Jakarta: Baffled light falls on Min Yoongi, 30-year-old rapper and music producer at Bangtan Sonyeondan, the world’s biggest musical act.
Limp on the shoulders of dancers, Yoongi is now on the floor. Dust rises in the pulsating light. Haunting string music teases from an unseen instrument. Trepidation floods the audience. Then the spotlight focuses and Yoongi is up, the audience is ablaze and he raps, “This song is the lifting of a ban, it is time to get on it, its rhythm is crowded but perhaps it is a different kind of lifting of a ban.”
The song is called ‘해금 (haegeum)’. The word doubles as a traditional Korean instrument and the easing of a suspension of a kind.
There is nothing much on stage except the rapper and an emphatic thrum. Smoke and dust greet the next verse which says, “Freedom to express whatever one wants, perhaps that becomes the reason for someone’s death.” The song hammers on forcefully, arrives at the ridiculous dangers of confusing freedom with self indulgence, slams the relentless flow of information that jams thoughts and the slavery to capitalism, YouTube and money that current existence has been reduced to.
You would think it was a smalltime rapper in an ill-known basement of his city, speaking to his devoted fanbase against life’s injustices. Not one-seventh of a global musical juggernaut.
Min Yoongi performs at the International Convention Exhibition hall in Jakarta, Indonesia, as part of his ‘D-Day’ tour. Photo: Instagram/agustd
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In the last five years of their decade-long existence, BTS has swept the world with their kindness, Koreanness and the beauty of their performances and expression. Their songs move millions, most of them women.
In India, BTS’s popularity is, humbly speaking, a behemoth, and transcends big city affection for foreign music. With a version of masculinity that is largely non-toxic and in sharp contrast to the routine male Bollywood hero, the band and its presence has been a lease of life to Indian women young and old. As something of a gateway to Korean culture, dramas and music, BTS have redefined what it means to have cultural power for South Korea and their popularity has put openly racist mores of arbitrating culture under the spotlight.
Comparisons to the Beatles do not do the band justice because they do not compose music and present themselves in a language that – through colonialism – is understood by most of the world. Instead, BTS has crafted for themselves a sweeping world order – as early as 2020, WSJ headlined their innovators’ issue cover, ‘Why BTS runs the world’.
No one knows the weight of this more than BTS themselves – its seven members Kim Namjoon, Kim Seokjin, Min Yoongi, Jung Hoseok, Park Jimin, Kim Taehyung, and Jeon Jungkook thus have a mandate that goes far beyond pop. While it is a fact cherished by fans that BTS have always been pop outliers it is still a startling fact – after unprecedented commercial success and numerous chart toppers – as to how much they still wish to use their position to burst through the pop shield.
From playing fast and easy with what is permissible within gender roles, their wanton use of pink, their avowed advocacy against racism (which took them to the White House) and against the issues that plague youth around the world (which took them to the UN multiple times), the band are nothing if not aware of their immense reach.
BTS members, from left Kim Namjoon, Min Yoongi, Kim Taehyung, Kim Seokjin, Jeon Jungkook, Park Jimin, and Jung Hoseok, at the White House with US President Joe Biden. Photo: Twitter/@bts_bighit
But if BTS are socially aware, their fans around the world, known as ARMY, one-up them as master crowdfunders and mobilisers. In India, during the height of the 2021 COVID wave, a BTS ARMY fanbase in the country handed over a little below Rs 22 lakh – most of it collected in just 12 hours – to three NGOs handling oxygen and ration kits. “Very rarely do we see public conversations about why BTS’ artistry has inspired a deliberate space for socially-conscious and restorative thought. The sensitivity with which BTS has tackled issues about youth, society and mental health in their music has created a space for meaningful conversation,” the members of the fanbase had told The Wire then.
The same group had released a memo against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which allowed people of all religions a chance at Indian citizenship, except Muslims. Rightwing social media participants – many of them also BTS fans – had slammed the move.
But while it is admirable to be socially there as famous people, BTS’s most significant footprint continues to be in the field they wield their prowess in – pop culture. In the unique way in which their cultural output crisscrosses with politics, they stir their own society in Korea and at once, societies like ones in India and Asia – mired in convenient patriarchy and economic inequality.
The band began in 2013 with a proverbial kick to unrewarding competitions in Korean society. “The youth of today can no more dream,” it said. It slammed hierarchy, charged against elitism, took on the government’s apathy to public disaster and Korean society’s obsession with material comforts.
In later years, its songs looked inward, offering solace and pride to people who needed it most, and propelling them to a height of worldwide success hitherto unseen.
It might be convenient for immensely popular pop artistes to do the bare minimum and earn appreciation, but no one who looks into the band, its output and its presence can argue that it only skims the surface of activism. Its very presence is its dissent and the fact that it does it all from the pedestal of pop music is testament to its stellar maturity.
As they wrote and sang songs across genres, they have rattled the West, impressed the East and united the world with what is still saliently an Asian output from a very Asian group of people. In doing so, they struck at two strong bastions of culture – male acceptance and the power of white privilege.
The fact that many predominantly male and Western-aligned thinkers on social and news media routinely comment on them – dismissively – and seek to minimise their diverse musical output, is testament to their value as veritable cultural disruptors.
BTS in their last show as a group in October, at Busan, South Korea. Photo: Bighit Music
And thus it was that until 2022, BTS’s songs, music videos, interviews, variety shows and performances across the world stirred the string of culture as we knew it.
And now, as BTS members are branching out to solo endeavours and mandatory military stints, what is a standout factor is the politics in their individual songs.
