The agony and ecstasy of j-hope
A celebration of the Korean artiste’s enthusiasm as he heads to the military
In the ‘Game Caterers’ episode of the Korean variety show ‘Run BTS’, Kim Namjoon grabs his bandmate Jung Hoseok by the arm and bellows at his face, “I told you not to get excited!”
Namjoon, like BTS’s vast fanbase, had known beforehand that a warning was essential.
Hoseok is famous for his excitement and had said the word, “okay!” to encourage a bandmate in a game of table-tennis with their three other bandmates. As per the very logic-driven rules of the variety show, any English word spoken by any BTS member would mean an awful penalty.
Hoseok’s error meant that his and Namjoon’s team would lose devastatingly and miss out on a very silly prize.
Viewers of ‘Run BTS’ cherish the world’s most popular band’s steadfast adherence to game principals, the millionaire performers’ humble expressions of joy at small prizes and their overall hilarious conduct in the show. Even outside the scope of this show, BTS members are scarcely - if ever - confrontational with each other and have been models of respectful co-existence.
Namjoon’s rebuke of Hoseok is not an exception to this. The two are friends and continue to be. And Namjoon, as the leader of a band that holds sway over a sizeable chunk of Korea’s economy — to mention nothing of fans’ emotions — has a natural ability to be occasionally assertive without leaving any scars.
And yet, his exasperation characterises Hoseok.
Hoseok is a rapper, songwriter and occasional vocalist at BTS. His home is in hip-hop, with multiple songs noting his own journey with the genre. In his music, he is Korea, the Far East, Harlem, Chinatown and at once, every lane of every city which has birthed music. He writes in English, sings in Korean, raps in a mishmash of both, with lyrics that are so simple, you wonder how to process them at all.
But at the heart of Hoseok is his dance. In the decade that BTS has been active, rarely has a beat fallen without Hoseok’s body falling in precise tandem with it. In performance after performance that has made the band the tour de force it is today, his body has leapt, fallen, pirouetted, split, appeared to disintegrate and gathered itself back up again. He does this while rapping, singing, and maintaining a frankly godlike level of stage presence.
As is now lore, Hoseok’s dance drew him to the Korean capital of Seoul from his distinctly smaller hometown of Gwangju and to the doors of BTS. As a teenager, Hoseok was a gifted freestylist. In adulthood, Hoseok’s dance makes music visible to the eye.
As BTS grew, the seven members earned the love of millions. Their music broke through boundaries of pop, spoke a language of universality and forced the rest of the world to wake up to the behemoth of talent that they and their country represented. Fans of the band cherished the unique character traits that defined the members. This was made easy because the structure of their branding has always been a heady balance of professional and casual — you see BTS on the red carpet in 100,000 dollar coats but you also see all seven of them lounging and bickering on a single decrepit sofa.
Soon, the world’s media latched on to Hoseok’s bright stage name while describing him — ‘j-hope.’ This was convenient because in public, Hoseok, who is affectionately called ‘Hobi’, embodied the spirit of hope itself. He smiled wide through sweaty three-hour concerts, he egged on his six bandmates with ad-libs and constant hyping, and at interviews he eased the load on Namjoon (until recently, the only one who spoke English in foreign interactions) with his constantly exuberant participation.
Yet, as BTS fans know, as Western media is keen to highlight and as Namjoon fears in competitive circumstances, j-hope’s defining feature is his enthusiasm, his very undefeated excitement towards all professional situations, big and small.
In one of his first songs, 1 Verse, j-hope writes that he puts his han — an untranslatable Korean word whose essence captures the collective and lived sorrow of all time — in his work and that he hopes that people understand this while listening to his music.
“내 한을 담아드릴게 다 들으면서 자각하길”
In the vast tranche of media on BTS, supplied by the band’s agency HYBE, there is a tired j-hope or two. But that is quite rare. From variety shows to interviews to press meets to concerts at gigantic stadiums, j-hope is a force of allness. When he is j-hope of BTS, his public persona is always busy, intricately crowded by the act of being j-hope himself — forever reacting to the occasion, chiming in with a cheer for a band member, responding with a loud laugh to an interviewer’s inane question and rushing (feet falling in beat) to fill an empty space on stage.
Not just in his performances, but especially in them, he was giving in a way that defied reason. In ‘Piece of Peace Part 1’ of his 2018 debut solo mixtape Hope World, his declaration gives voice to this acute necessity in him, to act as a filler upper, and a sort of untiring solace. “I want to fill up the space of your faith, with the simple ease with which a cake fills up a stomach.”
“채워 주고파 믿음 단순하고 쉽게 배가 차는 케이크 조각처럼."
It is easy to see why he is BTS’s performance leader. When the band performs their troublesome and complicated routines on stage, j-hope’s eyes dart around keeping note of members’ positions — a fact not quite visible to the naked eye but something BTS members themselves confess to being scared of.
