Jack in The Box

 

Released on July 15th 2022 through Big Hit Music, Jack in The Box is j-hope’s first solo studio album. J-hope is without doubt mostly known as a rapper, singer, songwriter, producer and especially dance captain of the biggest group in the world these days, namely South Korean BTS.

Prior to his solo album, he released a solo mix tape in 2018 called Hope World, which reflected j-hope’s image within the group as a positive, hopeful and happy artist with only minor melancholic strokes in some of the lyrics, whereas Jack in The Box is a concept album that lets us see the whole picture, including the dark sides of the 28-year-old artist whose real name is Hoseok Jung. The album pays tribute to the 1990s hip hop that came to define j-hope as an artist, and it consists of 10 tracks:

1.Intro
The intro to the album is narrated by a female voice (belonging to the actress Rachanee Lumanayo) and tells the myth of Pandora’s Box in a slightly glorified version. Hope is here seen as something good and positive, or is it?

The myth can be interpreted in different ways, but as the box contained all evils and hope was in the box, hope must be evil, too. To quote Friedrich Nietzsche: “Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

The intro is in English, whereas the lyrics of the album consist of a mix of English and Korean that has become the trademark of not only BTS but j-hope as well.

2. Pandora’s Box
The opening of Pandora’s Box could be straight of horror movie soundtrack and when j-hope starts rapping, his voice sounds quite aggressive and disillusioned. The lyrics are about his background including his stage name j-hope, which derives from the Pandora’s Box myth. Once again it is stressed that hope is seen as a ray of light, but he also draws attention to the title of the album, Jack in The Box, where according to the jack-in-the-box myth, Jack is the devil, so is hope really the devil?

In any case, j-hope no longer wants to be confined to the box. Instead, he wants to face the disaster head on

 

3.MORE
This rap rock track is in my opinion the best of the album. It was an early release single that preceded the album, and many BTS fans as well as casual listeners were surprised at the rock theme highlighted by the heavy guitar riff and loud shouting, but this is the j-hope I have always know was there and whom I have been waiting for for years.

The track is cheeky, hard, playful and the “Inhale, inhale, exhale, exhale” lyrics are already a classic. Interestingly, the music video for the track is a homage to David Fincher’s 1999 Fight Club movie, from which scenes are recreated with j-hope in the lead as Fight Club’s protagonist Jack Moore (Jack in The Box and MORE, see?).

4. STOP (There Are No Bad People In The World)
A mesmerising repetitive and multi layered track, telling people to stop fighting as there are no bad people in the world, only bad environment, upbringing, education etc. Very j-hope.

 

5. = (Equal Sign)
Another homage to ’90 hip hop about respect, where j-hope tells his audience: “It costs you nothing to be kind / Hate’ll paralyze your mind / Gotta see the other side / Not so different you and I. Equality is you and me. A great song, but at 1.55 minutes, it is way too short!!

After the release of the album, I heard j-hope sing it with the Korean singer IU, and I honestly think she should have been the backing vocal on the track instead of the one used!

 

6. Music Box: Reflection
A short instrumental track, bridging the message-filled songs of the first part of the album with the introspective songs of the second part. Again: it sounds like something taken directly from a horror movie soundtrack, this time added j-hope’s heavy breathing. It is after all a breather between the two parts of the album.

 

7. What If…
This track samples Ol’ Dirty Bastards Shimmy Shimmy Ya as an homage to the hip hop genre. Here j-hope asks the question: am I really like that? Hope, positivity, always smiling face? He asks is he would be as positive if he had no hope, no dream, no passion or vision. He is living a privileged life, but what if he had no money, no house, no car, nothing. Could he be positive then?

8. Safety Zone
A soul/R&B track, slow with pedestrian beat and second vocal by Jaicko Lawrence. It has j-hope pondering that he has “Dedicated my entire twenties / Living up to this immeasurable life.” He then continues, “My life is becoming my enemy. It is getting lonesome.” and “I like animals better than people these days.”

