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huayangnianhuaall my youth: a needlessly detailed close reading of txt’s discography
i want to talk about boybands and I want to talk about youth. i want to talk about the same thing that boy groups have been obsessed with circling around since time immemorial—because boy bands are about boyhood, whether we are embodying or chasing or subverting it. i want to talk about tomorrow by together, whose discography has been clearly preoccupied with this since debut, and how i think they’ve hit on something real and true of youth-and-boyband-dom with the latest release (The Name Chapter: Freefall, which is a goofy title, but is also thematically resonant as we will find)
this started out initially because i wanted to write about the latest album and why i think it really clarifies sooooooooooo many themes & brings the txt discography back to a more familiar space all the while building/complicating meaning, but then i started talking about the context behind a specific sort of archetype i think we’re seeing more of in kpop and the topic got away from me, so here is an essay.
the most beautiful moment in life
so what do i mean by boyband content about youth? let’s define some terms. when i say comebacks about Youth, what i mean is an overall aesthetic sense that doesn’t merely depict young people, but seeks to define young adulthood as a specific and finite interval of time. the ubiquitous music video of high school students in uniform and charming neighbourhood boys is certainly about being young, but it’s precisely the implication of perpetuity that means this isn’t what i’m talking about—the Youth comeback is primarily preoccupied with the end of youth, and high school is, of course, eternal. by and large, boyband music about youth is either about entrapment (school sucks! i can’t wait to get out of here and join the real world!), ennui (i don’t know who i am and i’m scared to find out), or a precarious joy (i dont want this to be over; i want to stay in this moment forever).
there are some common semiotic motifs that tend to crop up in service to this aesthetic, in how mvs are shot, the styling of our boybanders, sets & props, etc. some things you might see in a boy group mv about Youth: running with reckless abandon (in a field, down a city street), deliberately styled down fashion, a pseudo-realistic style—usually the outdoors, some on-location shooting rather than on a set, an implied spontaneity or unorthodox place to gather (a trainyard, a swimming pool, a rooftop), sometimes fireworks, boys piled on and on each other, you get the point. oftentimes, naturalistic motifs of time passing are seen or alluded to—sunsets, the seasons, flowers.
all this is to say that i think a major touchstone text in the development of this theory is bts’s hyyh series. it’s not that i think bts invented this as a concept. a lot of early shinhwa, h.o.t, sechkies, seo taiji, etc. is certainly about a disaffected & troubled youth rallying against society in a way that is reminiscent of early bangtan as well, and while that narrative isn’t precisely the same thing, it certainly stems from the same place and i would argue its presence is instrumental in laying down the groundwork for the Youth narrative. i think that what hyyh did was 1) codify the general imagery and aesthetic into a recognizable whole specifically as a cohesive, pan-comeback (from music to mv to paratextual lore) package and 2) understand its own nature as being inherently, inextricably, About Youth. in other words, hyyh was one of the most prominent comebacks about youth that knew it was about youth.
this is generally part of the army intro package but assuming not everyone here is ex-army or cares about bts (not that you need to be, but im cognizant of audience here LOL) let’s rehash the meaning of hyyh. hwa yang yeon hwa or 화양연화 is officially translated into ‘the most beautiful time in life’ but individually the hangul means, roughly, ‘the years like flowers’ (fun fact the hanja 花样年华 is actually the original title of wong kar-wai’s film more commonly translated as ‘in the mood for love’). translated a little more directly, the connection becomes way more clear: hyyh is about youth in the way that youth is about temporary beauty—the flower-like years are your most beautiful moments in life specifically because of their fleeting nature. everything that went into developing the hyyh mythos was devoted to that understanding. youth is beautiful, but the beautiful times never last. the in-built time loop paradoxically only emphasizes the point: seokjin is doomed to fail to save his friends, because no matter how many times he repeats the story, youth always will end. the seasons will continue to pass. all he can ever do is turn the time back again. this essay isn’t about hyyh, but i do think understanding hyyh is key in understanding the genre im theorizing here, and then further is particularly key in understanding txt’s specific modulation upon the theme. i won’t get into like, my personal analysis of hyyh LOL there’s honestly enough of that in this world, but suffice to say, i do think its rippling effect sets the foundation for later entries in the same Youth narrative that are self-aware in the same way. here we begin to dig into the metatextual implications.
i think the connection between the themes we’ve identified so far and the very nature of boyband-dom itself is fairly evident. boybands end. some just stop being groups entirely. plenty don’t, but even if they keep making music, the mature boyband is no longer reliant on those adolescent bonds—either the boy part or the band part has to die, you know? just as the school system is a great analogy for the entrapment present in some variations on the Youth narrative, being in a boyband is like being in school: you have a schedule someone else makes for you, you work hard all day until you’re exhausted, you’re constantly evaluated and set against your peers, the theoretical endpoint of all this is some nebulous measure of success that will be attained when your hard work pays off. being in a boyband is also all about joy—another key theme—and specifically, the reckless, wide-open, infinite sense of joy. how else can you describe the sensation of being on stage performing to a thousand screaming voices other than to compare it to the changing tide of the sea, the overwhelm of a sunset, the glow of spring on the horizon after a harsh winter?
again, like i said, it’s not like the Youth narrative was rare or limited to the specific troubled hyyh version or anything. some notable examples just to round this discussion out and further clarify: nct dream “we go up” and “go” (they made some others with this energy but you know these two are the Classic examples), cix “save me kill me”, stray kids “young wings”, jj project “tomorrow, today”, literally everything that new boygroup the wind has done, plave “the sixth summer” (i know they’re animated guys but that only makes it more stark!), and, honestly, if you want to watch an mv that perfectly embodies the theme just watch nine.i “young boy” (it is literally in the title). i started writing this before wayv announced their upcoming album titled ‘on my youth’ with the first of the track video featuring the members in various troubled youthful situations before they break free & slow motion run in the rain together, so i think i’m a prophet. that does bring me neatly to the next point, which is: well, so what? other than that i care about this, why am i talking about this now?
well, it’s because fresh concepts are back, baybee! and i think there has been an interesting shift towards the Youth narrative specifically in the big releases that theoretically are going to dictate how 5th gen (oof) is going to play out. the now codified “4th gen” “noise music” tropes dominated so much of the late 2010s to early 2020 or so, and i think this is important because so much massive movement into kpop fandom happened during this time, so this style really crystallized as A Way To Be A Modern Boy Group for new people. even though “dark” concepts have always existed, and even now as im describing how we’ve shifted away, it’s a cycle that has basically existed since kpop started. and because the “dark” trends are also in part driven by spectacle, a slick production, and high intensity dance, there wasn’t a lot of room for the more grounded & optimistic imagining that is required to achieve the Youth narrative. (not that 3rd/4th gen, high level production and dance is absolutely contraindicative—we go up is a quintessential entry in the canon after all—but certainly it just makes it harder is all). but as we collectively grow tired of the dark concept, so, too, must it end. and now here we are, in a landscape where the latest big debut songs from the groups that likely will become the vanguard of the new gen all, to some extent, embody the Youth narrative, and specifically embody them in that meta-textual way, that is about being a boyband as much as it is about being youths.
zerobaseone “in bloom” is perhaps the most obvious example. already we see: in bloom. the boys wake up and immediately are caught in running tableau, singing about how they will always be in chase, always running towards you. every lyric in this song is an attempt to refute the truth that they dedicate a whole phrase to: nothing lasts forever. zerobaseone promise to not let that come to fruition—even if it’s the same ending, they will keep running to you!—but of course their very nature as a project group meta-textually renders that already impossible (let’s not talk about contract extensions here LOL we are assuming the way of every project group here). another really prominent example is riize “memories”—first of all, the 90s nostalgia practically bleeds off of this one. riize jumps around some train tracks and spend a lazy summer together, singing about all the things they want to reach out and grasp, healing from loneliness, but ultimately, about wanting to hold onto the memories. in here i think another theme that is particularly prominent about the latest iteration of this narrative arises: memories is depicting this almost pre-emptive retrospective. there’s nostalgia for this current moment baked in. we’re singing about the memories as they are being formed. lastly, i think boynextdoor is like, basically all about this. they’re called boynextdoor, first of all. i think serenade is the best example, since it’s about literally a first serenade, the mv filled with our boys next door gathering, piled on each other, marveling at each others strategies for serenading, depicting that flush of first love.
okay all that was a lot to say: here is something i think exists (the kpop Youth narrative) and i think as we move into next generation kpop, the themes & motifs elucidated in the Youth narrative have already played a prominent role in the likely establishing music in the canon. all of this is of course background for what im going to talk about next, which is how i think txt fits into this canon, specifically, and why i think the name chapter: freefall (god i really do think txt album titles are silly sorry) is a kind of unique entry into the new canon that clarifies & modulates on the themes we’re describing.
we lost the summer
so! what does this have to do with txt?
i haven’t mentioned any of the txt tracks that specifically fit into the Youth narrative thus far so we can talk about it all together here, but suffice to say, i think if you want to understand, like, txt’s group identity, then you have to understand this narrative. because txt have been basically making music surrounding the Youth narrative since they debuted, separate from the broader trends that were popular at the time. i think they have been pretty remarkably consistent as well with this identity, in a way that other contemporaneous groups have been less so. stray kids is a good counterpoint example for same-ish debut era & career trajectory, particularly since a lot of early skz was about Youth. consider skz’s development from the early my pace/young wings vibe to the sound that most people would probably conjure up now when one mentions them (more in line with gods menu/thunderous/maniac). in comparison, txt have branched out less from their debut sound—you can see a pretty consistent throughline from crown to blue hour to lovesong, to the latest chasing that feeling. If anything you can see their commitment to theme by the fact that even now, in 2023, they are getting styled in variations on little boy shorts LOL this isn’t like, a comment on quality or anything, by the by. i’m really only using the example to emphasize the way txt returns over & over again to this sound/narrative. and obviously im not saying there have been no exceptions and departures, notably & recently good boy gone bad and sugar rush ride both (txt is not immune to the dark or sexy trend either!!) i’m also not saying they were visionaries or mavericks for having some brand loyalty to this theme—again, the fresh concept/dark concept cycle has been here forever. i think what’s true is that they have clearly had this preoccupation with Youth in their group identity that is fairly consistent across their active years, and i think that in the landscape of a new, developing canon where those same themes & motifs are more prominent than previously, analyzing txt’s discography through this lens allows us to understand what they particularly are saying about Youth in their entries to the canon.
