them talk candidly about fame and saesangs and all of the things no one could have predicted/prepared them for. Imagine trying to get a job as a musician and ending up a diplomat. Like, that wasn’t part of the plan!

I think it’s incredible to watch their fandom at work, the organization and community building of ARMY should literally be studied, they are incredibly effective and efficient at what they do and they really do it from a pure place of love and affection. This is their favorite band and they just want to let you know about it because it’s done so much for them and they want you to be able to experience that too! I have witnessed friendships develop in real-time in the fandom space and yeah sure, there are toxic people in the fandom, of fucking course there is there are like a billion people in there! The shipping stuff gets real weird real quick! (We are very much overdue for a cultural reckoning around Real People Fanfiction and the boundaries being violated by shipping real people!! One word: Larries!) But there is so much to be said about the connective power of music and art and making boyfriend edits of the members, apparently. (Their Coway ads are filmed as if they’re waking up next to you in bed that company knows what they’re doing.) There is shared healing happening as well and the music is a great vehicle for those discussions and allow for deep bonds to form quickly because it’s a shared experience.

I think it’s also really incredible how seriously the band takes their fans and it is a real symbiotic relationship and yes the parasocial is obviously exploited but I think the bonds within ARMY itself are just straight social and are really worthy of admiration. I think it’s so cute that in lines at concerts people just give out and trade merch with each other, and they all hype each other’s outfits and get to share this thing that really does take up so much space in their lives.

It’s been a really fun year as far as finding BTS and integrating them into my life in ways I never would have expected. I definitely got back into silver jewelry thanks to them and now I have a bunch of bracelets I wear every day and I wish it was like…not a BTS thing but it’s totally a BTS thing and I don’t know that I’ve ever even admitted that to myself but here we are writing it down! Anyway, it’s culminated in me dropping a cool $65 on an anthology album when I don’t even have a cd player and now must acquire one because I need the Seesaw demo in my life?? And it’s definitely not the best use of that $65 but in terms of spend-to-joy ratio, it’s probably the most effective.

Anyway, I’d recommend checking out the music if you’ve never listened! I don’t think they’re for everybody but the rap line is so fucking good and therefore I consider them approachable and idk let me know if you want specific recs but I promise there are more playlists for BTS out in the universe than any other band because streaming goals are a thing and ARMY really does just want to cultivate and share as far and wide as they can and the bands been around for 9 years so they’ve covered many a genre.

I’ll end it here because it’s already sappy and I am already deeply uuuh eeked by just how much I’ve admitted in this but idk, it’s nice to acknowledge and share my little slice of this phenomenon! And I think that being unapologetically optimistic while acknowledging the things that need to be improved politically has been like actually BTS’s mission the entire time they’ve been a band and I think their popularity speaks to the sincerity of their messages and the fact that we don’t have a lot of unironically positive pop culture that also speaks directly to daily injustices we all face and I just think it’s neat! There’s a reason they’re able to break through language and cultural barriers on every continent!!

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