I do believe that bands have a certain magic about them, one that cannot be replicated no matter how hard countless record labels will try, and attempting to decipher what makes one rise above all the others is a bit like trying to explain why you love your spouse. What hooked me, at first, felt like the same thing that hooks anyone to their favorite music-at an elemental level, I just really liked and connected to the songs. I finished with weeks to spare and started again. Then I went into the kitchen and told my husband that I got BTS now, its seven members-RM, Jin, Suga, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook-had a new album coming out, and my job starting at that moment would be to listen to their entire back catalogue before its release. Then, I messaged my friends that I totally understood this whole BTS phenomenon now, and was going to go all-in. I watched this video on a loop dozens of times. I hadn’t learned any of that yet, but I heard the song and I understood it. The singer is Jimin, the last member to join the group, the one with the shortest training period, the one management had considered kicking out of the group, the one with a notorious perfectionist streak. I wish I had a happier answer-the pastel joyride of “ Boy With Luv” or the chest-thumping boldness of “ MIC DROP.” But it was “Lie.” Somehow, even before I tracked down the song’s lyrics translated into English, I knew what the song was about, a lament on staving off darkness, impostor syndrome, and doubt. It’s a dark song, enough so that I compulsively apologize to people when I tell them it’s the song that sent me head-first into BTS fandom. At some point the algorithm gave me a live performance of the song “Lie,” off the group’s 2016 album Wings. I started with “Dynamite,” then hopped around some. On a whim one of those days, I decided to spend my day online listening to BTS videos on YouTube.
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It turned out that this tendency did not go away when I was left to my own devices in a small apartment with nowhere to go. I spent a lot of time wrestling with self-doubt, which I do all the time in the best circumstances. We were getting ready to launch Defector Media, which meant reuniting with everyone I used to work with to ask people to give us money to write about sports and culture in the middle of a massive global crisis. Without that regimentation, I wouldn’t have done anything at all. My days played out through deeply regimented blocks of time that had been assigned to various tasks for various spaces in the small apartment I shared with a husband and two cats, which later became one cat when one died during the pandemic. I was spending very little time at the beach, or outside, or seeing people at all when I discovered the Korean band BTS during the COVID-19 pandemic.
![tiny bubbles lyrics youtube tiny bubbles lyrics youtube](https://www.appunwrapper.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/img_3115.jpg)
That’s what unbridled joy made you look like, I thought-maybe a goofy tourist, or maybe just a sucker. I also never bought the ice cream because I knew it was cheaper off the beach overpriced beach ice cream, in my mind, was for tourists and suckers. I didn’t want to have to wash the saltwater from my hair later. Hell, most of the time, even when I did go to the beach, I did not even go in the water.
![tiny bubbles lyrics youtube tiny bubbles lyrics youtube](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/J_XmLLtVcCE/maxresdefault.jpg)
That is so lame.Īll that unbridled emotion somehow curdled in my mind. A friend once told me about the time she saw people running and screaming into the ocean with happiness and, though I don’t recall the exact words of my response, I remember the emotion of it: Oh, come on. As a child of Florida-my parents moved to the state when I was a year old, I grew up there, I went to college there, I worked in various newspapers across the state for eight and a half years, I traveled it from Pensacola to Jacksonville to Key West, I met my future husband there-I didn’t think much of or about moments like these. To see them flopping wholly into the warm salt water and tiny waves is to witness an unbridled and almost unhinged glee. They try their best on the dry sand, then become more surefooted on the compacted wet sand, navigate past the clumps of seaweed and beach detritus, and then throw their bodies into the ocean. People arriving from landlocked parts of the country, who perhaps have not even seen the ocean before, tend to run toward it people who have seen the ocean before, but not for awhile, run too. This is a common enough sight in Florida, a large landmass of limestone risen up from the ocean floor that juts out between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico as a giant stretch of coastline, and also where I grew up. I used to watch people run into the ocean.