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ladybusiness2020 is almost half over even though it feels like time stopped in late February. This year could be defined by a lot of things: the ongoing pandemic, the brutal racial inequities exposed by said pandemic, extrajudicial murders by police, and the failure of many governments to respond. It could also be the presidential candidate I chose to invest my time in getting shut out after Super Tuesday and withdrawing from the field, leaving me and a lot of my fellow activists demoralized and uncertain about our place. On the other, more positive hand, it might be The Untamed, which I discovered and mainlined in a week and still have no regrets about because it and the fans making the fandom an exciting place to be gave me such joy. But I suspect what will define 2020 for me is music and one band in particular: 방탄소년단 (Bangtan Sonyeondan), otherwise known as BTS. You might have heard of them.
But first, I want to go back and talk about me and music. My relationship with music is strange and fragmented. Part of this is that my parents didn't push their own music on me, let me develop my own tastes, and never barred me from anything. I watched how heavily the music choices my friends made were policed by their parents; I got very lucky because mine never were. For example, did my Very White mother purchase Gangsta's Paradise for me? Yes, she touched the actual physical CD with its EXPLICIT marker that she had to purchase from the store because I was too young (also too young to understand most of the album...bless my heart). Was she very confused? Absolutely. Did she take it away once she heard it? Nope!
My musical experiences were all over the place due to parental freedom to engage with art. If I had to represent my life experience with music in three songs it would begin with Stay by Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs, take a sharp turn into TLC's Waterfalls with some country music playing in the distance as you rounded the corner, and then end with The Fortress at Sea Level by Model.Fragment, which doesn't seem to exist anywhere except on my hard drive and in this Final Fantasy VIII fanvid, albeit in edited form (the vid is still quality).
Although I didn't listen to full albums growing up I was lucky to be around a variety of adults that had dramatically different music tastes, from country and jazz to rock and classical. Unlike me, most of them gave their favorite music preferential treatment. I spent my time as a baby music fan finding songs that I liked through those adults. I tucked them away on cassette tapes and CDs; different genres and styles all crammed together on one medium with no cohesion or narrative. When I acquired albums after I started buying music on my own it would only be for the few songs I was interested in. I pulled them off the tape/CD and put them into my collection of mismatched cassette tapes and rainbow-colored blank CDs, with no track list for anything in sight.
Once, a babysitter who preferred INXS and Warrant listened to one of my many mixtapes. The faces she made might have made me question my choices and conform to her music aesthetic had I been less opinionated about my preferences as a pre-teen who was also an only child. Joke's on her for mocking me back then: I still have multiple INXS songs from her collection in my rotation and some of the songs from that long ago mix.
The end of high school and the beginning of college changed my experience of music, because I met a friend who had a fascinating approach to new albums. He appreciated albums as a concept, not just as a mode of delivery for a few favorite songs. He would get a new album, play the whole thing through, and listen quietly while doing nothing else. I had never done anything like this before; it had never occurred to me because of course I couldn't only listen to music; that wasn't productive. Music was secondary to other activities. After joining him for the first album he listened to I created my own routine: the same, but with an added bit of darkness. I turned off the lights.
Music sounds different in the dark. It's richer and more present. It's impossible to be "productive" in the dark so I'm locked in to paying attention. The way I emotionally connected with music changed when I listened to songs in their context, too. I would connect with single songs but nothing else because I wasn't giving myself the mental space to treat music like any other piece of art that could be enjoyed within its context. The music I loved had something to say within that context that was worth hearing. I knew albums told stories or had themes in theory, but I never thought that was relevant to me; I wasn't a musician. We talk a lot about how some fandoms will invite you in and stoke your curiosity, and luckily for me that's what my friend did. He taught me how to understand and care for albums in a way that I hadn't before.
After this quiet revelation I spent time with artists who I had liked before, in passing, but had never really invested in properly. I opened my CD case up and went through everything, put on some headphones, turned off the lights, and listened for weeks and weeks during one long summer. I learned a lot about myself and my music choices, from Spice Girls to Boyz II Men, from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Missy Elliott, from Jon Secada to Dwight Yoakam. This technique helped me, because I pretty much know after one cycle through an album if that album is going to be sticky for me and how sticky it will be. Not every piece of music is for everyone or needs to be, after all. Sometimes only a few songs are and I'm back to my old habit of collecting pieces of an album and hoarding them like sparkling jewels. I have a lot more fondness for those single songs from albums that don't leave much of an impression or that I don't quite understand—they mean more to me in a complicated way I haven't figured out how to express.