i do also want to say that txt’s position as following bts in an unavoidable way certainly is probably a big part of the reason why they’ve had this consistent narrative throughline. bighit (still bighit at the time!) saw how obsessively people tracked the hyyh storyline (as we speak bang pd has announced some 2025 anniversary thing) and wanted to do that again.
txt debuts in 2019 with “crown”—which in and of itself doesn’t hit all the marks that we’ve talked about. the mv is glossy, mostly filmed indoors on set, bright and fresh certainly, but not carrying any of that naturalistic grit that ive been describing as a hallmark of the genre. but i would argue that the debut as a whole hews closer to our themes when we consider it holistically. starting right from the pre-debut teaser videos, they feature the members in various scattered locations in seoul (taehyun phone videos on the bus, soobin sprawled on the field on campus, beomgyu in the metro, yeonjun making trouble at an arcade, kai hanging out with dogs near the park)—there are Real Boys. the “our summer” (seasons!) video also comes to mind, specifically relying on the boys’ selfie cams, meant to mimic a certain self-directed spontaneity. and of course, key to it all, in the actual music, this entire first album is about the hesitations and doubts of youth, where the horns/crown thing is a pretty self-evident metaphor for puberty. “that’s not me staring blankly into the mirror” txt sing, “i dont know who i am”. the other theme that emerges from this first album is the idea that although things are confusing, mired in too-rapid change, one thing will always be there: you.
of course, this is pretty much the core of all kpop. the parasocial longing. again, there’s nothing particularly unique here—a lot of kpop songs do this thing where it is actually one thing (loneliness, depression, the industry, ennui, etc.) but couch the more complicated feelings into love songs (i hate myself and i can’t see what tomorrow might look like…. when you’re not here, girl!), and certainly plenty of songs in this vein do this with the ennui of youth—it’s the entire premise of bts “i need u” (life sucks & this love is complicated… but i need u, girl!). txt’s specific brand of this is mired around teenaged confusion and self-loathing morphing into triumph through love—i’ve turned into a monster, but you can save me. you can turn my horns into a crown. it’s this theme of yearning to be saved that suffuses their entire discography. youth is about love is about youth, etc. i argue that in this context (as with most kpop fansongs), the ‘you’ that is the subject has a triple-fold meaning: ‘you,’ a specific hypothetical y/n romantic subject; ‘you,’ the broad fandom—specifically in an idolfan way—as moa; or using a singular proxy ‘you’ as a substitute towards expressing love towards the band/your members. the “our summer” lyrics and mv are a great example of this: obviously we can infer a theoretical girl that they’re singing about here, but this song’s placement on the first EP & the selfie cam video makes it evident that the ‘summer’ that is being sung about is a metaphorical representation of having finally debuted, and lastly within the video, there is, of course, no actual subject other than the members themselves, so when they sing “if we’re together, feels like summer,” they are on some level talking about the boyband bond that is being formed before our eyes. why does this matter? well this rhetorical device is what allows us to marry the youth narrative with a love story. again, as we’ve established, the state of being within a boyband is an excellent metaphor for the youth narrative—a state that is beautiful but temporary—and by associating longing for boyband-dom with longing for love, the associative effect is that love is what allows us to stay in youth. it’s summer when we’re together implying that winter comes when we’re apart. this love is what binds us to this moment (the most beautiful moment—)
i won’t do like an exhaustive deep dive close reading of every single EP and album they’re released, simply because i do not have that sort of stamina. but i want to sketch out the overall trajectory of the narrative arc across their three album cycles so far, so let’s do a rundown. let’s talk overview. let’s talk themes! “run away” features an mv that is way closer to our familiar themes (the… running away LOL and the classrooms that give away into fantastical landscapes, the boy-covens, the hidden secrets in the city) while the chorus asks for you to “please be my eternity, please call my name” even while acknowledging that what we run towards is the end of the world. “can’t you see me?” sets things in a suburban unreality, full of the brimming eerie tension of teenager secretive friendships—this time, the theme is betrayal, and here we come to the second half of the messaging. if txt are longing for you to save them, then what happens when you inevitably fail? “my heart is heavy, cause you don’t understand me”—the closing chapter of the dream chapter is about betrayal. it’s about, despite the yearning, eternity isn’t possible. we can never understand each other. i think the other notable thing that runs throughout underneath all three comebacks is that they’re, like, shockingly violent? there’s a scene in the fairytale-esque mv for “nap of a star” (off of STAR) that has a scene where yeonjun breaks off his antlers and it’s very grimm brothers’ in tone, like there is some implied blood & gore there. “run away” has the implication of arson running through it and a fixation on wounds/bandages. “can’t you see me?” uses tomatoes & ketchup & strawberries to obvious bloody implication, and the mv for “eternally” has a lot of horror elements, like the implication that beomgyu tokyo ghoul tentacles his abusive parents to death (sob) and that haunting scene of yeonjun stuck through with overgrown oozy plants. to sum up: the dream chapter is about a youth preoccupied with monstrousness & the undercurrent of a hidden violence, the attempt to reach out for love as a way to be saved, but ultimately realizing that this is futile because love ends and understanding is lost.
between dream & chaos, we have our first minisode, a sort of interlude. our title track “blue hour” is, inherently, transitive in and of itself—it describes that time of day between sunset and true dusk, that glowing interval of time when the world is teeming with possibility. again, we see the theme of time passing crop up, the transitory time of the day being magical because it is about transition. that orange-glowing sky, the magic we want to be trapped in—before it ends. blue hour is where we finally arrive at acknowledging the thing that hyyh does: things are beautiful not despite them ending, but because of.
if the dream chapter is about first love, the chaos chapter is about adolescent love. the first Real, Complicated love you have. “lovesong” is all extremes, introducing mature themes (like it’s kind of a gimme but “please use me like a drug” would never have come earlier in their career you know) and returning again to the attempt to use love to save yourself, but this time with a more troubled layer, boosted by a distinct teenaged angst. no longer under the delusion that love can last forever, instead, “lovesong” is about searching for a discernable, concrete truth to this imperfect love anyway—I Know It’s Real I Can Feel It. “loser=lover” is resentful—it’s not merely that this love failed, but that to love at all is flawed. again, we return to the theme of “you were my saviour”. it is also in “loser=lover” where the implication of violence comes out again but in full force. rather than the magical violence and heightened reality from the dream chaper, the “loser=lover” mv features depictions of real world violence: bank robbery, abusive parents, workplace harassment, you get the drift. again, the shift here is apparent: we have left the realm of pubescent confusion and entered the world of young adulthood. the rest of the full length chaos chapter album is mired with this back and forth, a jaded new understanding of what it means to be mature. “what if i had been that puma?” and “no rules” both presenting a dilemma between A & B, routine and freedom—life is complicated by having too much to choose from. and besides, it’s not like the untainted version of a true love exists anyhow. from the melodramatic anguish in “lovesong” and “loser=lover” to the ambivalent confusion & jadedness through the album, a clearly teenaged turbulence arises. sorry, i’m an antiromantic.
i will come out and say that “good boy gone bad” wasn’t exactly my favourite release when it initially came out LOL i think (and still do) that this was an attempt to match the general popular vibe or like, you know, at least it was a sort of “txt can do dark concepts too” sort of comeback. not to read too much into it but i do think it’s notable that, again, we have the TT of a minisode EP being explicitly about transformation (good boy gone bad). in context of the overarching narrative we’re developing here, if youth is inherently troubled by the tension between innocence and growing knowledge of the world, and if love is the string that is supposed to pull you through that transition, then so what if love is inherently flawed? what if the process of loving is what matures you? good boy gone bad says goodbye to boyhood—literally, “erase that boy inside of you”. gbgb also makes it explicit that this chase for love is driven by a longing to become something else, “you completely changed me when i was fragile / i spent hours in the mirror trying to become you”—we go back to the theme that love is transformative, but this time the subject of txt’s love is the goal in and of itself.
so, what are txt trying to become? what lies at the end of youth? the name chapter opens with an EP titled temptation, aptly so. two images immediately arise from this comeback: the devil and neverland. it’s pretty self evident what the thesis is here: lead me to temptation and i’ll be a child forever. despite the ~sexier concept, the name chapter: temptation is about a longing for a left behind innocence. if yearning for love will keep you young, and if you have learned that love is neither eternal nor pure, “sugar rush ride” is about knowing all of that and wanting it anyway—”taking me into the dream / the liar on the bedside.” there is a sensual, psychedelic turn to the mv, drawing us deeper and deeper into a lurid, dripping forest, but before all that, it opens with the vast beach & the boys running, chasing, as they always do. the album closer is “farewell neverland” which is about as textually about youth as you can get. “I hoped for endless flying,” but it’s “time to fall.” temptation is about leaving youth, running into that forest of full maturity—but have we really?
the first time i saw a clip of blue spring on twitter, i was instantly struck by how true it felt. i could talk about the reasons why (the in-concert debut, where emotions are already heightened, their realboy vocals not filtered through hybe’s sometimes weird processing, the grounding acoustic opening, the fansong of it all) but what i was mostly thinking about was that when i saw yeonjun bent over himself full throated singing all my youth, i believed him. and then i realized that it really had been… all his youth, hasn’t it? not that yeonjun (or any of txt) is old by any measure LOL but just that in the context of both our societal conceptions of what counts as adolescent and like in kpop, txt aren’t rookies anymore. they’re still in little boy shorts, but they’re not kids. i listened to blue spring obsessively in the months since, specifically looping this concert video and every single time, i believe them. im really not kidding about how much i love this song, the album came out like two days ago and i know it’s going to fuck up my spotify wrapped already. but anyway, my point here is that i think the direction that this whole album goes in—culminating here, in blue spring—articulates like, what the point of all this is. the question that the name chapter: freefall & in some way txt’s whole discography up until this point has been preoccupied is precisely what lies at the end of all this? what is the point of your youth?
i do want to take this moment, before i go into somewhat overanalysis of this album, that i don’t really subscribe to the notion that any of this was necessarily intentional. like i dont think the hybe producer people and bang pd were sitting there in meetings going like “now what are we going to articulate about the nature of youth & the pursuit of it with this next tomorrow by together album, boys?” like im a big believer of taking the text—in this case the discography and associated imagery—and performing analysis by taking it as it is, but that doesn’t necessarily mean i think there is, like, a strong degree of authorial intent behind it. i think there’s a tendency in fan spaces to get all mystery clue hunting about this stuff, like, oh, neverland is actually a metaphor also for the dnd magic world that txt found in the run away music video, and the devil is, idk, yeonjun from another timeline (i dont actually know txt lore dont come for me) but my approach is more like, i can see overall patterns, and there is a layer of meaning i think we can generate from them, you know? like i don’t think this was a masterstroke planned from the beginning or anything LOL i think a lot of this is happy coincidence. but i do think the reason why things cohere well, is that there was always a central identity to return to, and an archetypal story/narrative cycle that worked well and could be iterated upon. effectively what i’ve described here are two cycles of “i love you”/”i don’t love you anymore” but with different contextual meaning and therefore different overall narrative significance—that sort of thing isn’t hard to set up! it’s good to have a formula. anyway, i just wanted to get that off my chest, i am very aware that like, none of this is a genius masterplan in the works is all.
