RM’s Mono as Black and White Pictures

1. Tokyo

by jessaphb from clickinmoms.com

After listening to the playlist for the nth time, trying to extract a summary on what I really want to say about what I observed about everything, I concluded that this is my least favorite song, it’s the perfect intro, and it is how I imagine RM sounds like personally.

As a fan of BTS, I have heard songs from each of the mixtapes the rap line has released and each of them have shed a part of themselves in those songs that we all should appreciate. I think their personal styles, both music and lyric wise, reflect on their solo songs in Wings. Like Reflection, Tokyo (the whole playlist) is very reflective. It has a long instrumental break that sets the mood for an atmosphere of introspection, and personally, both are my least favorite songs in their respective albums, which probably mirrors the fact that I hate my overthinking habits because it drives me insane. But like how both songs effortlessly make me think of RM in his sensitive and true state, Tokyo is the perfect intro because of all the ways I just described it: reflective and introspective (practically synonyms those are). The entire playlist is both of those and, like Joey Nato, even if it’s not my favorite, in an artistic sense, I can appreciate it. Because art, in all its forms, is supposed to be subjective, and it’s supposed to make you feel.

“I see Pinocchio wearing a poncho,

That’s me some time ago.”

For the picture, I was hoping to find a Pinocchio fan art, because, for some unexplainable reason, that’s my favorite lyric in the song. I instead opted to scroll through two different tabs on Pinterest looking for black and white pictures that will make my intuition jump and say, “that is the one”. Well, that is the one.

The picture is of introspection. Like the captor wants a moment in the darkness to lay down his messes and collect himself. Like the captor wants to revel in his sadness and his pain and find the ground for a minute in his restless ocean. It’s a subtext in RM’s song because he is the one that made himself feel homesick and alone, and sometimes that’s the best course of action when you miss the feeling of feeling because it’s better than pretending when you’re truly feeling empty inside.

2. Seoul (prod. Honne)

by Mr Gianni Fontana from Flickr

Seoul is one of my favorites in the playlist and it’s just my type of pop song, and by pop song I mean electronic song, or it depends on the typical songs I hear on the radio or could be in the radio, Seoul should be on the radio, and it’s my kind of song if it is on the radio. This is a bit of snippet of the fact that my music library is not what you would usually find on the radio.

“If love and hate were the same things,

I love you Seoul,

If love and hate were the same things,

I hate you Seoul.”

So, because I love the song, I can’t quite write about it as much as I want to. All I can say is that like Joey Nato said, it’s a “starting your day” song, which means it’s got a laid-back energy that makes you move but not with so much energy which is the atmosphere on a lazy morning, but you still have something to do. I love the sentimentality that echoes on the lyrics of the song which echoes through the whole song, I’ve heard Honne’s music before and I’m not a big fan but their romantic, electronic style fits perfectly in this song and I don’t know who chose them to produce this song, but they chose right.

I love the lyric video so much that I can’t hold back on wanting to get a picture of Seoul for this post, but I didn’t want to use the video and I found this. To me, it’s got the same feeling of an imperfect home but still, home.

3. Moonchild

by eves_art_project from instagram

As I listened to this song again, it got to me how BTS has somehow, again, redefined my music taste because the style of this song is similar to some of the hip-hop songs I hear in the radio that I can tolerate but I can’t like. But when I listened to the whole playlist without the lyrics, I still have an appreciation for all of them despite the genre. Their music, to me, has a lot more soul than what I frequently hear on the radio. But, remember, music is subjective guys, we have different tastes.

“Moonchild, you shine,

When the moon rises, it’s your time.”

There is a shoutout to Love Yourself here, but I think I should expect that a lot more now, but it’s still worth saying. As an identified living sunshine according to my friends, the message of Moonchild is very personal for me because I strive for sadness. I’m always happy because I’m always sad. My eyes are teary no matter the situation and I am extremely sensitive. It is because I feel too much that I somehow find a way to smile and it’s very contradictory, but that is how I’m also able to write poetry.

This song sort of cemented what I feel whenever RM writes a song, I think that if ever I meet him, it’s either we will talk a lot or none at all.

4. Badbye (with eAeon)

by Lee Jeffries from fromupnorth.com

“Please break me into little pieces.”

^I’ll just leave that there.^

5. Uh good (어긋)

unknown from Pinterest

“Falling short is a painful thing,

But if you don’t go through it, you can’t know it.”

6. Everything goes (지나가) (with Nell)

by Monica Galvan

“It passes”

This is one of my favorites. I was imagining flowers blooming during spring while listening to this song.

The picture I chose, I wanted to help portray the repeating passing message because pictures also fade but so will this, whatever it is we’re going through, and if you look at the song and in this picture, the message “it passes” can have both positive and negative meaning to it, but from the music and the picture, the passing is still beautiful.

Do I make sense?

7. Forever Rain

unknown from Pinterest

I think Forever Rain stands out in the playlist, it feels like it’s got a dimension of it’s own and it’s meant to be played last because of that.