I'm not picky with my music because I'll listen to anything once, but I am picky with my time. That translated to falling away from most music other than radio play while I finished college and tried to recover from the crisis of having feelings under capitalism, which was a multi-year process. The albums I've purchased the last few years have included Janelle Monáe, Janelle Monáe, and also Janelle Monáe, and truly, no one would blame me for this blatant favoritism. This is why I cannot be faulted for the fact that I missed most of the K-pop explosion until my local rural Arkansas radio station played a perfect song in Korean during go home traffic like it was normal, leading me immediately to Twitter to go, "AMERICA, EXPLAIN!!!!"
My descent into the BTS discography was less of a slide and more of a giant belly flop that I still haven't recovered from. When a friend asked me to explain why I fell so hard so quickly, everything was too new for me to have a good answer. But now I've been here a few months, I've gone through exactly one comeback, lived through the surprise Black Swan MV drop, and listened to five albums alone in the dark with headphones, as is my Custom. I've disliked...nothing.
My system broke down, because songs I accepted I would like but not have deeper feelings for after my first listen later came up to slap me across the face and go, "YOU THOUGHT!". Even the songs with gunshots. As I told Jenny when she graciously allowed me to bend her ear about BTS on her podcast recently, it's hilarious that a gun violence survivor is all, "yep, my current favorite band is a group whose name means Bulletproof Boy Scouts and also they use gunshot noises in their music! This is fine!!!"
My fondness for BTS is rooted in that they somehow managed to ram me in the feelings the same way that hip hop, pop, synthwave, and Final Fantasy Piano Collections do, except BTS manages to light up all those areas of my brain at the same time. Go hard, but soothe the impact with a message. Keep it soft, but use music that carves your emotions up like soft clay. Feel some nostalgia, both heartwarming and bittersweet. Have a dynamic, complicated sound, but don't let it overshadow the vocals. Do all of these things, but simultaneously. I keep chasing that feeling until I hit three digits on listen counts for particular songs, which means falling further and further down the rabbit hole of their discography to find new songs that make me feel like my chest will explode from feelings. I'll eventually find the bottom—at least music wise, because forget trying to do it with their ancillary content because it's endless—and I'm curious if the trend will continue.
I've fallen this fast and hard before with authors and their backlists—Kate Elliott and N.K. Jemisin, to name two—but I've never done it with a band. It's a new experience, especially with the language barrier. That's slightly less of an issue given that it's not the words that attract me; I can always look up translations to get a sense of meaning (fans are doing amazing translation work for free, proving again that fandom is an awesome place). It's the moods that BTS creates that spark something in me: a mixture of their music, the cadence of their language with its vastly different consonants and vowels, and the way they shape their sounds. It's a very weird and addicting feeling after being away from music for so long in any dedicated way.
I'm not the right person to explain BTS as a group; they're massive and the fandom even bigger. There are plenty of fans who have spent hours doing that work already, too. My pal Jess did a short explainer thread for me on Twitter and then I read this primer by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
adoremouse and watched this video, and that got me 10% of the way to understanding how important BTS is and the context of their place in the various music industries, which I find very complicated and inaccessible as an outsider.
I wouldn't be me if I didn't bring recommendations. If I ever talk about something and don't offer recs, it's not me! It's a spy.
Boy With Luv
The song that started me on this journey by showing up on rural Arkansas radio was Boy With Luv (featuring Halsey). There's context I'm missing because I haven't listened to all their earlier albums, but they're in conversation with their older work in ways that benefit from the experience of that work. I haven't gotten there yet. It's okay, because this song is pure happiness taken and molded into an absolutely perfect pop song that features silky smooth rap sections. This is the song where I fell in love with the rap line (as opposed to the members who largely do vocals, who I fell in love with later). This doesn't surprise me, looking back: my preference for rap and hip hop is not subtle and has been one of my constants since I was very small (thank you, Simply Mad About the Mouse).
Outro: Ego
Jess described Jung Hoseok as follows: "will destroy your life if you're not prepared." After listening to many parts of his songs and some of his solo work, I have come to the conclusion that this assessment is Correct. There's something about the inflection to his verses—he takes up vocal space with his voice in a fascinating way. Every morning when I get up Outro: Ego is the song I get ready with, because I never fail to finish it feeling happy and upbeat.