~i just keep on chasing that feeling
on the surface, “chasing that feeling” subverts the cycle that we were describing. it’s not so much a bitter breakup song as “can’t you see me?”, “loser=lover”, and of course “good boy gone bad” were. it’s not even a breakup song at all. but i think it’s not quite a love song either—or at least not a love song that is untroubled by the deeper implications. similar to “sugar rush ride,” “chasing that feeling” is about being hurt but wanting anyway. it’s about chasing love, but, like, in minor you know? but whereas the imagery surrounding “sugar rush ride” is about a premature wanting, a temptation, a fall from grace, “chasing that feeling” recontextualizes that same fall from grace (literally, it opens with “i turn my back from heaven and fall from the sky”) into something that isn’t quite hopeful, but i want to say, meant to be soothing?
tracklist here does matter—not unusual for txt—and by applying a close reading to each song, we can arrive at a thesis for what the album might be trying to say.
we open with “growing pain,” a another song that is fairly self evident in title alone (i do think there is something to prove my point here that if you lined up a bunch of txt song titles you can easily see the references to periods of youth right there). this song is a great opener not just because it bangs, but because it lays out the thesis we’re going to spend the rest of the album exploring. a deep uncertainty belies the musical texture of the song, taking inspiration from a very 90s angsty grunge rock era, with some metal-inspired vocals peppered throughout. not quite discordant, but certainly a darker, more uneasy sound to set the tone in clear contrast from the previous EP: we have entered into a new sonic world. “don’t know how to fly” soobin sings, “but i’m going to let go,” evoking the previous fall that temptation ended on. “growing pain” links that fall to a period of painful growth, “even if my bones are broken, gotta make my way through this,” and “endless fall is evidence of growth.” the fall from innocence is the necessary step, then, prior to entering maturity. another necessary piece of knowledge highlighted here as a step towards growth is acknowledging the lie. here the connection to our larger thesis about youth becomes clear as well: the lyrics reference “childhood dreams,” and stating that “when i woke up, it’s different from the dream that ended.” put together, the imagery is that of a fall—what transpired during temptation—and the comeuppance. you’ve followed the devil and eaten the fruit, and now here, down in the dirt, you have to learn how to grow beyond where you’ve landed yourself. this is what the album is about.
placing “chasing that feeling” second on this tracklist clarifies further the thesis statement. i do find it interesting that the english line lyrics to ctf are entirely different from the english version released on the album (which i am assuming is the demo version), which speaks to the fact that the song was written over with entirely new lyrics toward a theme. like im aware that most demo songs do this, but the fact that even the english in the korean ctf are literally entirely different from the english version i think speaks to how thoroughly different the final lyrics are. anyway my point here is that ctf reinforces the place that we arrived at at the end of growing pain. the lyrics speak about turning from heaven & embracing the fall, and they connect that heaven with being a lie—a “sweet mirage,” that they “finally saw the truth” of. this transformation is difficult, falling means preparing to die. but ultimately it’s necessary to “feel so alive.” the chorus is interesting. in the original english, the opening line is, “time’s a thief that keeps on stealing / i just keep on chasing that feeling”—in korean, the line instead is, “my fate, come and kiss me” which yes, does definitely create a nice little romance highlight moment for the song & choreo which im sure is part of it, but i do think the sentiment here creates a more back and forth cadence in the song. it introduces a sense of inevitability, here. “my fate” literally referencing a destined eventuality, but even “come and kiss me” is inviting, assured. put together, i think the tension in the song comes from the attempt both to escape a false heaven and yet also knowing that you will still be doomed to chase. what is the feeling that we’re talking about here? the song doesn’t clarify. in the english, the song is clearly nostalgic, yearning for a time gone past that you compulsively chase for. in the korean, it’s unclear exactly what is being chased. the notion of fate? it has a romantic undertone, but most of the rest of the song isn’t about romance. are we chasing the truth? but the second verse implies we’ve already come to know it. i do think this uncertainty emphasizes the central point of the song: it’s not actually about whatever the feeling is; it’s about the chase. but using the structure of the english version as scaffolding, i would take the feeling to mean the previous haven that they fell from—that we now know is a mirage. caught between a painful truth and fate, all you can do is try and thread the needle, find balance between yearning for something you know is false and the dirty pain of being left outside what you’re meant for. you chase. “it’s all i know,” taehyun belts.
another brief note here but in my view of the album, the songs that like matter stop at “blue spring”. you can see how “do it like that” (lol) and the eng ctf are sort of just add ons at the very end. but “back for more” even though it’s a collab gets placed here, right after ctf. “back for more” re-introduces the ‘you’ subject—it’s the first real love song on the tracklist imo. taken together, ctf & back for more have a push & pull. if ctf is about txt chasing, then back for more posits that the hypothetical ‘you’ is always going to be, well, “back for more”. by and large back for more is mostly a typical pop love song, probably because it was initially a collab and has to stand alone as a single. some of these lines are generic and that’s okay is what i mean. but i do think looking at the first verse of the txt version, the opening lines gesture at similar themes that have come before—“there’s a magic to what this is” and “it’s like a dream and we both day-trippin’” again reinforce the notion of ‘you’ being an access point to the seemingly neverending dream/magic of a relationship/boybandspace/youth. ultimately the idea here is that if txt are stuck chasing eternally, then, well, so are you.
this flows nicely into “dreamer,” for obvious reasons. the song opens with obvious disillusionment from the dream, again reiterating the idea that “beyond neverland,” wants are more complicated than a simple dream. i think the interplay between adolescence and childhood in this song is interesting. it came up earlier in chasing that feeling (“i was lost like a child”) and now here in dreamer, the idea of following an unwavering star is tied to being “like a newborn child.” the next line following lays it out fairly bluntly: “a grown up that doesn’t dream at all, and a boy that only dreams / between these two common roads, i’m grey.” here the act of dreaming is inherently childish, attached to boyhood, but txt acknowledge that they are not quite boys anymore. i think the most telling part of this song comes through in the star metaphor. txt liken following a dream to following a star—”even when it gets dark, the starlight is shining,” “the star that waited for me far away”—that blatantly doesn’t exist anymore—”twinkle, twinkle, disappear.” we can see the thread of neverland here (second star on the right, etc. etc.) and so all this culminates in the chorus, where txt name themselves dreamers (literally, the line talks about finding a ‘name’ which contextualizes ‘the name chapter’ as an arc) who have memories of stars. i think if chasing that feeling was ambiguous about what is being chased, dreamer makes sure we can’t miss it. dream as dreaming of idolhood is so entrenched in hybe discography that i feel like i don’t even need to explain it.
“deep down” is an interesting track i think for how it uses its soundscape to complicate the tone of the album so far. or, well, i think again it’s about furthering themes and clarification. up until now, the name chapter: freefall has been flirting with darker, more melancholic sounds. chasing that feeling being in minor key, casting an uneasy sheen over the entire song, suffusing a sense of unfulfillment in the music itself. the slightly discordant beat of growing pain, the sensual but somber jazz tones of dreamer, thus far the album is filled with richer, deeper notes. deep down is no different, but i think the thrumming house edm chorus takes it a step further in that the style of delivery is what emphasizes the point of the song. deep down calls all the way back to crown, making it clear that we are in a cycle. it rehashes the themes we’ve established, reminding us of the horns + you = crown thesis from their debut EP. but the chorus is, well. unsettling. i think it sounds like a confession. “deep down i need you more more more more” they sing, mantralike, entranced. at this point in the rabbithole, the repetition is clear. we’ve been here before and we’ll always be here. not only have we been here, but we’ve arrived all the way back at the very thing that the dream chapter was about. the ‘you’ motif becomes more ominous too, taking what was transformation love and turning it into a need. here, we understand the undercurrent of fear tied to the parasocial mode of reaching your dream—what if you need this more? what if you need someone else’s love to realize yourself?
the next track “happily ever after” is cheekily cynical. “what if we don’t know?” they sing, well, “i like it” anyways. it describes believing in your own main character energy and then painfully finding out otherwise. more important, it describes a life continuing after the main story. again, we see the idea of leaving this magical, storybook place: whether it’s a fairytale or heaven or neverland, you get kicked out eventually. what i think is interesting about this track is that it continues the return to themes present in early txt. while the notion of ~temptation and ~devilry and ~neverland are definitely related to fairytale vibes (you’ve got the whimsical childhood stuff with some dark undertones as a common theme), it’s not quite the same. meanwhile, with b-sides like nap of a star, etc. the early txt discography was more fairytale like in nature—which of course, the phrase ‘happily ever after’ is explicitly connected to. this neatly draws attention back to the cyclical nature of all this. we’ve described the same ‘conclusion’ already in this album, but what “deep down” and “happily ever after” do is really highlight the fact that not only have we been here before within the album, we’ve been here before within the discography writ large, too. is this an epiphany, or just another moment of thinking you’ve arrived at the answer, but finding out otherwise in a few years when you’re a touch older, a touch wiser, and yet mired over the same questions?
so… then what? if we’re trapped in this eternal loop, where chasing a dream and a boyhood that you’ve left behind is all you can do, and you’re kind of doomed to keep realizing this over and over, how do you live with that?