Rehearsal footage show him labouring over a millisecond’s ankle movement of a member who is only partially visible in that stage of the song or worried sick over where his exhale should be in the scheme of the beat.
The effect of this is excruciating. It is as if the ground scorches under Hoseok. In close-up videos shot by audience members, his effort is often seen written on his face, distinguishing it from the more chilled out demeanour of his bandmates. This was not just limited to the stage but also in all situations where he had to be j-hope of BTS — and given BTS’s extraordinary schedule for the last decade, there have been many such situations.
His visible enthusiasm has always occupied his whole being and, incredibly for an artiste in a world that is supposed to be produced to perfection, j-hope seemed to not be able to help it. He was in the moment, always giving it his all. His vocation and his colleagues had his undivided attention.
A clever pun by Seokjin or an existential sigh by Yoongi drove j-hope into rapture no matter where he was — White House or Weverse, where the band members do live broadcasts and interact with fans. He laughs, he cries and is absorbed by this life of his as a performer. He reacts with enthusiasm even if no one does. He is the lone citizen of a world created by his own grand enjoyment.
“In the beginning I used to think j-hope would talk to fill the silence during shows, but now I know that’s just how he is,” bandmate Yoongi once said.
The most beguiling part of this was that j-hope coupled this fullness with an ability to not hog the spotlight. In a band with six other talented men, it is something of a treat to see him lose nothing of his groove even at the absolute back of the set-up. But when he did occupy centerstage, his love was written on his face with a purity that removes all aura. It makes you want to scream — and often his fans have done just that.
I, who love BTS and j-hope, would find j-hope’s dogged enthusiasm endearing but also a niggling thorn to my side.
Why was he trying so hard, I would think, in the recesses of my room in a country with a culture that admonished open display of effort. Why doesn’t he play his part, pretend to be aloof, give a flying fuck about something instead of embracing every photoshoot, every appearance and every red carpet like the biggest and most joyous priority of his life? Did he not know that his extraordinary attention to every interviewer made him seem unserious, that it reduced his brand value?
Then, BTS members got individual Instagrams, driving me into paroxysms of seething. Not a second passes between a BTS member uploading a hot selfie on Instagram and j-hope responding with around seven fire and heart emojis. He shares solo music of his bandmates and his own work with entirely similar frequency on social media, never once giving anything on earth a miss.
The more I grasped that j-hope’s enthusiasm was entirely unmotivated by occasion and fuelled wholly by the independence of his character, the more I grumbled. He was always doing so much, I thought. And that very visible doing of so much seemed to rob his image of an aura I felt he had but one he didn’t let us feel.
To me — all-knowing, all-seeing lone surveyor of the world — it was clear: j-hope’s enthusiasm reduced j-hope in the eye of a cold scrutiniser.
And in this world, cold scrutinisers are many. Especially from the West, if you are a man of the East. In the 2021 profile of the band who were on the Rolling Stone magazine’s cover, its writer Brian Hiatt swept j-hope with a single brush of an adjective — “enthusiastic”. In that essay, Hiatt also forgot to mention that j-hope is among BTS members who write and produce songs.
The West has a way of reducing the value of artistic enthusiasm. Its artistes are meant to travel great distances but they are not meant to show how badly they want it, and the machinery involved in getting it. They dismiss Asians because in spheres of life where they compete with Asians, the latter are distinguished by the value of their enthusiasm, whose drive seems to surpass theirs and is thus ridiculed. Enthusiasm, the West has deemed, is the realm of the religious fanatic and is no collaborator of rational thought.
Even the historical cards are rigged against enthusiasm. Popular culture of religious enthusiasm trained Britain to see the maverick William Blake with initial suspicion. “Such enthusiasm was felt by many contemporaries as a vulgar feature of the popular culture…,” says the Oxford professor Jon Mee. Indeed, dominant cultural tropes have ridiculed enthusiasm and enthusiastic writing — deeming it light by virtue of the very enthusiasm that feeds it. Its claim to supernatural authority diluted its essence in 17th century England, that arbiter of all cultural prominence. Enthusiasm is always slightly mad, somewhat shameless.
And thus it was that while j-hope was fans’ “sunshine,” BTS’s “vitamin” and the image of great cheer, his politics, the depth of his songs and the self-assurance of the masculinity he portrayed were lost, I felt.
In 1 Verse, j-hope compared himself to a ‘watermelon being licked by people’ who would get no taste of what his inside is like. ‘Mang,’ a character he created for a line of merchandise (all BTS members have selfsame characters) wears a mask and we have never seen their face.
His treatment of depression — a topic which BTS has taken great strides in introducing to Korean and global pop listeners’ repertoire — is unique. Fans know this and also the fact that people missed it because of its squiggly simplicity and j-hope own self-representation as a beacon of hope and happiness. In the same episode of Run BTS I’ve mentioned at the top, j-hope says in a moment of truth, ‘I feel like the shadow behind me is growing larger.’ Band members nod knowingly.