Mikrokosmos
I love Mikrokosmos because it's buoyant and fun and the vocal line eats it up in the best way, but also because it explores a concept that I've been considering for years, starting with Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door all the way up to John Green's exploration of the personhood. Green used a line once about imagining people complexly, and I've always been very fond of the sentiment. We're all tiny, fragile universes, infinite and expanding inside our tiny, meaty bodies as we age, hurtling through our own universe on a rock at speeds we can't even feel. And yet, we're all important. I like that message no matter where I find it, because it took me so long to feel that way about myself.
MIC Drop
Hello, yes? I would like to report my own murder. This is MIC Drop (Steve Aoki Remix). This song makes me feel like Succession of Witches exploded into Cosmic Castaway and came through the other side in an explosion tailor made for me, specifically. It also features the rap line heavily, and the unreal ability of these men to do incredibly hard dancing. I get tired and energized just watching it. It makes me want to do squats. I want their hip flexors. I want their resting heart rates. Damn.
Magic Shop
I'm sad there doesn't seem to be a music video for Magic Shop. I have suspicions it would be beautiful, because the song definitely is. The vocal line is so good here, too (Jimin is an angel). I don't have much to say about it; it makes me really happy and the way some of the rap parts hit make my heart hurt, but in the best way. This song is meant for BTS fans for when they need to be comforted, according to their lead vocalist, Jungkook. It's a really kind sentiment.
One of my favorite things about art is that it can mean different things to different people depending on what we bring to it. I come to music as an adult having been thrust into a world with no preferences where one parent preferred jazz and the other preferred 1940s and 1950s country and they met in the middle with bluegrass when they made an effort. That early exposure to the raw sounds from acoustic strings made a very strong impression. There's a reason my favorite instrument is a piano and also why I like synthesized sounds that are a bit discordant but when combined make a fascinating whole. See also: dubstep.
I love that as an adult I can come to a band whose music I really connect with that has a deep history and an expansive backlog and I can sink into their work. It's the same with a long, involved book series: the excitement of picking up the next book and the next, the thrill of discovery, the revelation of community as people find out you're going on a journey they went on, too, and they're excited for you. It's the same with music.
Art is excellent, art creates fans, and fans create fandom, so it's no surprise I found a home here. Fandom, after all, is a place where I grew up, listened, learned, and became a version of myself that I love. Art changes the world one person at a time. I'm excited to see how this art changes me and the person I'll be when I come out the other side of BTS's discography, too.
But first, I want to go back and talk about me and music. My relationship with music is strange and fragmented. Part of this is that my parents didn't push their own music on me, let me develop my own tastes, and never barred me from anything. I watched how heavily the music choices my friends made were policed by their parents; I got very lucky because mine never were. For example, did my Very White mother purchase Gangsta's Paradise for me? Yes, she touched the actual physical CD with its EXPLICIT marker that she had to purchase from the store because I was too young (also too young to understand most of the album...bless my heart). Was she very confused? Absolutely. Did she take it away once she heard it? Nope!
My musical experiences were all over the place due to parental freedom to engage with art. If I had to represent my life experience with music in three songs it would begin with Stay by Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs, take a sharp turn into TLC's Waterfalls with some country music playing in the distance as you rounded the corner, and then end with The Fortress at Sea Level by Model.Fragment, which doesn't seem to exist anywhere except on my hard drive and in this Final Fantasy VIII fanvid, albeit in edited form (the vid is still quality).
Although I didn't listen to full albums growing up I was lucky to be around a variety of adults that had dramatically different music tastes, from country and jazz to rock and classical. Unlike me, most of them gave their favorite music preferential treatment. I spent my time as a baby music fan finding songs that I liked through those adults. I tucked them away on cassette tapes and CDs; different genres and styles all crammed together on one medium with no cohesion or narrative. When I acquired albums after I started buying music on my own it would only be for the few songs I was interested in. I pulled them off the tape/CD and put them into my collection of mismatched cassette tapes and rainbow-colored blank CDs, with no track list for anything in sight.
Once, a babysitter who preferred INXS and Warrant listened to one of my many mixtapes. The faces she made might have made me question my choices and conform to her music aesthetic had I been less opinionated about my preferences as a pre-teen who was also an only child. Joke's on her for mocking me back then: I still have multiple INXS songs from her collection in my rotation and some of the songs from that long ago mix.