“skipping stones” is like, honestly, undeniably i think the “””best””” song on the album, by which i mean i think it has the most interesting composition and also is the most ~mature track subject matter wise. i think this track tackles the question of, well, what then?
hard question! these are some very fundamental things, right? like, what do we do with the knowledge that life doesn’t follow a set path and hard work doesn’t always lead to success and that eventually, inevitably, we have to grow out of youth? hit me up if you know the answer lmao! the metaphor in “skipping stones” is simple—imagine your various pains and hard times you’ve collected are stones, and you’re skipping them into a wide lake that is so vast so as to be able to hold all of those emotions, good and bad. whereas “happily ever after” was ironic, carrying a sort of frustrated undertone to the flippant line “i’ll just write my own ending,” “skipping stones” meets this conclusion with calm. the lake is big enough and your life is also big enough and eventually you will be the ocean—”because you will have a wide embrace,” eventually, everything will settle into the stillness of the water’s surface. you can imagine the turbulence of every previous cycle, every epiphany unfulfilled, all flattening out into a calm. “skipping stones” acknowledges the fraught push & pull the rest of the album has been grappling with and folds it all into a radical acceptance.
and so we arrive back at “blue spring.” i really have so many things to say about blue spring. what then, does placing this song here, at the end of the album, after we’ve arrived at acceptance, signal? to me this gestures towards an answer—or at least, an approach to one, as to what the fuck you do next. acceptance is one thing, but what does that mean? how does understanding the inevitability of turbulence help to untangle & contextualize the day to day thing you’re grappling with? for txt it’s that they’re rapidly moving away from youth. i think that’s a universal sentiment—we were all once young, we will all be leaving spring behind, but more than that i don’t really think the yearning ends, even after you’ve gained a sufficient number of years under your belt.
first of all, let’s talk about the title. blue spring comes from a literal translation of the korean phrase for ‘youth.’ when you separate the hangul 청춘 (cheongchun, in hanja 青春), you get the word for ‘blue’ and ‘spring,’ put together to mean youth. this isn’t really like a literal translation the way that, like, the word pineapple means something entirely separately as pine + apple, which are themselves separate words, but more so that the metaphor of a blue/fresh spring is synonymous with the idea of youth. txt themselves have explained this as describing the feeling of coming into debut & their careers, with the previous blue of all those long, hard hours of pre-debut training transforming into the spring of idolhood. i think blue spring as a title neatly ties together the concept of youth with specifically the previous blue hour, serving as an anchor point back to their discography and emphasizing again that transitory nature of this period they are singing about. blue spring is also clearly literally a fan song, describing the relationship between moa & txt and again professing towards eternity, together, always. so in some ways, looking at the song and the lyrics, it sort of feels like we’re back to where we started, doesn’t it?
but the thing that i think blue spring understands—that wasn’t present in previous iterations of the cycle, that makes it not only about a futile chase—is inevitability. it marries the calm acceptance of “skipping stones” with the reality of want. if “crown” is about discovering that love can transform you, if “blue hour” wants to stay in the magic of that brief hour, if “lovesong” is about desperately claiming a truth that will slip away, if “chasing that feeling” is about knowing you’re doomed but choosing the fall anyway, then “blue spring” is about understanding that falling was always where you were meant to be. if all our failed epiphanies were about trying to reason around the simple fact that youth will end, that love can’t last, and you will never be young again, then “blue spring” is understanding this and loving wholeheartedly, despite. the boyband Youth narrative is frequently obsessed with naturalistic imagery because it’s the truth of nature to change, and i think again that comes back to the tension between cherishing something because you know it will end, but being entirely unable to acknowledge that that’s why you cherish it. “blue spring,” by reaching back to “blue hour” and that idea of beauty being found in liminality precisely because of the ephemerality of something that will pass, implicitly acknowledges that just as winter turns to spring, so will spring turn to winter. and yet—”all my youth,” they sing, unafraid this time. blue spring speaks of accompaniment, rather than martyrdom and sacrifice. “when we’re high, when we’re low,” the song opens, but there’s no transformation referred to here—there’s no triumphant moment of being brought up from below, no magic that turns horns into crown. instead, the refrain is simple. your warmth is with me. so what if youth ends? the fear of needing someone stems from the fear of what you’ll do when they leave, and the fear of relying on a hypothetical ‘you,’ be it a friend group, a lover, a fan, to bring you your youth is about that separation, when youth can scatter like the flowers of a petal. but what if that’s not so scary? what if we know that we’re as rivers, each of us flowing in our own directions and on our own paths, but all with some connection to the ocean—so it’s not about giving or taking or chasing or wanting, but about the simplicity of being together, for as long as we can have each other? what if both of us need each other more? what if we give all of us to each other anyway, for all of our youths?
the flower path
all the way at the beginning i said this was going to be an essay about youth, which it is. i want to talk here about why this theme resonates, and, return to that question: well, what’s the point? what do we make out of literalizing that connection between youth and boybands? like i said, i think all boybands are preoccupied on some level about youth, if only in the very literal sense that they are formed by adult men stepping into an adolescent space and inhabiting the bodies and inner lives of boys, and so when we engage with boybandhood, we are all in a way buying into that mythology. they can be boys forever, and we can partake in that youth. of course, it’s not always a myth. there’s a metatextual element here that is undeniable: txt started as boys, and their sound is about moving into adolescence as they are, too. but then we come all the way back to the point, why does that matter? what are we grappling with?
there’s that idea of the flower path that crops up frequently in conjunction with so much idol boy group lore. im resisting all the disclaimers i want to shove in here like yes, yes, txt of course are not the first group to make music about how ultimately it’s all about just existing together (i’ve logged my requisite hours of looping flower road okay shut up) and so on so forth. like, yes. but also it’s beautiful to ME to see a discography develop and grow all this way, and i think you know, part of the point is the journey, right? moreover, again, what does it say about like, where the landscape is now that this narrative is coming into trend again? things that are true: kpop has been seeing an unprecedented boon, the market is expanding and appears to have no signs of stopping; everyone and their mothers wants to get in on this trend and groups are debuting well beyond what even this rapidly expanded market can realistically sustain; we are all kind of trapped in an endless timeloop of ennui these days, or so that’s what life in the 2020s has proven to be dominated by, in part because we’re in this sort of post-time era, where actually are we even beholden to the turning of the seasons anymore, if an ongoing global pandemic can fuck up the structure of a year so badly so as to render previously held paradigms entirely flimsy? not to be like kpop can affect our global ennui, but our pop culture reflects onto our world and vice versa, right? so when why are we all obsessed with Youth all of a sudden!
well, i think we’re all yearning. it’s kind of the same reason why analog and y2k is back. as a species we’re always nostalgic for a simpler time, before ~all of this. for us, the ~all of this is that pre-technology time (notably, again, Youth narrative mvs feature generally little of tech, mostly happening in the outside world) where time meant something. like if we make music about beautiful, fleeting times, it means that at least the passage of time matters, right? at least if we lose youth that means we had it at all, rather than a drudging, grey forward march that is neither particularly enriching nor can end for its lack of distinction.
anyway at the end of the day, we come to boybands for love. and for distraction. but for love! we love these boys and the beautiful thing is that while we are here, we love with our whole hearts. i can’t talk about txt’s discography and group identity without talking about the fact that part of the reason why i (feel that i) understand them is because i’ve known them for so long. part of acceptance is the wide-eyed, whole-hearted entering into the fan-artist relationship here, which to me means accepting that my own feelings are irrational and too-big, a little bit beyond me and my life. the reason why “all my youth” hits so damn hard is because when that note rings out into the full crowd at KPSO dome, i feel like txt must be thinking about how they really have given up everything in their youth to come here, to be present, to sing this song for all the gathered fans who love them not as lovers or as friends but in a secret third way, and i’m so convinced that this is what they must be feeling—this retrospective longing, this yearning not to go back to the past but to be able to reach back and truly appreciate it—because it is what i’m feeling, past my youth but moving forward regardless, old enough to feel fond protectiveness listening to some boys who i feel like i watched grow up sing to me, young enough that i still feel on the tail end of getting to covet these feelings anyway. i think about how idolhood is like school, is like giving up your freedom for a dream, is like dreaming anyway. i think about how i’ve never seen txt and how unfair that feels. i think about how earlier this year, i flew to california to see min yoongi to honour the part of myself that spent my youth with bts, and how i told myself i really had to get my shit together and finish my damn book if i did that, to justify it, but then found myself floundering like he did writing d-day, stuck marinating on the same ideas and unsure how to put them down. i become convinced ill see txt one day, to honour the part of myself that understands their yearning, so i can stand in the room with them and everyone who loves them and stand under the falling confetti like petals and for a moment, we’d be in the same place, and that would matter. i don’t think it’s necessarily delusions of grandeur to empathize and feel aligned with your idols (much as i’m known for feeling much of myself) because i think plenty of people listen to txt and feel this way. it’s the point of them. they’re a boyband. they’re built to reflect love back onto yourself. the lack of specialness is special in and of itself. that for a moment, hundreds of thousands of people can reach out to this space and understand themselves inside and through the things that boybands sing about. youth may be fleeting, but we all have some yearning inside us, and we all need each other. so what if we gave into that? what if we walked together, just for a while?
i want to talk about boybands and I want to talk about youth. i want to talk about the same thing that boy groups have been obsessed with circling around since time immemorial—because boy bands are about boyhood, whether we are embodying or chasing or subverting it. i want to talk about tomorrow by together, whose discography has been clearly preoccupied with this since debut, and how i think they’ve hit on something real and true of youth-and-boyband-dom with the latest release (The Name Chapter: Freefall, which is a goofy title, but is also thematically resonant as we will find)
this started out initially because i wanted to write about the latest album and why i think it really clarifies sooooooooooo many themes & brings the txt discography back to a more familiar space all the while building/complicating meaning, but then i started talking about the context behind a specific sort of archetype i think we’re seeing more of in kpop and the topic got away from me, so here is an essay.