In the song Jamais Vu, j-hope says he needs to ‘heal his medic’. His use of English was canny and had political purpose, but people were missing it all the time, I felt, despondent that j-hope was not immediately scheduling a revamp of his entire persona at my advice.
But while I was grumbling at the grand injustice of it all, j-hope was doing something better.
He was making an album themed on this very aspect of his character.
Long before he earned Namjoon’s rebuke in the variety show, before BTS walked into unprecedented fame with the band’s pandemic time solace Dynamite, and before conversation shifted from BTS deserving a Grammy to how the Grammys didn’t deserve BTS, j-hope knew that his enthusiasm was unique. And with this understanding, he had been working on his second album, Jack in the Box.
I am not the first to note this, but in his album and in the defining performance at Lollapalooza since its release, dance — his chief talent — played an almost secondary role to music. The output was raw, the lyrics were once again deceptively stark and all 28 minutes of the album seethed with naked acknowledgement of the fact that his wild enthusiasm for the whole life of an artiste was something he has had to tackle with difficulty.
For a man who scarcely reveals a detail about himself in interviews, j-hope has been an open book in his music, where he talks of love, loss, solace, concerns and the mortal fire that consumes his artistic being. The whole of his latest album is an admission of his pain — one which ardent fans know and understand — that he is his artiste’s persona. He may be Jung Hoseok while going to his hometown, and j-hope while returning to Seoul (he himself says this in the Disney documentary essaying his historic journey to Lolla), but his willingness to be this artiste is his core.
“What if I had no hope?” He asks in his song What If.
“I burned it all,” he says in his headlining song Arson, which is literally about setting fire to his passions.
In art, it is thought, there is an essential divide between the naive and the sentimental. A naive creator is a creator of art, he is spontaneous. A sentimental creator is a craftsperson who reflects. The latter operates well with the rules, but the former builds the rules and breaks them at will — often possessed by an artistic spirit which is inexplicable, making his art far greater than his corporeal being as well. I think j-hope is the naive artist of our times, so original, with a musical expression which travels the world but is so deeply his own that had he been born in the West, he would have been celebrated far, far more than what he is being celebrated as now.
J-hope’s music has never sounded like much else. With time, his lyrics have grown quaint, reflecting not just existential worries like many of BTS members’ personal music does, but also the assertion of his inner self. I don’t know of any other artiste who uses his songs as such a stark window into his core and manages to enjoy such a degree of popularity. His music is largely untrammelled by everyday experiences, it distils his life and in doing so, gives us something pure and priceless. Maybe this is why j-hope celebrates his fans, his friends, his collaborators, and his BTS colleagues, and honours everyone at every instance with unmitigated joy — he knows himself, and he likes himself. So he also likes those who like him.
J-hope exists as an aberration. An honest-to-god declaration that you can wear your heart on your sleeve and that would not mean that it is any less serious.
Now that j-hope is passing from an intensely artistic existence — BTS’s output has been constant in a process that started from earlier than 2010 — to a private time with the Korean army, it’s easy to see how his life has been written like the first chapter of a novel. J-hope is quite taken with the idea of resembling a novel and speaks of a ‘novel-like feel’ in his 2018 song Hope World. But it astounds me as to how much he has been successful in writing the novel of his own career, despite in many cases having had little complete control over it, as few artistes do.
Decades ago, he became ‘j-hope’ in the cast of J. Cole, a rapper who was continents away. His first album was Hope World, as J. Cole’s was Cole World. Now that chapter one is drawing to a close, in a gigantic metaphor seen in his swan-song On the Street, j-hope, dancing in the New York underground, is pulled up to the streets as J. Cole raps on a terrace. Somewhere in his years of toil, j-hope had become an idol who could meet his own idol and produce a song together.
And somewhere in the process, Western media also came around. In just one of the inscrutable ways in which j-hope’s genius simplicity leaves people in his wake gaping, news reports on the collaboration used the same word j-hope had used to describe J.Cole when they first met.
“You’re my muse,” he had told J.Cole in English.
It was an unusual declaration, I had certainly never heard of an artiste referring to another as a ‘muse’. But it stuck as a subversion and extension of the meaning of the word itself.
The song is a farewell of sorts, a thank you note to fans before j-hope joins the military. He also manages to declare a bit more of himself in it.
“내 두 발은 선뜻 걸어, anywhere,” he sings. ‘My two feet walk willingly anywhere,’ he says. His life, his image and his choices, were his, he says.
But it is the next line that comes as an example of one of those devastatingly simple bits that define j-hope. “J in the air,” which he also used as a caption for a series of photos with J.Cole, is poignant with the image of him being on a break. He has walked the streets for years, and now is thrust into suspended pause.
I don’t know what happens next. But I hope that j-hope lives as acutely as an artiste as he has all this while. His enthusiasm may have set fire to itself, but it leaps in his music, it throbs in his dance. He gives me hope. May it never die.