Which brings us back to Min Yoongi, who is on the Asia leg of his solo tour, ‘D-Day‘. Yoongi is a rapper from Daegu town in South Korea and has written over 156 songs – all while singing, dancing and presenting himself as a salient K-pop participant, a role which has significant demands on presenting politically neutral public characters.
With BTS, Yoongi’s stage name is ‘SUGA’ – a portmanteau of the sound of the basketball position ‘shooting guard’. With his solo songs he is ‘Agust D’. The word is ‘suga’ spelt backwards, with ‘DT’ – Daegu town – added to it. This act of mooring himself to a smaller town is important.
The personas of SUGA and Agust D come together for the ongoing tour which arrived at Jakarta in Indonesia, after 11 shows in the US. There, I watched three performances.
Despite great success in the US, D-Day (which is also the name of Yoongi’s third solo album), is an innately Asian show.
The performances are of songs which cover very many topics but in their absolute devotion to addressing societal ills and uncovering the basic earthiness of Asia, it sets itself on a stage very separate from even the rest of BTS.
It is not as if the rest of BTS is evasive in its politics. Solo albums by Yoongi’s fellow rappers Jung Hoseok and Kim Namjoon, whose stage names are j-hope and RM, have songs on equality, the need for a hopeful future, and the tyranny of algorithms. But Yoongi, a master songmaker in his own right, captures in this gigantic performance the very smallness which is reflective of Asia’s whole collective existence, if ever there was one.
To the outside world, South Korea is a giant tech and consumer paradise and a picture of prosperity. But Yoongi reminds us – with significant style and musicality – that its youth is as flustered as the rest of Asia by many concerns of censorship, dreams that are difficult to realise in a world of political and economic struggle, and a competitive pursuit of ends.
“A flood of information prohibits the freedom of imagination and at the same time wants to have our thoughts standardised,” he says startlingly in his marquee song mentioned above in the piece. This translation is from a celebrated fan blog, ‘Doolset Lyrics‘. As an Indian among an audience of Indonesians – both countries have strict and controversial online content moderation policies in place – no resonances were lost.
Yoongi’s concert, while deeply Korean and deeply traditional, also challenges Korea’s own notion of specialness within Asia. This is significant especially as the Korean government leaves no stone unturned to use BTS to further its global and local political imprints.
In the Disney documentary Road to D-Day, featuring him, Yoongi curiously uses ‘Asia’ when he speaks of BTS’s impact as representatives of a people. He uses it multiple times. There is no reason to think this is a protest in any form against Korea – he mentions his role as a Korean ambassador too – but in the broadening of geographical spirit, there is a mark of an artiste with a message.
Screengrabs from the ‘Road to D-Day’ Disney documentary streaming on Hotstar in India.
In the way the tour’s setlist is designed – a personal journey through a life of struggle and then a gradual easing into existence – no Asian will miss the centrality of a crucial theme: money.
It is implicit, always there, and its role is startlingly clear without entering into bragging territory at all. It is an acknowledgment of money which is shorn of philosophising. One of the brutally personal songs Yoongi performs, ‘Amygdala‘, notes the real incident of a young Yoongi suffering a serious shoulder injury during his trainee days when he moonlit as a food delivery person. In it, he also speaks of his mother’s surgery and the trauma of learning of his father’s liver transplant just before a concert. I know of no other song which addresses parents’ illnesses – a huge and unifying experience among Asian people – with the frankness this does.
When Yoongi was not alone on stage, he was surrounded by dancers who clawed at him, bore him, abandoned him and very rarely, also danced with him. In their role too, there was commentary on a multitude beyond Korea and its impression on an artist.
And when 10,000 people in a suburban Jakarta hall echo such lyrics in a language they have had absolutely no reason to learn, they reinforce this belief that this is a concert by someone who exemplifies the continent.
Min Yoongi performs to a full International Convention Exhibition hall in Jakarta, Indonesia, as part of his ‘D-Day’ tour. Photo: Twitter/@bts_bighit
Speaking of language, when Yoongi’s song ‘People Part 2’, an ode to the pandemic and the distance it created, was released last month, people wondered what the English lyrics meant.
“So time is yet now, right here to go
I know, you know, anything does know
So time is yet now, right here to go
Nobody doesn’t know anymore.”
And since there have been times when English words and phrases have been used with scant regard for meaning or grammar in Korean pop songs, some fans wondered whether Yoongi’s song had suffered from a lack of basic proofreading.
But for Yoongi, as I have long suspected that it has been for BTS, the use of English has lately been political too. As Asian men, singing in a language with a non-Roman alphabet, BTS are plagued by foolish interview questions and countless comments asking them to speak in English.
Never colonised by the British, Koreans have not had reason to learn English, far less pride themselves on their ability to speak it flawlessly. Here, Yoongi’s awareness of the role of English is, like much of BTS’s politics, quiet.
In an act of calm daring, Yoongi’s mishmash of English appears to be a subversion of the language’s hegemony. Like a 21st century James Joyce, he makes the mistaken delivery of the very language which is the trump card of acceptance in the West, his own signature.
Yoongi’s politics is clear eyed. It is artful dissent, quietly told, in the largest of stages. You sleep with the knowledge that at least one very famous act is not above using a platform to deliver a political message.
After Indonesia, D-Day stopped at Japan. Through June, there will be performances in Thailand, Singapore and finally, South Korea.
‘The Art of Dissent’ is a new series that aims to look at ways in which people around the world and in India are registering dissent in spite of laws that ban or impinge upon their rights to do so. In subsequent pieces, the series will look at more art, artists, performers and their unique styles of dissenting. Should you wish to contribute to the series or feel like your artwork fits into this broad category, write to soumashree@thewire.in.