the most beautiful moment in life
so what do i mean by boyband content about youth? let’s define some terms. when i say comebacks about Youth, what i mean is an overall aesthetic sense that doesn’t merely depict young people, but seeks to define young adulthood as a specific and finite interval of time. the ubiquitous music video of high school students in uniform and charming neighbourhood boys is certainly about being young, but it’s precisely the implication of perpetuity that means this isn’t what i’m talking about—the Youth comeback is primarily preoccupied with the end of youth, and high school is, of course, eternal. by and large, boyband music about youth is either about entrapment (school sucks! i can’t wait to get out of here and join the real world!), ennui (i don’t know who i am and i’m scared to find out), or a precarious joy (i dont want this to be over; i want to stay in this moment forever).
there are some common semiotic motifs that tend to crop up in service to this aesthetic, in how mvs are shot, the styling of our boybanders, sets & props, etc. some things you might see in a boy group mv about Youth: running with reckless abandon (in a field, down a city street), deliberately styled down fashion, a pseudo-realistic style—usually the outdoors, some on-location shooting rather than on a set, an implied spontaneity or unorthodox place to gather (a trainyard, a swimming pool, a rooftop), sometimes fireworks, boys piled on and on each other, you get the point. oftentimes, naturalistic motifs of time passing are seen or alluded to—sunsets, the seasons, flowers.
all this is to say that i think a major touchstone text in the development of this theory is bts’s hyyh series. it’s not that i think bts invented this as a concept. a lot of early shinhwa, h.o.t, sechkies, seo taiji, etc. is certainly about a disaffected & troubled youth rallying against society in a way that is reminiscent of early bangtan as well, and while that narrative isn’t precisely the same thing, it certainly stems from the same place and i would argue its presence is instrumental in laying down the groundwork for the Youth narrative. i think that what hyyh did was 1) codify the general imagery and aesthetic into a recognizable whole specifically as a cohesive, pan-comeback (from music to mv to paratextual lore) package and 2) understand its own nature as being inherently, inextricably, About Youth. in other words, hyyh was one of the most prominent comebacks about youth that knew it was about youth.
this is generally part of the army intro package but assuming not everyone here is ex-army or cares about bts (not that you need to be, but im cognizant of audience here LOL) let’s rehash the meaning of hyyh. hwa yang yeon hwa or 화양연화 is officially translated into ‘the most beautiful time in life’ but individually the hangul means, roughly, ‘the years like flowers’ (fun fact the hanja 花样年华 is actually the original title of wong kar-wai’s film more commonly translated as ‘in the mood for love’). translated a little more directly, the connection becomes way more clear: hyyh is about youth in the way that youth is about temporary beauty—the flower-like years are your most beautiful moments in life specifically because of their fleeting nature. everything that went into developing the hyyh mythos was devoted to that understanding. youth is beautiful, but the beautiful times never last. the in-built time loop paradoxically only emphasizes the point: seokjin is doomed to fail to save his friends, because no matter how many times he repeats the story, youth always will end. the seasons will continue to pass. all he can ever do is turn the time back again. this essay isn’t about hyyh, but i do think understanding hyyh is key in understanding the genre im theorizing here, and then further is particularly key in understanding txt’s specific modulation upon the theme. i won’t get into like, my personal analysis of hyyh LOL there’s honestly enough of that in this world, but suffice to say, i do think its rippling effect sets the foundation for later entries in the same Youth narrative that are self-aware in the same way. here we begin to dig into the metatextual implications.
i think the connection between the themes we’ve identified so far and the very nature of boyband-dom itself is fairly evident. boybands end. some just stop being groups entirely. plenty don’t, but even if they keep making music, the mature boyband is no longer reliant on those adolescent bonds—either the boy part or the band part has to die, you know? just as the school system is a great analogy for the entrapment present in some variations on the Youth narrative, being in a boyband is like being in school: you have a schedule someone else makes for you, you work hard all day until you’re exhausted, you’re constantly evaluated and set against your peers, the theoretical endpoint of all this is some nebulous measure of success that will be attained when your hard work pays off. being in a boyband is also all about joy—another key theme—and specifically, the reckless, wide-open, infinite sense of joy. how else can you describe the sensation of being on stage performing to a thousand screaming voices other than to compare it to the changing tide of the sea, the overwhelm of a sunset, the glow of spring on the horizon after a harsh winter?
again, like i said, it’s not like the Youth narrative was rare or limited to the specific troubled hyyh version or anything. some notable examples just to round this discussion out and further clarify: nct dream “we go up” and “go” (they made some others with this energy but you know these two are the Classic examples), cix “save me kill me”, stray kids “young wings”, jj project “tomorrow, today”, literally everything that new boygroup the wind has done, plave “the sixth summer” (i know they’re animated guys but that only makes it more stark!), and, honestly, if you want to watch an mv that perfectly embodies the theme just watch nine.i “young boy” (it is literally in the title). i started writing this before wayv announced their upcoming album titled ‘on my youth’ with the first of the track video featuring the members in various troubled youthful situations before they break free & slow motion run in the rain together, so i think i’m a prophet. that does bring me neatly to the next point, which is: well, so what? other than that i care about this, why am i talking about this now?
well, it’s because fresh concepts are back, baybee! and i think there has been an interesting shift towards the Youth narrative specifically in the big releases that theoretically are going to dictate how 5th gen (oof) is going to play out. the now codified “4th gen” “noise music” tropes dominated so much of the late 2010s to early 2020 or so, and i think this is important because so much massive movement into kpop fandom happened during this time, so this style really crystallized as A Way To Be A Modern Boy Group for new people. even though “dark” concepts have always existed, and even now as im describing how we’ve shifted away, it’s a cycle that has basically existed since kpop started. and because the “dark” trends are also in part driven by spectacle, a slick production, and high intensity dance, there wasn’t a lot of room for the more grounded & optimistic imagining that is required to achieve the Youth narrative. (not that 3rd/4th gen, high level production and dance is absolutely contraindicative—we go up is a quintessential entry in the canon after all—but certainly it just makes it harder is all). but as we collectively grow tired of the dark concept, so, too, must it end. and now here we are, in a landscape where the latest big debut songs from the groups that likely will become the vanguard of the new gen all, to some extent, embody the Youth narrative, and specifically embody them in that meta-textual way, that is about being a boyband as much as it is about being youths.
zerobaseone “in bloom” is perhaps the most obvious example. already we see: in bloom. the boys wake up and immediately are caught in running tableau, singing about how they will always be in chase, always running towards you. every lyric in this song is an attempt to refute the truth that they dedicate a whole phrase to: nothing lasts forever. zerobaseone promise to not let that come to fruition—even if it’s the same ending, they will keep running to you!—but of course their very nature as a project group meta-textually renders that already impossible (let’s not talk about contract extensions here LOL we are assuming the way of every project group here). another really prominent example is riize “memories”—first of all, the 90s nostalgia practically bleeds off of this one. riize jumps around some train tracks and spend a lazy summer together, singing about all the things they want to reach out and grasp, healing from loneliness, but ultimately, about wanting to hold onto the memories. in here i think another theme that is particularly prominent about the latest iteration of this narrative arises: memories is depicting this almost pre-emptive retrospective. there’s nostalgia for this current moment baked in. we’re singing about the memories as they are being formed. lastly, i think boynextdoor is like, basically all about this. they’re called boynextdoor, first of all. i think serenade is the best example, since it’s about literally a first serenade, the mv filled with our boys next door gathering, piled on each other, marveling at each others strategies for serenading, depicting that flush of first love.
okay all that was a lot to say: here is something i think exists (the kpop Youth narrative) and i think as we move into next generation kpop, the themes & motifs elucidated in the Youth narrative have already played a prominent role in the likely establishing music in the canon. all of this is of course background for what im going to talk about next, which is how i think txt fits into this canon, specifically, and why i think the name chapter: freefall (god i really do think txt album titles are silly sorry) is a kind of unique entry into the new canon that clarifies & modulates on the themes we’re describing.
we lost the summer
so! what does this have to do with txt?
i haven’t mentioned any of the txt tracks that specifically fit into the Youth narrative thus far so we can talk about it all together here, but suffice to say, i think if you want to understand, like, txt’s group identity, then you have to understand this narrative. because txt have been basically making music surrounding the Youth narrative since they debuted, separate from the broader trends that were popular at the time. i think they have been pretty remarkably consistent as well with this identity, in a way that other contemporaneous groups have been less so. stray kids is a good counterpoint example for same-ish debut era & career trajectory, particularly since a lot of early skz was about Youth. consider skz’s development from the early my pace/young wings vibe to the sound that most people would probably conjure up now when one mentions them (more in line with gods menu/thunderous/maniac). in comparison, txt have branched out less from their debut sound—you can see a pretty consistent throughline from crown to blue hour to lovesong, to the latest chasing that feeling. If anything you can see their commitment to theme by the fact that even now, in 2023, they are getting styled in variations on little boy shorts LOL this isn’t like, a comment on quality or anything, by the by. i’m really only using the example to emphasize the way txt returns over & over again to this sound/narrative. and obviously im not saying there have been no exceptions and departures, notably & recently good boy gone bad and sugar rush ride both (txt is not immune to the dark or sexy trend either!!) i’m also not saying they were visionaries or mavericks for having some brand loyalty to this theme—again, the fresh concept/dark concept cycle has been here forever. i think what’s true is that they have clearly had this preoccupation with Youth in their group identity that is fairly consistent across their active years, and i think that in the landscape of a new, developing canon where those same themes & motifs are more prominent than previously, analyzing txt’s discography through this lens allows us to understand what they particularly are saying about Youth in their entries to the canon.
i do also want to say that txt’s position as following bts in an unavoidable way certainly is probably a big part of the reason why they’ve had this consistent narrative throughline. bighit (still bighit at the time!) saw how obsessively people tracked the hyyh storyline (as we speak bang pd has announced some 2025 anniversary thing) and wanted to do that again.
txt debuts in 2019 with “crown”—which in and of itself doesn’t hit all the marks that we’ve talked about. the mv is glossy, mostly filmed indoors on set, bright and fresh certainly, but not carrying any of that naturalistic grit that ive been describing as a hallmark of the genre. but i would argue that the debut as a whole hews closer to our themes when we consider it holistically. starting right from the pre-debut teaser videos, they feature the members in various scattered locations in seoul (taehyun phone videos on the bus, soobin sprawled on the field on campus, beomgyu in the metro, yeonjun making trouble at an arcade, kai hanging out with dogs near the park)—there are Real Boys. the “our summer” (seasons!) video also comes to mind, specifically relying on the boys’ selfie cams, meant to mimic a certain self-directed spontaneity. and of course, key to it all, in the actual music, this entire first album is about the hesitations and doubts of youth, where the horns/crown thing is a pretty self-evident metaphor for puberty. “that’s not me staring blankly into the mirror” txt sing, “i dont know who i am”. the other theme that emerges from this first album is the idea that although things are confusing, mired in too-rapid change, one thing will always be there: you.