The end of high school and the beginning of college changed my experience of music, because I met a friend who had a fascinating approach to new albums. He appreciated albums as a concept, not just as a mode of delivery for a few favorite songs. He would get a new album, play the whole thing through, and listen quietly while doing nothing else. I had never done anything like this before; it had never occurred to me because of course I couldn't only listen to music; that wasn't productive. Music was secondary to other activities. After joining him for the first album he listened to I created my own routine: the same, but with an added bit of darkness. I turned off the lights.
Music sounds different in the dark. It's richer and more present. It's impossible to be "productive" in the dark so I'm locked in to paying attention. The way I emotionally connected with music changed when I listened to songs in their context, too. I would connect with single songs but nothing else because I wasn't giving myself the mental space to treat music like any other piece of art that could be enjoyed within its context. The music I loved had something to say within that context that was worth hearing. I knew albums told stories or had themes in theory, but I never thought that was relevant to me; I wasn't a musician. We talk a lot about how some fandoms will invite you in and stoke your curiosity, and luckily for me that's what my friend did. He taught me how to understand and care for albums in a way that I hadn't before.
After this quiet revelation I spent time with artists who I had liked before, in passing, but had never really invested in properly. I opened my CD case up and went through everything, put on some headphones, turned off the lights, and listened for weeks and weeks during one long summer. I learned a lot about myself and my music choices, from Spice Girls to Boyz II Men, from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Missy Elliott, from Jon Secada to Dwight Yoakam. This technique helped me, because I pretty much know after one cycle through an album if that album is going to be sticky for me and how sticky it will be. Not every piece of music is for everyone or needs to be, after all. Sometimes only a few songs are and I'm back to my old habit of collecting pieces of an album and hoarding them like sparkling jewels. I have a lot more fondness for those single songs from albums that don't leave much of an impression or that I don't quite understand—they mean more to me in a complicated way I haven't figured out how to express.
The Descent
I'm not picky with my music because I'll listen to anything once, but I am picky with my time. That translated to falling away from most music other than radio play while I finished college and tried to recover from the crisis of having feelings under capitalism, which was a multi-year process. The albums I've purchased the last few years have included Janelle Monáe, Janelle Monáe, and also Janelle Monáe, and truly, no one would blame me for this blatant favoritism. This is why I cannot be faulted for the fact that I missed most of the K-pop explosion until my local rural Arkansas radio station played a perfect song in Korean during go home traffic like it was normal, leading me immediately to Twitter to go, "AMERICA, EXPLAIN!!!!"
My descent into the BTS discography was less of a slide and more of a giant belly flop that I still haven't recovered from. When a friend asked me to explain why I fell so hard so quickly, everything was too new for me to have a good answer. But now I've been here a few months, I've gone through exactly one comeback, lived through the surprise Black Swan MV drop, and listened to five albums alone in the dark with headphones, as is my Custom. I've disliked...nothing.
My system broke down, because songs I accepted I would like but not have deeper feelings for after my first listen later came up to slap me across the face and go, "YOU THOUGHT!". Even the songs with gunshots. As I told Jenny when she graciously allowed me to bend her ear about BTS on her podcast recently, it's hilarious that a gun violence survivor is all, "yep, my current favorite band is a group whose name means Bulletproof Boy Scouts and also they use gunshot noises in their music! This is fine!!!"
My fondness for BTS is rooted in that they somehow managed to ram me in the feelings the same way that hip hop, pop, synthwave, and Final Fantasy Piano Collections do, except BTS manages to light up all those areas of my brain at the same time. Go hard, but soothe the impact with a message. Keep it soft, but use music that carves your emotions up like soft clay. Feel some nostalgia, both heartwarming and bittersweet. Have a dynamic, complicated sound, but don't let it overshadow the vocals. Do all of these things, but simultaneously. I keep chasing that feeling until I hit three digits on listen counts for particular songs, which means falling further and further down the rabbit hole of their discography to find new songs that make me feel like my chest will explode from feelings. I'll eventually find the bottom—at least music wise, because forget trying to do it with their ancillary content because it's endless—and I'm curious if the trend will continue.