“When it rains I

Get a little feeling that I do have a friend

That keeps knocking on my windows

Asking me if I’m doing well.”

I chose the picture based on the feeling I get when I think or when I’m waiting for it to rain, because like those lyrics, that is how I feel when it’s raining outside.

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So, lyrically speaking, I connect most to Moonchild and Forever Rain, I did not need to explain that last track anymore because y’all should know how much I love the rain.  Musically speaking, I love Seoul, and Everything goes.

So, if you’ll see as the playlist progresses my paragraphs get smaller, I just find that the more I analyze each song individually the more I run out of words to say. Also, while making this post I was watching Joey Nato’s take on this mixtape in order to hear somebody else’s more intelligent view on it.

Overall, this playlist is an inspired 24-minute therapy session, I find it also interesting how simple it actually is in lyrics and how there are many instances that focus more on the music and letting that element say what it has to say, I applied black and white as the theme here because Forever Rain MV is black and white and I just applied it and from what I heard, it is an honest mixtape about RM himself and as it turns out, the entire playlist is gorgeous.

Spilled

It’s 9:30 in the evening at October 5, 2018 as I’m writing this. I personally, still don’t know the entire concept of my blog, I just literally write whatever I want but so far, it’s been a lot about music and how it makes me feel, the lyrics and how I love them, and, sometimes, my poetry. I am terrible at expressing my emotions straight forwardly, that’s why I have poetry to help me, I play with the words to display or mask how I’m really feeling inside, it’s weird, but somehow, I find myself when I write poetry or read it. In this post, I might talk about how I discovered poetry, the evolution of my music or my plans for this blog so far (note that I’m still going with the flow of my brain because it is a noisy poetic mess and I am really talkative, so I need to let it out).

I practiced song writing first before I dived into poetry; they’re almost the same anyway. I started practicing writing songs at 3^rd grade when I noticed that the lyrics rhyme and I know that you call those poems, so my attempt at rhyming started there. The first song I wrote that I like, that has a melody very similar to a Hannah Montana song that I forgot, is entitled “Invisible”. I wrote it a time when the whole classroom is so noisy, and everybody is talking with somebody while I’m just stuck there while people are talking around me and it just popped out. The next song I wrote is a love song, a one-sided love song, it’s inspired by the lyrics of Perfect Two that everybody has been singing that time. It was the school fair and it was raining, I think I got lost and got separated from my friends so, I just sat there and thought of the song and I just played with it on my own and the lyrics evolved into a sad, one-sided love story. The original lyrics were using the word, “like”, because I knew that that wasn’t love yet but there’s no harm in pretending that it is. The third song that I liked that I wrote is entitled “Doubtful” and I have no idea what the melody inspiration was, I just woke up and thought of it. It was a Sunday morning, but I woke up and sang: “If I wake up on Monday morning…”; forgive me, I was in 8^th grade. I was reminiscing the time that I comforted a classmate suffering from a break up even though I knew she was talking about me negatively behind my back, I reflected about how I don’t want to be hurt by someone like that again and how I will be more careful when trusting people. It’s a small thing in 7^th grade but I still remember the feeling well that it’s kind of affected my well-being as I grew.

So those were the first three songs I wrote that I remember the most, I’ve written several (1 or 2) others but they were a bit recent. I still write songs sometimes, after all, I love to sing, the process is just whatever enters my head and I try to remember them the best that I can, I don’t write them seriously as I used to now.

My high school has an annual literary portfolio and it is the first poetry book I ever read (7^th grade). I spent the ride home from school then just rhyming and it just went on. I never let it go.

So, about my plans.

*Awkward silence*

I personally like my post about BTS’ Rain and Taylor Swift’s Clean. I think I might be best when I’m being honest. So far, my list of ideas for posts have been filled with other lists of songs so I might be going with that. This might be my fangirl rant place, though I like to think that I am practicing “objectivity” in my song reviews, and I’m probably failing because I talk mostly about my feelings, so I think I’ll still go through with that. In a way, this is going to be like my diary/journal. I put a part of myself in everything, so you will be able to find them everywhere, hidden not so subtle-y inside my reflections on the songs I’m listening to and the poems that I write. I’m exploring more albums now; my list is filled with albums I haven’t heard before but I’m willing to try. I think album playlists transport you into the mind of the artist better than other playlists, because other playlists are subjective to the listener, but albums are subjective to the creator. These are their thoughts and stories and it’s like entering a new environment of some sort when I listen to them in the order that they were released so, I’m excited for that.

My schedule is based on my time though, I’m in college and though my classes are more loose than usual, I use some of my time to study by myself (aka, rewrite notes), or update my Instagram, or finish the set of prompts I challenged for myself (which, when I finish, I will be making scrapbooks of and posting here, I like talking about my poetry).

So that’s that. I don’t know if I’m really talking to anybody, but it helps to think that I am.

Have a nice day!