of course, this is pretty much the core of all kpop. the parasocial longing. again, there’s nothing particularly unique here—a lot of kpop songs do this thing where it is actually one thing (loneliness, depression, the industry, ennui, etc.) but couch the more complicated feelings into love songs (i hate myself and i can’t see what tomorrow might look like…. when you’re not here, girl!), and certainly plenty of songs in this vein do this with the ennui of youth—it’s the entire premise of bts “i need u” (life sucks & this love is complicated… but i need u, girl!). txt’s specific brand of this is mired around teenaged confusion and self-loathing morphing into triumph through love—i’ve turned into a monster, but you can save me. you can turn my horns into a crown. it’s this theme of yearning to be saved that suffuses their entire discography. youth is about love is about youth, etc. i argue that in this context (as with most kpop fansongs), the ‘you’ that is the subject has a triple-fold meaning: ‘you,’ a specific hypothetical y/n romantic subject; ‘you,’ the broad fandom—specifically in an idolfan way—as moa; or using a singular proxy ‘you’ as a substitute towards expressing love towards the band/your members. the “our summer” lyrics and mv are a great example of this: obviously we can infer a theoretical girl that they’re singing about here, but this song’s placement on the first EP & the selfie cam video makes it evident that the ‘summer’ that is being sung about is a metaphorical representation of having finally debuted, and lastly within the video, there is, of course, no actual subject other than the members themselves, so when they sing “if we’re together, feels like summer,” they are on some level talking about the boyband bond that is being formed before our eyes. why does this matter? well this rhetorical device is what allows us to marry the youth narrative with a love story. again, as we’ve established, the state of being within a boyband is an excellent metaphor for the youth narrative—a state that is beautiful but temporary—and by associating longing for boyband-dom with longing for love, the associative effect is that love is what allows us to stay in youth. it’s summer when we’re together implying that winter comes when we’re apart. this love is what binds us to this moment (the most beautiful moment—)
i won’t do like an exhaustive deep dive close reading of every single EP and album they’re released, simply because i do not have that sort of stamina. but i want to sketch out the overall trajectory of the narrative arc across their three album cycles so far, so let’s do a rundown. let’s talk overview. let’s talk themes! “run away” features an mv that is way closer to our familiar themes (the… running away LOL and the classrooms that give away into fantastical landscapes, the boy-covens, the hidden secrets in the city) while the chorus asks for you to “please be my eternity, please call my name” even while acknowledging that what we run towards is the end of the world. “can’t you see me?” sets things in a suburban unreality, full of the brimming eerie tension of teenager secretive friendships—this time, the theme is betrayal, and here we come to the second half of the messaging. if txt are longing for you to save them, then what happens when you inevitably fail? “my heart is heavy, cause you don’t understand me”—the closing chapter of the dream chapter is about betrayal. it’s about, despite the yearning, eternity isn’t possible. we can never understand each other. i think the other notable thing that runs throughout underneath all three comebacks is that they’re, like, shockingly violent? there’s a scene in the fairytale-esque mv for “nap of a star” (off of STAR) that has a scene where yeonjun breaks off his antlers and it’s very grimm brothers’ in tone, like there is some implied blood & gore there. “run away” has the implication of arson running through it and a fixation on wounds/bandages. “can’t you see me?” uses tomatoes & ketchup & strawberries to obvious bloody implication, and the mv for “eternally” has a lot of horror elements, like the implication that beomgyu tokyo ghoul tentacles his abusive parents to death (sob) and that haunting scene of yeonjun stuck through with overgrown oozy plants. to sum up: the dream chapter is about a youth preoccupied with monstrousness & the undercurrent of a hidden violence, the attempt to reach out for love as a way to be saved, but ultimately realizing that this is futile because love ends and understanding is lost.
between dream & chaos, we have our first minisode, a sort of interlude. our title track “blue hour” is, inherently, transitive in and of itself—it describes that time of day between sunset and true dusk, that glowing interval of time when the world is teeming with possibility. again, we see the theme of time passing crop up, the transitory time of the day being magical because it is about transition. that orange-glowing sky, the magic we want to be trapped in—before it ends. blue hour is where we finally arrive at acknowledging the thing that hyyh does: things are beautiful not despite them ending, but because of.
if the dream chapter is about first love, the chaos chapter is about adolescent love. the first Real, Complicated love you have. “lovesong” is all extremes, introducing mature themes (like it’s kind of a gimme but “please use me like a drug” would never have come earlier in their career you know) and returning again to the attempt to use love to save yourself, but this time with a more troubled layer, boosted by a distinct teenaged angst. no longer under the delusion that love can last forever, instead, “lovesong” is about searching for a discernable, concrete truth to this imperfect love anyway—I Know It’s Real I Can Feel It. “loser=lover” is resentful—it’s not merely that this love failed, but that to love at all is flawed. again, we return to the theme of “you were my saviour”. it is also in “loser=lover” where the implication of violence comes out again but in full force. rather than the magical violence and heightened reality from the dream chaper, the “loser=lover” mv features depictions of real world violence: bank robbery, abusive parents, workplace harassment, you get the drift. again, the shift here is apparent: we have left the realm of pubescent confusion and entered the world of young adulthood. the rest of the full length chaos chapter album is mired with this back and forth, a jaded new understanding of what it means to be mature. “what if i had been that puma?” and “no rules” both presenting a dilemma between A & B, routine and freedom—life is complicated by having too much to choose from. and besides, it’s not like the untainted version of a true love exists anyhow. from the melodramatic anguish in “lovesong” and “loser=lover” to the ambivalent confusion & jadedness through the album, a clearly teenaged turbulence arises. sorry, i’m an antiromantic.
i will come out and say that “good boy gone bad” wasn’t exactly my favourite release when it initially came out LOL i think (and still do) that this was an attempt to match the general popular vibe or like, you know, at least it was a sort of “txt can do dark concepts too” sort of comeback. not to read too much into it but i do think it’s notable that, again, we have the TT of a minisode EP being explicitly about transformation (good boy gone bad). in context of the overarching narrative we’re developing here, if youth is inherently troubled by the tension between innocence and growing knowledge of the world, and if love is the string that is supposed to pull you through that transition, then so what if love is inherently flawed? what if the process of loving is what matures you? good boy gone bad says goodbye to boyhood—literally, “erase that boy inside of you”. gbgb also makes it explicit that this chase for love is driven by a longing to become something else, “you completely changed me when i was fragile / i spent hours in the mirror trying to become you”—we go back to the theme that love is transformative, but this time the subject of txt’s love is the goal in and of itself.
so, what are txt trying to become? what lies at the end of youth? the name chapter opens with an EP titled temptation, aptly so. two images immediately arise from this comeback: the devil and neverland. it’s pretty self evident what the thesis is here: lead me to temptation and i’ll be a child forever. despite the ~sexier concept, the name chapter: temptation is about a longing for a left behind innocence. if yearning for love will keep you young, and if you have learned that love is neither eternal nor pure, “sugar rush ride” is about knowing all of that and wanting it anyway—”taking me into the dream / the liar on the bedside.” there is a sensual, psychedelic turn to the mv, drawing us deeper and deeper into a lurid, dripping forest, but before all that, it opens with the vast beach & the boys running, chasing, as they always do. the album closer is “farewell neverland” which is about as textually about youth as you can get. “I hoped for endless flying,” but it’s “time to fall.” temptation is about leaving youth, running into that forest of full maturity—but have we really?
the first time i saw a clip of blue spring on twitter, i was instantly struck by how true it felt. i could talk about the reasons why (the in-concert debut, where emotions are already heightened, their realboy vocals not filtered through hybe’s sometimes weird processing, the grounding acoustic opening, the fansong of it all) but what i was mostly thinking about was that when i saw yeonjun bent over himself full throated singing all my youth, i believed him. and then i realized that it really had been… all his youth, hasn’t it? not that yeonjun (or any of txt) is old by any measure LOL but just that in the context of both our societal conceptions of what counts as adolescent and like in kpop, txt aren’t rookies anymore. they’re still in little boy shorts, but they’re not kids. i listened to blue spring obsessively in the months since, specifically looping this concert video and every single time, i believe them. im really not kidding about how much i love this song, the album came out like two days ago and i know it’s going to fuck up my spotify wrapped already. but anyway, my point here is that i think the direction that this whole album goes in—culminating here, in blue spring—articulates like, what the point of all this is. the question that the name chapter: freefall & in some way txt’s whole discography up until this point has been preoccupied is precisely what lies at the end of all this? what is the point of your youth?
i do want to take this moment, before i go into somewhat overanalysis of this album, that i don’t really subscribe to the notion that any of this was necessarily intentional. like i dont think the hybe producer people and bang pd were sitting there in meetings going like “now what are we going to articulate about the nature of youth & the pursuit of it with this next tomorrow by together album, boys?” like im a big believer of taking the text—in this case the discography and associated imagery—and performing analysis by taking it as it is, but that doesn’t necessarily mean i think there is, like, a strong degree of authorial intent behind it. i think there’s a tendency in fan spaces to get all mystery clue hunting about this stuff, like, oh, neverland is actually a metaphor also for the dnd magic world that txt found in the run away music video, and the devil is, idk, yeonjun from another timeline (i dont actually know txt lore dont come for me) but my approach is more like, i can see overall patterns, and there is a layer of meaning i think we can generate from them, you know? like i don’t think this was a masterstroke planned from the beginning or anything LOL i think a lot of this is happy coincidence. but i do think the reason why things cohere well, is that there was always a central identity to return to, and an archetypal story/narrative cycle that worked well and could be iterated upon. effectively what i’ve described here are two cycles of “i love you”/”i don’t love you anymore” but with different contextual meaning and therefore different overall narrative significance—that sort of thing isn’t hard to set up! it’s good to have a formula. anyway, i just wanted to get that off my chest, i am very aware that like, none of this is a genius masterplan in the works is all.
