Last October, South Korea’s biggest boyband, BTS, revealed they were going on “hiatus”. As a band who have seldom adhered to the norms of western pop, they delivered the news in suitably intriguing style. It was announced during the annual YouTube broadcast of BTS having dinner together, during which they had tucked into a couple of bottles of whisky and were visibly quite pissed. They were openly critical of K-pop’s notoriously controlling system of battery-farming pop stars – “they don’t give you time to mature, you have to keep producing music and keep doing something … there’s no time left for growth” protested the band’s de-facto leader, RM – and freely admitted they were out of ideas. “What message do we want to give?” complained rapper Suga. “Nothing comes out any more.”
Drunk band members telling an audience of 32m that inspiration has run dry: it goes without saying this is not the normal way for boybands to announce their disbandment, temporary or otherwise. But in one sense at least, BTS’s hiatus is proceeding according to the standard script. When a boyband splits, it is invariably the lot of one member to embark on a solo career plying a more raffish, R&B-inspired musical direction. Which brings us to Golden, the debut solo album by BTS’s Jung Kook.
It arrives trailed by two hit singles, 3D and Seven. The first features guest verses from Jack Harlow, which are all shrooms this and thots that and “four girls – now you whorin’” the other. Its sound, meanwhile, is not unlike that conjured by the Neptunes on Justified, the debut solo album by another boyband escapee, Justin Timberlake. The second features backing inspired by 2-step UK garage, an appearance by rapper Latto and lyrics of a noticeably more earthy bent than those found on BTS’s Carl Jung-inspired Map of the Soul: Persona. No need to bone up on psychoanalytics to work out what Jung Kook is driving at: “Night after night, I’ll be fucking you right.”
You might think the transition from baby-faced maknae – the K-pop term for the youngest member of a band, often teased and doted on by their bandmates – to this orgiastic, psilocybin-fuelled realm would be a tricky one, but that would overlook the devotion of BTS fans. Seven entered the US charts at No 1; 3D reached the Top 5 and accumulated 104m streams in seven days. BTS fans are so devoted that if Jung Kook had kicked off his solo career with a cover of Carcass’s Crepitating Bowel Erosion, they would have sent that to No 1 as well. Equally, there’s no doubt that the 10 tracks on Golden are well-done – as you might hope, given the wealth of spendy production and songwriting talent in the credits – if occasionally a shade too close to their source material for comfort. Beyond Timberlake, the other model seems to be Justin Bieber’s career-resuscitating 2015 album Purpose: Jung Kook’s Major Lazer collaboration Closer to You leans into the tropical house sound of Bieber’s Sorry, while Too Sad to Dance owes a fairly obvious debt to his Ed Sheeran-penned smash Love Yourself.
Sheeran is on songwriting duty here, too, although his contribution cleaves to the R&B-influenced end of his oeuvre: without wishing to provoke yet another lawsuit, there’s a vague air of R Kelly’s Ignition about the hook-laden melody of Yes Or No. Jung Kook’s breathy vocal style is good enough to make you wonder if all the AutoTune is necessary, and hooks abound on the ballads designed to make the most of that voice: the tremulous Hate You, with its Bee Gees harmonies, the concluding glowsticks-aloft anthemics of Shot Glass of Tears. The only real misfire is Standing Next to You, which starts fabulously – a big, splashy, live-sounding intro that could have stepped off Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories – then devolves into pallid mid-tempo disco-house.
It’s well-made, hooky – but nevertheless, Golden is an album bound to leave more agnostic listeners pondering what the fuss is about. If you detach the music from the pop world that spawned it – with its maknae, annually broadcast dinner parties, Jung-inspired concept albums and umpteen other approaches and customs that seem markedly different to and thus more interesting than anything happening in western pop – it just sounds like decent mainstream pop: there isn’t anything happening sonically that sounds particularly unique or fresh. Then again, as the sales figures for its singles underline, the views of agnostics are by-the-by: Golden’s success is a foregone conclusion.
This week Alexis listened to
Sofia Kourtesis – How Music Makes You Feel Better
A paean to the healing power of sound, which proves its point by gradually building into a heady, rapturous whirl of electronics and half-heard gasps of vocal.
