K-pop supergroup BTS is preparing for the release of its upcoming album, Map of the Soul: Persona, on April 12, and they just released a new track where leader RM asks the eternal question: “Who the hell am I?” In a comeback trailer for their new song, “Persona,” RM dives back into uncertainties over identity.
Things go in cycles for BTS. Up to this point, the group has released albums as trilogies, and Persona marks the beginning of a new “era.” The septet creates whole narratives across multiple albums, and its latest Love Yourself series was their most ambitious to date. “Persona” serves as an introductory song, and finds RM sorting through his different selves.
The new song is littered with references to BTS’s older material, like “Fake Love” and RM’s latest “playlist.” The trailer even features visual callbacks to the group’s 2 Cool 4 Skool era, the “Skool Luv Affair” comeback trailer and “Idol.” If you’re going to have your own “BTS Universe,” it makes sense that the releases are intertextual. There’s also a dash of Jungian archetypes, the idea that people have unconscious archetypal traits:
I dreamt of becoming a superhero
Now it feels like I really became one
This line harkens back to last year’s B-side, “Anpanman,” in which the titular Japanese superhero made of bread became a metaphor for how BTS’s own do-gooding comes at the expense of themselves.
The self-referentialism of “Persona” is almost like a roll call for the different versions of BTS. The video has even inspired a #PersonaChallenge, where fans share older photos to note their personal growth:
The ‘me’ that I want myself to be
The ‘me’ that people want me to be
The ‘me’ that you love
And the ‘me’ that I create
Questions of identity form the conceptual basis of a lot of BTS’s work. There’s a common notion that K-pop idols put on personas for the camera. BTS is the rare boy band that has a reputation for being authentic—but they’ve previously spoken about filtering what they show onscreen. During the first episode of their YouTube Red series, Burn the Stage, Suga noted that “we don’t want to show them the entire process.”
BTS often complicates the notion between reality and fantasy—the idea of the self is not so black and white for them. That notion is reflected in the visuals of the trailer. Genius contributor milkmmxe notes that RM is seen as four different version of himself in the trailer: Kim Namjoon, an idol, a rapper, and a leader.
You can see RM searching for his real self throughout last year’s solo release, mono. On “Uhgood,” he struggles to find the dividing line between what’s real and what’s ideal about himself:
But I still want to cross that two bridges
To reach myself
To the real me, yeah yeah
To the real me, yeah
Issues of authenticity also play out in the group’s crossover strategy. American ARMYs, the group’s fandom, are averse to suggestions that the group sing in English, with many believing that Korean lyrics are intrinsic to their artistry. The members recently spoke about not wanting to compromise who they are in their cover story for Entertainment Weekly.
“I don’t want to compare, but I think it’s even harder as an Asian group,” RM told the magazine. “A Hot 100 and a Grammy nomination, these are our goals. But they’re just goals—we don’t want to change our identity or our genuineness to get the number one.”
But “Persona” also personalizes psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s high-minded theory about archetypes:
My shadow, I wrote and called it ‘hesitation’
It has never hesitated after becoming that
It keeps appearing under the stage or the light
Keeps glaring at me scorchingly like a heat wave (oh shit)
As Genius user milkmmxe points out, the “shadow” is a reference to Jungian archetypes, reflecting the darker part of someone’s personality.
In an unexpected twist, Murray Stein’s book Jung’s Map of the Soul—the album title’s namesake—is sold out on BTS’s online shop. The author spoke about how RM’s United Nations speech impressed him. “What impressed me about that was that he kept the distinction, carefully, between who he was [as] a boy growing up in a small village outside of Seoul, Korea and who he is publicly and famously now. You know, a star in the firmament of the entertainment world. If he were to identify with that role totally, he would lose contact with himself, with the boy he was, with the human being that he is.”
Watch BTS’s comeback trailer for “Persona” above, and read all the lyrics on Genius now.