I've fallen this fast and hard before with authors and their backlists—Kate Elliott and N.K. Jemisin, to name two—but I've never done it with a band. It's a new experience, especially with the language barrier. That's slightly less of an issue given that it's not the words that attract me; I can always look up translations to get a sense of meaning (fans are doing amazing translation work for free, proving again that fandom is an awesome place). It's the moods that BTS creates that spark something in me: a mixture of their music, the cadence of their language with its vastly different consonants and vowels, and the way they shape their sounds. It's a very weird and addicting feeling after being away from music for so long in any dedicated way.
I'm not the right person to explain BTS as a group; they're massive and the fandom even bigger. There are plenty of fans who have spent hours doing that work already, too. My pal Jess did a short explainer thread for me on Twitter and then I read this primer by
Listen
I wouldn't be me if I didn't bring recommendations. If I ever talk about something and don't offer recs, it's not me! It's a spy.
Boy With Luv
The song that started me on this journey by showing up on rural Arkansas radio was Boy With Luv (featuring Halsey). There's context I'm missing because I haven't listened to all their earlier albums, but they're in conversation with their older work in ways that benefit from the experience of that work. I haven't gotten there yet. It's okay, because this song is pure happiness taken and molded into an absolutely perfect pop song that features silky smooth rap sections. This is the song where I fell in love with the rap line (as opposed to the members who largely do vocals, who I fell in love with later). This doesn't surprise me, looking back: my preference for rap and hip hop is not subtle and has been one of my constants since I was very small (thank you, Simply Mad About the Mouse).
Outro: Ego
Jess described Jung Hoseok as follows: "will destroy your life if you're not prepared." After listening to many parts of his songs and some of his solo work, I have come to the conclusion that this assessment is Correct. There's something about the inflection to his verses—he takes up vocal space with his voice in a fascinating way. Every morning when I get up Outro: Ego is the song I get ready with, because I never fail to finish it feeling happy and upbeat.
Mikrokosmos
I love Mikrokosmos because it's buoyant and fun and the vocal line eats it up in the best way, but also because it explores a concept that I've been considering for years, starting with Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door all the way up to John Green's exploration of the personhood. Green used a line once about imagining people complexly, and I've always been very fond of the sentiment. We're all tiny, fragile universes, infinite and expanding inside our tiny, meaty bodies as we age, hurtling through our own universe on a rock at speeds we can't even feel. And yet, we're all important. I like that message no matter where I find it, because it took me so long to feel that way about myself.
MIC Drop
Hello, yes? I would like to report my own murder. This is MIC Drop (Steve Aoki Remix). This song makes me feel like Succession of Witches exploded into Cosmic Castaway and came through the other side in an explosion tailor made for me, specifically. It also features the rap line heavily, and the unreal ability of these men to do incredibly hard dancing. I get tired and energized just watching it. It makes me want to do squats. I want their hip flexors. I want their resting heart rates. Damn.
Magic Shop
I'm sad there doesn't seem to be a music video for Magic Shop. I have suspicions it would be beautiful, because the song definitely is. The vocal line is so good here, too (Jimin is an angel). I don't have much to say about it; it makes me really happy and the way some of the rap parts hit make my heart hurt, but in the best way. This song is meant for BTS fans for when they need to be comforted, according to their lead vocalist, Jungkook. It's a really kind sentiment.
Conclusion: Subjectivity
One of my favorite things about art is that it can mean different things to different people depending on what we bring to it. I come to music as an adult having been thrust into a world with no preferences where one parent preferred jazz and the other preferred 1940s and 1950s country and they met in the middle with bluegrass when they made an effort. That early exposure to the raw sounds from acoustic strings made a very strong impression. There's a reason my favorite instrument is a piano and also why I like synthesized sounds that are a bit discordant but when combined make a fascinating whole. See also: dubstep.
I love that as an adult I can come to a band whose music I really connect with that has a deep history and an expansive backlog and I can sink into their work. It's the same with a long, involved book series: the excitement of picking up the next book and the next, the thrill of discovery, the revelation of community as people find out you're going on a journey they went on, too, and they're excited for you. It's the same with music.
Art is excellent, art creates fans, and fans create fandom, so it's no surprise I found a home here. Fandom, after all, is a place where I grew up, listened, learned, and became a version of myself that I love. Art changes the world one person at a time. I'm excited to see how this art changes me and the person I'll be when I come out the other side of BTS's discography, too.
Support Black lives and culture: Black Lives Matter, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, The Marshall Project, The Carl Brandon Society, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, ColorOfChange, & bail funds.