It is quite heart breaking, especially as he admits that he feels self-destructive and that he is searching for a safe zone, a peaceful home, where he feels protected and finds relief.

 

9. Future
This track has a light, positive sound partly because it uses chimes and the Yeonum Children’s Choir. The message of the track is, that the future is scary, so we need courage, faith, and positivity to go with the flow and step into what is to come.

 

10. Arson
Arson was the main single off the album, a repetitive and hard hip-hop track, where both the beat and the rap are very typical j-hope. The song is building up in layers and hardness, while a disillusioned j-hope raps, “My dream done / success done / my part of the job, done / what else, none. Do I put out the fire or burn even brighter?

 

After the release of the album, j-hope went on to perform at the Lollapalooza Festival in Chicago on July 31 as the first Korean headliner ever, and here even people who had never been into BTS fell for his talent as he is born to be on stage. By making the album and doing the concert, he answered some of the questions that he had raised on the album as he now knows that he wants to burn brighter and continue his career and that the other BTS members along with his fans are the safety zone he has been looking for.

Jack in The Box is a concept album that shows a darker side of j-hope than we are used to see within BTS and that surprised some, but not hardcore fans like me, who remember him complaining about his name and image in the early years of BTS and that some of the other BTS members even thought that he should have been called j-sad back then as that would have been more fitting. Over the years j-hope has lived up to his name and image and acted as the happy sunshine of the group, thereby suppressing his darker side in public, but not anymore.

As Jack in The Box shows, j-hope has grown older and more mature both as a person and as an artist, and that suits him well and is also very fitting as the core fans of both him and BTS are adults of all genders, races and walks of life and not children or crazed teenage girls, which the press usually makes us out to be. Like Arson, the album burns down the old happy image of j-hope and have him rise from the ashes. This way the hope in Pandora’s Box really was jack, a devil who has burned down j-hope’s sunshine image so he could rise from the ashes like a phoenix as a new, multifaceted and intriguing artist.

There is only one bad thing that I have to say about the album and that is, that with 10 tracks it is way too short! I want MORE!!!

Jack in The Box is available as download and a limited edition vinyl LP.

Five out of five stars: *****

© Lise Lyng Falkenberg, 2022

 

Wrong Assumptions about BTS, part 2

 

Who are the BTS ARMY?

 

One of the most persistent of false assumptions that surfaces several times a year, is the misconception of the age and gender of the BTS ARMY (BTS fans). As far back as I can remember, it has been assumed, perhaps especially in Western media, that BTS fans are screaming teenage girls. Well, they are not. Far from.

When BTS debuted in 2013 they were between 15 to 20 years old and their songs were mostly about the injustice and hardships that the youth must endure, so of course they mainly appealed to a younger audience. This also shows in the fan name ARMY, which stands for Adorable Representative MCs of Youth, but it didn’t take long before BTS caught the attention of older age groups as well.

BTS have always made music and lyrics that appeal to an older audience. They have tried their hands at not only hip-hop, but also soul, funk, jazz, rock, and other kinds of music that were popular in the twentieth century. There lyrics are deep and intricate and often it comes in handy to have a Ph.D. in Literature as well as one in Cultural Studies to understand the full meaning of a song. This appeals to an audience much older than the band itself, so when I became an ARMY in 2016, the fandom was already full of older fans, although you hardly ever noticed them. Why, you ask? Because they were bullied and ridiculed.

I became an ARMY just a few months before my 54^th birthday, so I’ve had my fair share of being bullied online and ridiculed offline. It was mostly my family and so-called friends who made fun of me liking such a young band, but the bullying online was by other ARMYs, young ARMYs, or so they call themselves, and to this day they come after ARMYs who are 20+.

I guess that a lot of these so-called ARMYs are only into BTS because they like the way that the band members look, because they clearly have no clue as to what the band stands for. BTS is probably the most including band in the world who truly appreciate their older fans as much as their younger and their lyrics and references to literature, art, psychology etc. more often than not demand a broader inside into the world than what your ordinary teenager would normally have.

