I am not one much for lyric tattoos, but as soon as Namjoon said I wanna be a human before I make some art in Indigo, I felt like I really needed that on ink somewhere.
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The tagline of Kim Namjoon’s Indigo is that it is the last archive of his twenties.
Namjoon says that calling it an archive partially explains why the album holds such a range of genres and collaborations – city pop, boom bap, RnB, folk, amongst others – while being understood as a cohesive piece. But he also he thinks of his creative work as an act of continuous self-documentation, comparing his use of colour in album titles (mono. and Indigo) to the way that Adele titles each of her albums after her age at the time. This means that we are asked to see these songs as confessional; that we can see this album as representational of Namjoon in some shape or form.
There is a wealth of evidence for evidence for Namjoon’s interest in self-representation and self-documentation. The most obvious example is the fact that he spearheaded a BTS comeback trilogy dedicated to Jungian psychology, which no idol company would ever imagine to be a commercially viable project. Namjoon’s who the hell am I? in Persona is so fucking memorable, so emphatically performed, that you know he was eaten up by this question and just had to make music about it.
But the interest in the archive? That feels newer. I first began to associate Namjoon with archives when the BTS boys got their independent, publicly available Instagrams, and Namjoon named himself @rkive. Just an archive, his bio said, implying something more curated than Jin’s habit of posting whatever the feels like anytime ever, yet not quite curated as whatever Hoseok had going on, which involved scanned polaroids and an insistence on posting photos in sets of three that made feel like we were back in the 2010s. It also happens that he calls his studio the Rkive.
When you characterise your own work and as an archive, it suggests that you understand that your work has historical significance, that it will be perceived again in the future under widely different contexts. I imagine that it became necessary for Namjoon to understand all his content as forming an archive, and also allows him to firmly place certain things in the past. Perhaps that also allows him to share his life without burning under the scrutinising gaze of millions on millions of people.
Lately, Namjoon’s been speaking publicly about his interest in art. He says that he enjoys being a fan of art, likes how when he looks at a work he can feel the legacies of those that came before him, likes how they created something so specific to their circumstances and yet is capable of transforming him and others because of the universal feelings they produce. It's interesting, then, that Namjoon calls his latest body of work an archive, and in doing so readily attaches it to a specific moment in time over an appeal to universality. I would like to hear what he has to say about the relationship between archiving and ideas of creating art which endures.
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I've been having conversations with people about creative work over the past few months, namely the way that art seems to demand vulnerability, and whether sometimes the demands on vulnerability are too much for artists to bear, whether they shouldn't be asked to give so much of themselves. I think this came about after seeing really young writers in the indie-lit scene give up incredible amounts of information about themselves in their work, and noticing that it was often the writings that said the most about their pain that got published. Would you choose to publish this in an industry that demanded less of your pain, I wondered.
The conversations are ongoing and inconclusive, but what they have brought to attention are the extreme lengths I go to avoid being vulnerable in my public work. I write almost exclusively through personas. I take the things I care about and displace it into another situation, so the essence of it is there but there appears to be no relationship with my own life. As a student of literature I know that this is futile, because often the most revealing details about someone's writing are the elements which are unconscious. Knowing this fact will not change anything about my writing habits in the near future.
When Namjoon says I wanna be a human before I make some art, it is less that he has given me a new piece of wisdom to live be, and more that he has taken something I viscerally feel and put words to it.
I did not have much of a writing habit until a few years ago, because I spent many years believing that I needed to do some more living before I had anything worth writing about. Part of me thinks that belief was a waste of time. The more empathetic part of myself appreciates that I gave myself time to exist, and to learn to discern what I wanted to share before learning to write. Now I will be forever playing catch-up, but this is okay with me, given that I am always also playing catch-up with my own emotions. My daily experience of existing has a lot more to do with the relationships I have, anyways. Writing is be a kind of attentiveness, but it is important to me that I pick carefully the things I allow others' attention to be drawn to in my own work.
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It's been two weeks since Indigo came out and it has consumed my life. I listen to it on the way to work. I listen to it in the shower. I listen to it while writing. I tried to listen to it while I was at work, until I realised it was making me an emotional mess and then had to stop. I'm listening to it again, and again, and again, and I feel close to where Namjoon was when he made this album, which really means that I am reflecting on where I am at the moment and where I have been emotionally these last few years, because this is an album about feeling lost and unsure about what you're doing in life but trying to make something out of it regardless.
I'm fucking lonely, Namjoon says, and I think about how my last few years have been marked by such radical transformations there was a point I felt unrecognisable, even to myself. If I can just find a reason/To keep this endless chasing, he says, and I'm confronted by the fact that I have been busy, by all means, but that it is often unclear why I am doing all manner of things without quite knowing what it is I'm hoping to achieve.
Enjoying music has a lot to do with timing. There's so much good music out there that it is hard to explain why I simply must listen to Indigo on repeat to those who aren't in the same headspace. I've had friends who can't get into the melodrama of the album. Others who think it's technically good, but have been able to move on after a few listens. Even in the last two weeks my listening habits have changed: at first it was the deep disappointment of lost love in Change pt. 2 that got to me, and now I can't listen to Wild Flower without having to tamp down a deep wave of feelings that spreads through me.
So what about Indigo gets me now? I'm sure my attachment is contextual. It feels like an explanation for why Namjoon literally cried in front of the cameras while gently breaking the news of BTS's pivot to solo work in this year's festa, which is BTS's annual catchup video where the members discuss what they've been up to and where they are at emotional. But it also feels cathartic, having someone share their own feelings of uncertainty and unsettledness as they move through adulthood, as they move through the clusterfuck of life and what these few years have been.