~i just keep on chasing that feeling
on the surface, “chasing that feeling” subverts the cycle that we were describing. it’s not so much a bitter breakup song as “can’t you see me?”, “loser=lover”, and of course “good boy gone bad” were. it’s not even a breakup song at all. but i think it’s not quite a love song either—or at least not a love song that is untroubled by the deeper implications. similar to “sugar rush ride,” “chasing that feeling” is about being hurt but wanting anyway. it’s about chasing love, but, like, in minor you know? but whereas the imagery surrounding “sugar rush ride” is about a premature wanting, a temptation, a fall from grace, “chasing that feeling” recontextualizes that same fall from grace (literally, it opens with “i turn my back from heaven and fall from the sky”) into something that isn’t quite hopeful, but i want to say, meant to be soothing?
tracklist here does matter—not unusual for txt—and by applying a close reading to each song, we can arrive at a thesis for what the album might be trying to say.
we open with “growing pain,” a another song that is fairly self evident in title alone (i do think there is something to prove my point here that if you lined up a bunch of txt song titles you can easily see the references to periods of youth right there). this song is a great opener not just because it bangs, but because it lays out the thesis we’re going to spend the rest of the album exploring. a deep uncertainty belies the musical texture of the song, taking inspiration from a very 90s angsty grunge rock era, with some metal-inspired vocals peppered throughout. not quite discordant, but certainly a darker, more uneasy sound to set the tone in clear contrast from the previous EP: we have entered into a new sonic world. “don’t know how to fly” soobin sings, “but i’m going to let go,” evoking the previous fall that temptation ended on. “growing pain” links that fall to a period of painful growth, “even if my bones are broken, gotta make my way through this,” and “endless fall is evidence of growth.” the fall from innocence is the necessary step, then, prior to entering maturity. another necessary piece of knowledge highlighted here as a step towards growth is acknowledging the lie. here the connection to our larger thesis about youth becomes clear as well: the lyrics reference “childhood dreams,” and stating that “when i woke up, it’s different from the dream that ended.” put together, the imagery is that of a fall—what transpired during temptation—and the comeuppance. you’ve followed the devil and eaten the fruit, and now here, down in the dirt, you have to learn how to grow beyond where you’ve landed yourself. this is what the album is about.
placing “chasing that feeling” second on this tracklist clarifies further the thesis statement. i do find it interesting that the english line lyrics to ctf are entirely different from the english version released on the album (which i am assuming is the demo version), which speaks to the fact that the song was written over with entirely new lyrics toward a theme. like im aware that most demo songs do this, but the fact that even the english in the korean ctf are literally entirely different from the english version i think speaks to how thoroughly different the final lyrics are. anyway my point here is that ctf reinforces the place that we arrived at at the end of growing pain. the lyrics speak about turning from heaven & embracing the fall, and they connect that heaven with being a lie—a “sweet mirage,” that they “finally saw the truth” of. this transformation is difficult, falling means preparing to die. but ultimately it’s necessary to “feel so alive.” the chorus is interesting. in the original english, the opening line is, “time’s a thief that keeps on stealing / i just keep on chasing that feeling”—in korean, the line instead is, “my fate, come and kiss me” which yes, does definitely create a nice little romance highlight moment for the song & choreo which im sure is part of it, but i do think the sentiment here creates a more back and forth cadence in the song. it introduces a sense of inevitability, here. “my fate” literally referencing a destined eventuality, but even “come and kiss me” is inviting, assured. put together, i think the tension in the song comes from the attempt both to escape a false heaven and yet also knowing that you will still be doomed to chase. what is the feeling that we’re talking about here? the song doesn’t clarify. in the english, the song is clearly nostalgic, yearning for a time gone past that you compulsively chase for. in the korean, it’s unclear exactly what is being chased. the notion of fate? it has a romantic undertone, but most of the rest of the song isn’t about romance. are we chasing the truth? but the second verse implies we’ve already come to know it. i do think this uncertainty emphasizes the central point of the song: it’s not actually about whatever the feeling is; it’s about the chase. but using the structure of the english version as scaffolding, i would take the feeling to mean the previous haven that they fell from—that we now know is a mirage. caught between a painful truth and fate, all you can do is try and thread the needle, find balance between yearning for something you know is false and the dirty pain of being left outside what you’re meant for. you chase. “it’s all i know,” taehyun belts.
another brief note here but in my view of the album, the songs that like matter stop at “blue spring”. you can see how “do it like that” (lol) and the eng ctf are sort of just add ons at the very end. but “back for more” even though it’s a collab gets placed here, right after ctf. “back for more” re-introduces the ‘you’ subject—it’s the first real love song on the tracklist imo. taken together, ctf & back for more have a push & pull. if ctf is about txt chasing, then back for more posits that the hypothetical ‘you’ is always going to be, well, “back for more”. by and large back for more is mostly a typical pop love song, probably because it was initially a collab and has to stand alone as a single. some of these lines are generic and that’s okay is what i mean. but i do think looking at the first verse of the txt version, the opening lines gesture at similar themes that have come before—“there’s a magic to what this is” and “it’s like a dream and we both day-trippin’” again reinforce the notion of ‘you’ being an access point to the seemingly neverending dream/magic of a relationship/boybandspace/youth. ultimately the idea here is that if txt are stuck chasing eternally, then, well, so are you.
this flows nicely into “dreamer,” for obvious reasons. the song opens with obvious disillusionment from the dream, again reiterating the idea that “beyond neverland,” wants are more complicated than a simple dream. i think the interplay between adolescence and childhood in this song is interesting. it came up earlier in chasing that feeling (“i was lost like a child”) and now here in dreamer, the idea of following an unwavering star is tied to being “like a newborn child.” the next line following lays it out fairly bluntly: “a grown up that doesn’t dream at all, and a boy that only dreams / between these two common roads, i’m grey.” here the act of dreaming is inherently childish, attached to boyhood, but txt acknowledge that they are not quite boys anymore. i think the most telling part of this song comes through in the star metaphor. txt liken following a dream to following a star—”even when it gets dark, the starlight is shining,” “the star that waited for me far away”—that blatantly doesn’t exist anymore—”twinkle, twinkle, disappear.” we can see the thread of neverland here (second star on the right, etc. etc.) and so all this culminates in the chorus, where txt name themselves dreamers (literally, the line talks about finding a ‘name’ which contextualizes ‘the name chapter’ as an arc) who have memories of stars. i think if chasing that feeling was ambiguous about what is being chased, dreamer makes sure we can’t miss it. dream as dreaming of idolhood is so entrenched in hybe discography that i feel like i don’t even need to explain it.
“deep down” is an interesting track i think for how it uses its soundscape to complicate the tone of the album so far. or, well, i think again it’s about furthering themes and clarification. up until now, the name chapter: freefall has been flirting with darker, more melancholic sounds. chasing that feeling being in minor key, casting an uneasy sheen over the entire song, suffusing a sense of unfulfillment in the music itself. the slightly discordant beat of growing pain, the sensual but somber jazz tones of dreamer, thus far the album is filled with richer, deeper notes. deep down is no different, but i think the thrumming house edm chorus takes it a step further in that the style of delivery is what emphasizes the point of the song. deep down calls all the way back to crown, making it clear that we are in a cycle. it rehashes the themes we’ve established, reminding us of the horns + you = crown thesis from their debut EP. but the chorus is, well. unsettling. i think it sounds like a confession. “deep down i need you more more more more” they sing, mantralike, entranced. at this point in the rabbithole, the repetition is clear. we’ve been here before and we’ll always be here. not only have we been here, but we’ve arrived all the way back at the very thing that the dream chapter was about. the ‘you’ motif becomes more ominous too, taking what was transformation love and turning it into a need. here, we understand the undercurrent of fear tied to the parasocial mode of reaching your dream—what if you need this more? what if you need someone else’s love to realize yourself?
the next track “happily ever after” is cheekily cynical. “what if we don’t know?” they sing, well, “i like it” anyways. it describes believing in your own main character energy and then painfully finding out otherwise. more important, it describes a life continuing after the main story. again, we see the idea of leaving this magical, storybook place: whether it’s a fairytale or heaven or neverland, you get kicked out eventually. what i think is interesting about this track is that it continues the return to themes present in early txt. while the notion of ~temptation and ~devilry and ~neverland are definitely related to fairytale vibes (you’ve got the whimsical childhood stuff with some dark undertones as a common theme), it’s not quite the same. meanwhile, with b-sides like nap of a star, etc. the early txt discography was more fairytale like in nature—which of course, the phrase ‘happily ever after’ is explicitly connected to. this neatly draws attention back to the cyclical nature of all this. we’ve described the same ‘conclusion’ already in this album, but what “deep down” and “happily ever after” do is really highlight the fact that not only have we been here before within the album, we’ve been here before within the discography writ large, too. is this an epiphany, or just another moment of thinking you’ve arrived at the answer, but finding out otherwise in a few years when you’re a touch older, a touch wiser, and yet mired over the same questions?
so… then what? if we’re trapped in this eternal loop, where chasing a dream and a boyhood that you’ve left behind is all you can do, and you’re kind of doomed to keep realizing this over and over, how do you live with that?
