February 21, 2020 BTS live interview on Today Show at Rock Plaza in NewYork.February 21, 2020. ... [+] Credit:RW/MediaPunch /IPX
RW/MediaPunch/MediaPunch/IPxThe new BTS album Map of the Soul: 7 is a piece of slick, sophisticated pop. It is a slap in the face to all those critical skeptics who have scoffed at the K-pop septet. The collection will delight millions of fans worldwide, to state the obvious. It would do that even if it wasn’t much good. The better news is that this slice of Korean culture, perfectly timed after the Oscar success of the Parasite movie, is spot on in places.
Many pop teen sensations are treated as a joke at first. At the recent BRITS ceremony, Harry Styles faced questions that he wasn’t taken seriously in his early One Direction days. How can you respect a pretty-boy pop force when its audience is mainly schoolgirls? BTS has been through all this and this latest release is a sign that it is climbing towards maturity. Never mind about boy-meets-girl songs and young-love angst, now we have tracks that hint at hate and the pressures of fame.
Heavy guitars meet Latin touches and rap on a wide-ranging and, dare we say it, ambitious record with a cinematic sweep that doesn’t stay still for long.
Not that BTS’s ambition means that it is getting all Radiohead-experimental on us. This is a thoroughly commercial piece of power pop made for the radio, the dancefloor, for the stadium-show synchronized strut or, yes, the student bedroom.
The single “ON†with Sia is a case in point: an opening organ leads into a danceable series of treated vocal acrobatics. Don’t worry it’s a mix of English and Korean, it sounds good, and for the many who can’t understand it, well, it offers less to criticize with inane words. Are they delivering profound lyrics likely to change the world? From translations so far, there aren’t great insights, but the fans won’t care.
BTS could probably do with an editor. This guaranteed chart-topper is 74 minutes of music over 20 tracks, with some having been previewed on the Map Of The Soul: Persona EP. It is doing the Bangtan Boys a disservice to say this is a record that shows them growing to a Beatles-like stature. It is also a misunderstanding to describe this as super-safe capitalistic drivel. BTS is growing up in public and on its way to being one of the biggest commercial forces in music. The boys can afford the best production and the best collaborators â€" Ed Sheeran and Halsey, for instance.
This is emphatically not the greatest album ever, just a calling card that effectively says “Take us seriously or make a serious mistake.â€