The record’s first OT7 song is a bright, poppy, candy-colored, sweet (pick your cliché), synth-filled bop with a bouncing bass line. “You, the star that makes the trivial things not trivial at all” “The ‘me’ that I want to be, the ‘me’ that the people want The ‘me” that you love and the me that I craft” He is his own ambition and desire, embodied. It’s telling that, in response to a question about who he is, he answers with what he wants to do. Yes, the lyrics are dense, but they feel human and organic and genuinely searching. It’s almost as though RM were given a prompt - write a song about what having a “persona” means to you - and he delivered a perfect musical essay about the joys and perils of creating and living behind a mask. His voice is the track’s most powerful instrument he stays studiously with the beat, ever the conscientious and self-controlled leader, as he slips effortlessly between Korean and English. The song, which is a propulsive introduction to the record, is indeed hip hop, but it’s also rock - it’s got this driving electric-guitar riff that seems to chase RM’s as he raps almost without taking a breath. Ever the musician-philosopher, he starts out by asking a question he knows he’ll probably never be able to answer and proceeds to try to answer it anyway by staging a Socratic dialogue with himself - or, more accurately, with his various selves.įittingly, the song samples “Intro: Skool Luv Affair,” which begins with a skit in which RM, Suga, and J-Hope do something similar - each attempting to answer a single question “What is Bangtan’s style?” in his own way until RM interjects to declare that Bangtan’s style is “hip hop.”
This song is two minutes and 51 seconds of pure RM. “The superhero I wished to be, I think I’ve really become him now” Much thanks to them, and to the translation community as a whole, for all their brilliance, hard work, dedication, and generosity. Lastly, I used English translations for every song, except for “UGH” and “Outro: Ego,” for which I used work.
I also came away with a deeper appreciation of a beautifully complex record that deserves more serious engagement and analysis in the mainstream. Because I was writing this semi-informally, I started getting sentimental and personal. One inherent weakness of this song-by-song approach is I don’t talk enough about the album as a whole, but I tried to do some of that in each review.
#Grand chase eternal reborn review professional#
I’m not a professional music critic (though I did cover music as a staffer at the East Bay Express once upon a time), nor am I the most educated ARMY. I sought to analyze and contextualize the lyrics within BTS’s discography and history while also talking about the music and production itself. This explains why the reviews got so much longer as I kept going. My original goal was to write a quick thread during a late-night train ride from New York to D.C. It ended up being 15,000 words long, but that wasn’t the plan. I originally wrote this review thread of BTS’s new album Map of the Soul: 7 on Twitter over the course of two weeks.
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