“skipping stones” is like, honestly, undeniably i think the “””best””” song on the album, by which i mean i think it has the most interesting composition and also is the most ~mature track subject matter wise. i think this track tackles the question of, well, what then?
hard question! these are some very fundamental things, right? like, what do we do with the knowledge that life doesn’t follow a set path and hard work doesn’t always lead to success and that eventually, inevitably, we have to grow out of youth? hit me up if you know the answer lmao! the metaphor in “skipping stones” is simple—imagine your various pains and hard times you’ve collected are stones, and you’re skipping them into a wide lake that is so vast so as to be able to hold all of those emotions, good and bad. whereas “happily ever after” was ironic, carrying a sort of frustrated undertone to the flippant line “i’ll just write my own ending,” “skipping stones” meets this conclusion with calm. the lake is big enough and your life is also big enough and eventually you will be the ocean—”because you will have a wide embrace,” eventually, everything will settle into the stillness of the water’s surface. you can imagine the turbulence of every previous cycle, every epiphany unfulfilled, all flattening out into a calm. “skipping stones” acknowledges the fraught push & pull the rest of the album has been grappling with and folds it all into a radical acceptance.
and so we arrive back at “blue spring.” i really have so many things to say about blue spring. what then, does placing this song here, at the end of the album, after we’ve arrived at acceptance, signal? to me this gestures towards an answer—or at least, an approach to one, as to what the fuck you do next. acceptance is one thing, but what does that mean? how does understanding the inevitability of turbulence help to untangle & contextualize the day to day thing you’re grappling with? for txt it’s that they’re rapidly moving away from youth. i think that’s a universal sentiment—we were all once young, we will all be leaving spring behind, but more than that i don’t really think the yearning ends, even after you’ve gained a sufficient number of years under your belt.
first of all, let’s talk about the title. blue spring comes from a literal translation of the korean phrase for ‘youth.’ when you separate the hangul 청춘 (cheongchun, in hanja 青春), you get the word for ‘blue’ and ‘spring,’ put together to mean youth. this isn’t really like a literal translation the way that, like, the word pineapple means something entirely separately as pine + apple, which are themselves separate words, but more so that the metaphor of a blue/fresh spring is synonymous with the idea of youth. txt themselves have explained this as describing the feeling of coming into debut & their careers, with the previous blue of all those long, hard hours of pre-debut training transforming into the spring of idolhood. i think blue spring as a title neatly ties together the concept of youth with specifically the previous blue hour, serving as an anchor point back to their discography and emphasizing again that transitory nature of this period they are singing about. blue spring is also clearly literally a fan song, describing the relationship between moa & txt and again professing towards eternity, together, always. so in some ways, looking at the song and the lyrics, it sort of feels like we’re back to where we started, doesn’t it?
but the thing that i think blue spring understands—that wasn’t present in previous iterations of the cycle, that makes it not only about a futile chase—is inevitability. it marries the calm acceptance of “skipping stones” with the reality of want. if “crown” is about discovering that love can transform you, if “blue hour” wants to stay in the magic of that brief hour, if “lovesong” is about desperately claiming a truth that will slip away, if “chasing that feeling” is about knowing you’re doomed but choosing the fall anyway, then “blue spring” is about understanding that falling was always where you were meant to be. if all our failed epiphanies were about trying to reason around the simple fact that youth will end, that love can’t last, and you will never be young again, then “blue spring” is understanding this and loving wholeheartedly, despite. the boyband Youth narrative is frequently obsessed with naturalistic imagery because it’s the truth of nature to change, and i think again that comes back to the tension between cherishing something because you know it will end, but being entirely unable to acknowledge that that’s why you cherish it. “blue spring,” by reaching back to “blue hour” and that idea of beauty being found in liminality precisely because of the ephemerality of something that will pass, implicitly acknowledges that just as winter turns to spring, so will spring turn to winter. and yet—”all my youth,” they sing, unafraid this time. blue spring speaks of accompaniment, rather than martyrdom and sacrifice. “when we’re high, when we’re low,” the song opens, but there’s no transformation referred to here—there’s no triumphant moment of being brought up from below, no magic that turns horns into crown. instead, the refrain is simple. your warmth is with me. so what if youth ends? the fear of needing someone stems from the fear of what you’ll do when they leave, and the fear of relying on a hypothetical ‘you,’ be it a friend group, a lover, a fan, to bring you your youth is about that separation, when youth can scatter like the flowers of a petal. but what if that’s not so scary? what if we know that we’re as rivers, each of us flowing in our own directions and on our own paths, but all with some connection to the ocean—so it’s not about giving or taking or chasing or wanting, but about the simplicity of being together, for as long as we can have each other? what if both of us need each other more? what if we give all of us to each other anyway, for all of our youths?
the flower path
all the way at the beginning i said this was going to be an essay about youth, which it is. i want to talk here about why this theme resonates, and, return to that question: well, what’s the point? what do we make out of literalizing that connection between youth and boybands? like i said, i think all boybands are preoccupied on some level about youth, if only in the very literal sense that they are formed by adult men stepping into an adolescent space and inhabiting the bodies and inner lives of boys, and so when we engage with boybandhood, we are all in a way buying into that mythology. they can be boys forever, and we can partake in that youth. of course, it’s not always a myth. there’s a metatextual element here that is undeniable: txt started as boys, and their sound is about moving into adolescence as they are, too. but then we come all the way back to the point, why does that matter? what are we grappling with?
there’s that idea of the flower path that crops up frequently in conjunction with so much idol boy group lore. im resisting all the disclaimers i want to shove in here like yes, yes, txt of course are not the first group to make music about how ultimately it’s all about just existing together (i’ve logged my requisite hours of looping flower road okay shut up) and so on so forth. like, yes. but also it’s beautiful to ME to see a discography develop and grow all this way, and i think you know, part of the point is the journey, right? moreover, again, what does it say about like, where the landscape is now that this narrative is coming into trend again? things that are true: kpop has been seeing an unprecedented boon, the market is expanding and appears to have no signs of stopping; everyone and their mothers wants to get in on this trend and groups are debuting well beyond what even this rapidly expanded market can realistically sustain; we are all kind of trapped in an endless timeloop of ennui these days, or so that’s what life in the 2020s has proven to be dominated by, in part because we’re in this sort of post-time era, where actually are we even beholden to the turning of the seasons anymore, if an ongoing global pandemic can fuck up the structure of a year so badly so as to render previously held paradigms entirely flimsy? not to be like kpop can affect our global ennui, but our pop culture reflects onto our world and vice versa, right? so when why are we all obsessed with Youth all of a sudden!
well, i think we’re all yearning. it’s kind of the same reason why analog and y2k is back. as a species we’re always nostalgic for a simpler time, before ~all of this. for us, the ~all of this is that pre-technology time (notably, again, Youth narrative mvs feature generally little of tech, mostly happening in the outside world) where time meant something. like if we make music about beautiful, fleeting times, it means that at least the passage of time matters, right? at least if we lose youth that means we had it at all, rather than a drudging, grey forward march that is neither particularly enriching nor can end for its lack of distinction.
anyway at the end of the day, we come to boybands for love. and for distraction. but for love! we love these boys and the beautiful thing is that while we are here, we love with our whole hearts. i can’t talk about txt’s discography and group identity without talking about the fact that part of the reason why i (feel that i) understand them is because i’ve known them for so long. part of acceptance is the wide-eyed, whole-hearted entering into the fan-artist relationship here, which to me means accepting that my own feelings are irrational and too-big, a little bit beyond me and my life. the reason why “all my youth” hits so damn hard is because when that note rings out into the full crowd at KPSO dome, i feel like txt must be thinking about how they really have given up everything in their youth to come here, to be present, to sing this song for all the gathered fans who love them not as lovers or as friends but in a secret third way, and i’m so convinced that this is what they must be feeling—this retrospective longing, this yearning not to go back to the past but to be able to reach back and truly appreciate it—because it is what i’m feeling, past my youth but moving forward regardless, old enough to feel fond protectiveness listening to some boys who i feel like i watched grow up sing to me, young enough that i still feel on the tail end of getting to covet these feelings anyway. i think about how idolhood is like school, is like giving up your freedom for a dream, is like dreaming anyway. i think about how i’ve never seen txt and how unfair that feels. i think about how earlier this year, i flew to california to see min yoongi to honour the part of myself that spent my youth with bts, and how i told myself i really had to get my shit together and finish my damn book if i did that, to justify it, but then found myself floundering like he did writing d-day, stuck marinating on the same ideas and unsure how to put them down. i become convinced ill see txt one day, to honour the part of myself that understands their yearning, so i can stand in the room with them and everyone who loves them and stand under the falling confetti like petals and for a moment, we’d be in the same place, and that would matter. i don’t think it’s necessarily delusions of grandeur to empathize and feel aligned with your idols (much as i’m known for feeling much of myself) because i think plenty of people listen to txt and feel this way. it’s the point of them. they’re a boyband. they’re built to reflect love back onto yourself. the lack of specialness is special in and of itself. that for a moment, hundreds of thousands of people can reach out to this space and understand themselves inside and through the things that boybands sing about. youth may be fleeting, but we all have some yearning inside us, and we all need each other. so what if we gave into that? what if we walked together, just for a while?
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Date: 2023-10-24 05:53 am (UTC)Lines like this - like if we make music about beautiful, fleeting times, it means that at least the passage of time matters, right? at least if we lose youth that means we had it at all, really struck me, in a great way. I've been thinking a lot about youth lately, as someone who can no longer claim it in many ways. I've lived a fairly mundane life, so I've always (perhaps with some bitterness) seen the idea(l)s of youth that kpop and other media sell as highly fictionalized, too neatly packaged - and I think that's still somewhat true, but what these songs and mvs and concepts really are is omniscient, more self-aware than how I was able to perceive my circumstances at the height of my actual youth. It's only recently in retrospect that I can view some of my life through the lens of that sparkling, chaotic, charged dream. So perhaps the framing that txt presents is prescriptive in a way that is comforting for many who are in their blue spring and guides them towards the feeling of universality you describe.
I really hope you get to see txt sometime in the future! xx thank you again for sharing this piece, I really enjoyed reading it and feel lucky to witness some of your insight and sincere relationship with their music.
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Date: 2023-10-24 09:54 pm (UTC)i really resonate with the idea that seeing this period of youth as just as charged as it is often depicted in fiction so frequently comes with retrospect. i feel like i gravitate towards sometimes self-aware projection onto the idol system bc a lot of the systems i grew up in have easy parallels (your standard too-intense high school over-competitive environment to pre-med to med sch asn kid route) but ultimately it's impossible for those youth stories to really truly capture the mundanities of living your normal life. but also i think sometimes the trajectories and arcs of our own lives become clearer looking back as well, and i do appreciate the lens that i can develop when i contemplate what txt express about their own experience!
thank you again for sharing your thoughts, i'm glad you enjoyed the piece! <3
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Date: 2023-10-24 02:42 pm (UTC)I have also never seen txt and that also feels deeply unfair sigh…here’s hoping that changes for both of us next tour!!!! thank you for sharing your thoughts I really enjoyed this
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Date: 2023-11-02 03:44 am (UTC)thank you for leaving your thoughts in return, i also hope you get to see txt next tour!! <3
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Date: 2023-10-31 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-02 03:45 am (UTC)