hey! i wasn’t sure if it was ok to reblog your last post so i thought i’d message. i really really enjoyed reading it — all really good thoughts. while i loved the song on my first listen, including and perhaps mostly because of the atonal autotune, i found the (rap) lyrics to be a let-down and your post helped me articulate my thoughts on why — they do feel like posturing, and slightly disingenuous coming from his own mouth. i Am trying to figure out if there was some deeper reasoning behind it (like i believe there was for the vocal processing), which if there were would align with what you have written here, or if it’s just an unfortunate byproduct of having supreme boi in the writers’ room, lol. (not trying to take away agency from jimin here — but the pre-chorus and chorus lyrics are all much closer to what we saw on lie, which makes me lean towards him taking the lead on those, and the rap lyrics are a lot closer to what i know to be supreme boi’s wheelhouse.)
i perhaps see less of the machismo you see in the overall song and performance (apologies if i’ve misread you and that’s not what you were saying) and that is why only the rap lyrics stand out in this way to me. i think it would have been so easy for this performance to be dripping in ostentatious masculinity and swagger, the kind 2013-14 jimin was striving so hard to emulate, and to my eyes he doesn’t really do that here. he looks at turns defiant (but in a very…off-kilter way?) and at turns like a caged animal. i’ve used the word visceral before in a post, i think, and it’s still probably the best descriptor i can think of. very much the “insane” part of “going insane to stay sane”. he also does really interesting things with costuming, despite how simple it is — the more masculine leather jacket layered over the much more femme cut of the tank top, for example. even his toplessness is interesting; something which once again he could have injected with sexy macho swagger if that’s what he was going for, but he didn’t. no washboard abs, unlike debut jimin, but a modernist german poem covering his whole chest. i know many fans were drooling over it but i really do not think sexiness was the intention there (much like filter, lol). and i’m not sure i ascribe any particular significance in this sense to the genre of the song either, although i get where you’re going with it — he’s expressed a love for anthemic hip hop before (eg. ON) and the instrumentation is the kind of dramatic and theatrical i would expect from him after lie. even the way he plays with his voice is interesting — i have said this elsewhere but the first half of the second verse is pure unhinged hyperpop girl to me, which i love.
BUT the rap lyrics — yeah. (i keep saying rap but to be fair he isn’t really rapping — more like fast talk-singing.) it’s reminiscent of the kind of appropriative (with the AAVE and the hennessy) hard masculinity bts were going for at the beginning of their career, and which jimin found so ill-fitting, and that’s what makes it jarring to me. and not good jarring — i would describe the autotune as jarring too but that is why i love it — but kind of try-hard and insincere. hennessy and “opps” in the original sense of the word aren’t really reflective of jimin’s experiences at all. (i also just find it poorly written, but i’m trying to dig a little deeper.)
anyway — sorry if this is jumbled! i completely get all your thoughts as a fellow Jimin Gender Thinker TM, and they really jogged something in my brain when trying to articulate my own. as much as soft jimin at the end is closer to the Real Jimin (insofar as that exists and can be perceived by us, lol) i’m not sure if we should dismiss the other jimin as something to be left behind entirely — i think that rage and defiance are all very much within him, even if he has mostly exorcised them out of his system with this song. and i don’t really associate those with gender at all? am i making sense? lol. i really love the conclusion you drew from it otherwise, and i *think* that is where i am also sitting at this juncture. he’s getting out and going somewhere else (like in the mood picture, like in the darkness vs light theme of the pholio).
(feel free to reply to this privately or publicly, i don’t really mind either way! thanks for reading this whole essay!)
Thank you for messaging, always a pleasure to meet another Jimin Gender Thinker TM! I actually read your post on the vocal processing and I loved it, because it hadn’t occurred to me at all that it might indeed be a hyper pop-esque stylistic decision to create a secondary vocal persona. Really interesting, and it makes a lot of sense! I think my shortcoming in this department is that I simply don’t like autotune effects in general. I always joke about how I wish I could get into hyperpop, but I am simply too uncool and pedestrian in my music tastes to get it. Your perspective really gave me a new appreciation for the effects in this particular song, so thank you!
I agree with you on there being barely any hip hop machismo in the performance, which is why the choice of 'rap' lyrics were so jarring to me as well (I had entirely forgotten that Supreme Boi worked on this song, and now that you mentioned it I can’t unsee it lol). You correctly spotted that in my post I kind of ascribed masculinity to hip hop as a whole, which is a mistake, and a shallow and reductionist view of the genre on my part. It’s simply not true. I think that in my ‘writing Jimin post’ fugue state I latched on to stereotypical ideas of hip hop imagery that come across in these specific lyrics and couldn’t really look past them. I also agree that should they be taken at face value, they do not gel with how Jimin has established himself as an artist so far, which makes them feel so disingenuous and strange. Like, Jimin has not exactly characterised himself as a hip hop -phile in the same way that the rap line has, for instance.
This is why I laser focused on the quotation marks in the lyrics and the placement of the Hennessy name drop. I just kept thinking ‘why are these in quotes? Why is the Hennessy directly after the introduction of the metaphorical maze?’ I feel like interpreting that particular verse as referential to something that Jimin does not necessarily subscribe to, but rather an external concept he is examining, gives them a little extra dimension in this context. Like he’s somehow aware that these words don’t fit him. This could, of course, just be me projecting, but I can’t seem to let go of that in particular.
I also absolutely agree that past Jimin should not be dismissed as a relic of times long gone, though it may come across that way in my post. He, as we all do, contains multitudes, after all. I think my main point with the metamorphosis metaphor (haha) is less about Jimin leaving rage or defiance behind, and more about changing the way he processes and expresses them. He’s plenty angry in this song, and though it being a hip hop track harkens back to days of yore in a linear understanding of Jimin’s artistic development, he is doing it in a different way from then. Notably, alone, and with the notion of his anger stemming from pretense and self-supression on a personal level (rather than societal like in bts’s early discography) being made explicit. He is openly saying that he refuses to hide, nevermind the cost.
I love that we both have the same interpretation of Filter and the meta around it, what a genius combo of song-writing and performance. I find it really funny how often I’ve come across people characterising it as a sexy song and thereby exemplifying what the song is about. It’s a wonderfully self-aware track, acerbic, almost cynical, I’d say. I quite dislike the idea of Jimin himself primarily being characterised as ‘soft’ or ‘cute-sexy’ or even just ‘sexy,’ as even though these are notable components of his celebrity image, they are just that, isolated parts. Though his image has changed and fluctuated over time between more conventionally masculine aesthetics and conventionally effeminate ones (I stress the word conventional because gender isn’t fundamentally tied to aesthetics, but in the context of celebrity image we are operating within a matrix of established gender code lol), he is invariably portrayed as very strong both physically and mentally. I'm not sure I articulated that as well as I could have but I hope it makes some sense lol. I’m really interested in whether or not Face is going to address that and how Jimin sees himself in regards to it.
I also agree that Jimin’s shirtlessness in Set me free pt. 2 is not primarily intended to be sexy, but rather a visually striking symbol of commitment to authentic life within his artistry. Like, he has symbolically ‘engraved it into his chest,’ similarly to the ‘Nevermind’ tattoo, which we know carries significant meaning for him. Visual communication!
Again, thank you for reading and writing as well, my favourite part of fandom is analysis with company! This is also all over the place, I hope I did not misinterpret anything you said too badly and that this doesn't come off as an incoherent ramble lol
I will follow you with my main blog!