There was a time when the music I was interested in was almost intellectual, a matter of sampling what the possible spectrum of sounds could be and what range of emotions could possibly be communicated. Now I want to be seen by the music I hear. Namjoon's music is really good at making me feel that if we were to sit down and have a conversation together, he could understand where I've been at.
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Still, it would be an oversimplification to say that Indigo is very good because Namjoon is vulnerable in it. Vulnerability is nonetheless expressed through style, and there are many different ways to grant truth to someone.
Let me explain what I mean via a conflict I had with an artist this summer in Hong Kong. I was visiting a gallery with a few friends when we stumbled across an artist who was working on a durational piece, a massive work on this never-ending scroll of paper where he was very slowly drawing minute lines across in the shapes of waves, while listening to the stories of visitors like myself who happened to drop by.
We sat down and got to chatting, and after a while, I asked him what he was looking for in this process of making this work. Truth, he said. And what if someone isn't ready to offer you their truth? I asked.
He seemed deeply disturbed by this question, and the energy in the room quickly shifted to something combative. I think he took my question to mean that the things that I had said were untruthful. Actually, I wanted to hear what his stakes were in the project, because I was trying to figure out what kinds of truths I could offer him. Call it an unfortunate hangover from studying philosophy, but I find the idea of truth in-itself deeply unhelpful. Truth is just a value that you can assign a statement; the potency of a truth comes from the premises from which it arises, and that means the person asking for truth has to offer something first.
To be fair, I phrased my question poorly. What I meant was what if someone wasn't ready to offer you the truth in the way you wanted them to? I was thinking about how since 2020, talking to my friends about what has happened to Hong Kong and their relationship to the city is rarely expressed in direct terms. For me, that is not being untruthful. That is being truthful in ways you can afford, and finding paths to vulnerability in spite of the linguistic and lived barriers we encounter. I got the sense that he was interested in something similar, but that he was hoping that there was some core grain of truth he could arrive at if only he worked on the project long enough.
The artist didn't reveal any of his thoughts to me, though, and so I was left cold by his project, and he was left cold by our misunderstanding.
What this has to do with Indigo: Namjoon understands the kinds of truths he needs to offer. He's confessional, yes, but you get the contours of his experience rather than literal descriptions of what he has been through, and frankly that is for the best. What he does offer is an exploration of what it means to try to live well and to do your best, with the understanding that these things are neither intuitive nor easy. The vulnerability he offers is one which understands that trying to live well is a matter of often failing to live up to expectations of yourself, of being disgruntled by life despite knowing we should be grateful and not to let it simply pass us by. The fact that I can articulate these ideas clearly tells me that he has done well in telling me his truth, and in turn allows me to be candid with myself and others about how I, too, am trying to live well.
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I was, and remain, intimidated by the fact that BTS have such a hold on me. When I think about it abstractly I understand how I got here; that this intense and extremely attractive found family would be exactly what I needed to latch onto in 2020. And I am no stranger to obsession, having existing in and out of fandoms for as long as I have been able to use the internet. Fandom has always been more of an idle habit for me, a way of escaping reality. What startles me is how much I genuinely care about this group, how much I buy into identifying with its members despite the constant reminders that the versions of them I get are being carefully marketed to me.
No one is better at reminding me of this split vision than Namjoon. No one is better at making me identify with them than Namjoon. This is because he is clumsy but also likes reading and art, and I am also clumsy and theoretically like reading and art. Perhaps this is why I am most intimidated by him, out of all the members.
Although it is part of the mechanism of idol groups to make you identify with one member over another, I think being the one a fan feels most similar to is pretty tough going in terms of parasocial relationships. Identifying with Namjoon makes me hyperconscious of the ways in which he is flawed, like his penchant to be a bit petty, to say too much when he is not careful, his tendencies towards jealousy despite his attempts to temper this part of himself. He is perfect, of course, but I find his shame difficult to witness because it reminds me of my own shame. I find myself thinking that I can read his facial expressions in the same way I can read the expressions of the ones I love most, and then embarrassed by this presumption of familiarity.
The best and worst part is that Namjoon is smart enough to know all this is happening, and both bothered and motivated by it. Namjoon knows enough about the strange reflective quality of the idol-fan relationship to tell a stadium of his fans to please use me, please use BTS to love yourself. Because you taught me how to love myself.
This is part of what intimidates me about Namjoon, these feelings of emotional proximity coupled with the sharp clarity about how these feelings are manufactured, and yet again the knowledge that these feelings are nonetheless real. The desire to make something out of that connection, however fragmented and uncomfortable that tether can be.
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I asked the poet Yanyi about vulnerability lately, and whether it was possible to write and be vulnerable while protecting yourself and the ones you love. This is what he had to say about the matter:
Vulnerability must be chosen from within, not pressured from without. Also, not all vulnerability makes great art. It can often be performative rather than profound. In my experience, the majority of one's healing need not occur in public. In fact, privacy makes space for complications, cliches, and ugly truths—the real stuff of vulnerability that doesn't do well in public forums.
My litmus test: is it more empowering for me to say this in public or private? If the former, then it's more likely I still have work to do on my own, work that shouldn't be available yet to anyone else. It's only after you've done that internal work that public vulnerability—which requires strength and consideration as well as honesty—is possible.
There is so much I want to create, and yet I know that if I ever want to share these creations there is so much internal work to be done.
Indigo makes me feel like it is possible to want my work to be seen by others in the future. It reminds me that making work visible isn't just about subjecting myself to the horrific gaze of the Other, but also a matter of bridging a connection to others in ways that would otherwise be impossible, which is what really moves me about art.
