Did you see this Arirang review from IZM?
https://www.izm.co.kr/posts?id=33908
IZM is South Korea's most influential music critic site. The review is a bit gloomy but I was surprised how it showed like many points you raised when criticizing the album. Do you think this feeling is because you're Korean and can pick up these things that might be lost on the rest of us?
Pitchfork just published their review and its brutal bpp. One one hand the review is a similar score to other underwhelming western albums from Bruno Mars and Harry Styles (supporting the view this album sounds too much like generic western rap and pop for something called arirang) but its interesting that the reviewer and you raise similar points but he hated like animals but you love the song. Ya I know people are different but the polarization tho..
https:// pitchfork .com/reviews/albums/bts-arirang/
Your link, anon in ask 1; and your link, anon in ask 2.
I'd say it's less about me being Korean and more about me being critical of music in general. For older followers of my blog, this is nothing new. Also, IZM might be 'influential' in Korea but they aren't the be all and end all of music discourse in Korea, and are known to be sometimes political in their music discussions. Personally, one of the only Korean critics I genuinely followed was Kim Young-dae (may his soul rest in peace) and I think it's a real shame the world has been deprived of his view on this album, because he's one person I'm confident never let politics get in the way of his assessments of anybody. He would've called a spade a spade and let the chips fall where they may. When listening to Arirang I found myself wondering what he might think...
Anon in ask 2, thanks for linking the Pitchfork review because I hadn't seen it yet. In terms of tone and language, Pitchfork kinda has the reputation of being fairly caustic and harsh, so I felt that review was actually tame and in some ways fair.
Also our difference in opinion is less about 'polarization' and more about taste. For example, he cites Like Animals as the worst offender of BTS' vocals 'lacking pathos' (something true in most of the album). And while that's true in that BTS vocals in Like Animals is massively distorted and in some cases nearly washed out to the point you hear very little affect, I like it because that distortion is consistent throughout all elements of the song (the arrangement, percussion, etc - note how the outro guitars are distorted till they flatline). Also, extreme vocal distortion isn't unusual in alt-rock songs of a certain style. So while I can't forgive the excessive vocal processing in some other songs on the album, it works perfectly for me on Like Animals and that's mostly due to my taste for songs like that anyway.
Another thing about reviews on Pitchfork is that although the text is typically written by one or two people, the score is given by a group of music reviewers at Pitchfork. I'm saying this because I know some ARMYs have taken offense to the author before and some consider him to be an anti. I don't agree with that view but even if he was an anti, you'd have to assume most of the reviewers at Pitchfork have it out for BTS too, and aside from that sounding paranoid and crazy (how'd you explain the more positive BTS reviews also from Pitchfork?), it shuts down conversation people want to have about the album.
And that, that conversation, to me is the biggest win for BTS in this case. This album is generating chatter, people want to talk about it. Worse than thinking an album is bad is thinking it's forgettable and not worth dissection of any kind. BTS have earned that honour. Just in my tiny space on Tumblr, my inbox is filled with opinion after opinion: some negative, some positive, some neutral, some horny, some completely confused, some very pissed off.
This is an album that's calmed people and gotten on the nerves of other people, it's generating discourse about their music choices, the constraints the members are under, their authenticity, their politics, their confidence, the influence of HYBE executives on their music, their future.... and weird as it might seem to some newer fans, this is normal for a BTS comeback because these are all things BTS have made fair game for discussion in their art. It's happening at a much larger degree now because BTS today is so much more massive than in 2020, than they were in 2018, but this chatter was there then too. And they didn't just survive the pushback, they took that criticism and used it to inform and build up their later albums as we saw in songs like Black Swan, What Do You Think, Groin...
Lord I'm rambling again lmao.
I'll just end it here by saying if anyone sees more interesting reviews, please send them my way - let's get into them.