 Still, online we older ARMYs are often told by pestering kids that we should take care of our children instead of listening to BTS, as if one excludes the other! Besides, my daughter is an adult who doesn’t need that much taking care of, but how come that the young fans of BTS think they have the right to bully the older? I guess it is because they are told again and again that the ordinary BTS fan is a teenage girl, so people who are not, are weird.

The ones who do the telling is of course the press. You’ll find the misconception everywhere in reviews of BTS concerts and albums, in feature articles about them, in talk-shows and shows like Saturday Night Live etc. etc. Everywhere it says, that ARMYs are a bunch of teenage girls who want to marry the members – which in itself is pretty weird as some of the members are close to 30 years old.

 

Anyway, in the western world, this misconception originated from BTS trying to seriously crack the western music market in 2017. BTS was originally a hip hop-idol group, but as we don’t have such a group label in the west, they were launched by their company Big Hit Entertainment as a boy band. As soon as I read it, I knew that we were doomed, because boy bands are never taken seriously, and in the West, they are made to cater to young teenage girls. Often, they don’t write their own songs but are put together solely based on their looks and then trained to sing and dance a bit. Some don’t even sing themselves, but mime to playback. The multitalented BTS - who write (and often produce) the vast majority of their own material as well as sing and dance to perfection - was now lumped together with these groups, despite them being closer to acts like the Beatles, David Bowie and even Simon and Garfunkel!

The annual ARMY Census seems to back up the misled teenage ARMYs. ARMY Census is a global demographic study of ARMY made by ARMYs to show their diversity and although I appreciate the attempt, the problem is, that their results don’t reflect real life. Thus, the recent ARMY Census showed that 50% of ARMYs are over 18 and 50% are under and that only 3% are male. These percentages are of course ridiculous, so how come that ARMY Census gets it so wrong?

ARMY Census makes one of the worst mistakes when it comes to statistics. It is not so much the very small number of ARMYs they ask, approximately 500,000 out of 40 million which is not even one percent. That would have been okay if these 500,000 were representative but they are not. ARMY Census only advertises after ARMYs on social media, so all the fans who don’t use social media are excluded. Even a lot of fans who use social media are excluded too, as they exclude themselves, because they are older and would never ever participate in an online survey. Why? Because they are used to being bullied online! This way, it is mainly the younger fans who take part in ARMY Census, and the true identity of ARMY remains hidden.

If it is hidden, how do I know that ARMY Census got it wrong, then? Partly of course, because I am ARMY myself and talk online to hundreds of 40+ ARMYs, men, women, and other gender identities, partly because other, more thorough surveys have been made.

In my time as an ARMY, I have seen at least three big surveys, conducted by respectively a Korean university, Big Hit itself and an American university, the latest I think in 2021. Put together, these surveys showed, that 55% of ARMYs are 30+ and that 25% are male. In fact, less than 10% are teenagers, as the percentages were distributed like this:

0-10 years: 5%
11-19 years: 10%
20-29 years: 30%
30-39 years: 25%
40-49 years: 11%
50-59 years: 4%
60-69 years: 8%
70+ years: 7%

These statistics were based on not only social media, but also on who buys BTS albums, concert tickets and merchandise, and a lot more people have been asked, generally between 5 and 10 percent. Of course, there is still a large hidden number of mostly elderly and male fans who are too afraid to admit in public that they are BTS fans, but even without them, the majority is 30+ years old.

When you see what kinds of products that ARMY has outsold throughout the years, because BTS have been seen using them or endorsing them, you shouldn’t be surprised to find that ARMY are adults. We are talking about as diverse things as wine, fabric softener and cars, products that teenage girls would hardly buy!

 So if you are looking for a typical ARMY, it won’t be easy as the fan base is extremely diverse. Based on my personally experience, a likely representative of ARMY could be a person of colour in their late thirties, probably something other than heterosexual and working as a teacher, a lawyer, or a nurse. That seems to be where the majority is at, whereas I who am white, in my early sixties, straight and a professional writer with two Ph.D. degrees am still a minority, but a minority within the majority!

© BTS ARMA, 2022