BTS Album ‘Map Of The Soul: 7’ Is A Serious Slap In Face For Skeptics: First Listen

February 21, 2020 BTS live interview on Today Show at Rock Plaza in NewYork.February 21, 2020. ... [+] Credit:RW/MediaPunch /IPX

RW/MediaPunch/MediaPunch/IPx

The 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 consistently scoffed at the K-pop septet. The collection will delight millions of fans worldwide. It would delight many even if it wasn’t that great. Admirers are already hailing the work as an unalloyed masterpiece. The good news is that this slice of Korean culture, perfectly timed after the Oscar success of the Parasite movie, is spot-on in many places.

The majority of 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, it was said, 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 with its audience broadening too. Never mind about boy-meets-girl songs and young-love angst, now we have tracks that hint at hate, self-doubt and the nuanced, nagging 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 and yet has a certain consistency.

Not that BTS’s ambition means that it is getting all Radiohead-experimental on us. This is a thoroughly commercial and accessible piece of power-pop made for the radio, the dancefloor, for the stadium-show synchronized strut or, yes, the student bedroom with posters on the wall.

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 that it’s a mix of English and Korean, it sounds good. For the many who can’t understand it, well, it offers less to criticize in case there are any inane words. Are the stars delivering profound lyrics likely to change the world? From translations so far, there aren’t great insights, but the fans won’t care. BTS has constructed an elaborate backstory of a seven-year journey and getting inspiration from the works of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. The “concept album” is back in all its glory. The mood gets dark on “Interlude: Shadow,” with Suga, and “Black Swan.” The sentiments are not lightweight: “the hushed sadness of yours shakes me,” we are told, and “everyone tells me I am beautiful, but my sea is all black.”

BTS could probably do with an editor. This guaranteed chart-topper is 74 minutes of music spread over 20 tracks, with five of them having been previewed on the Map Of The Soul: Persona EP.

The group’s leader RM starts with the Jung concept of ego on “Intro: Persona.” He asks: “Who the hell am I?” As each of the other members chimes in over the next hour, the answers become clearer and the members gain a clearer identity â€" the angry one, the cute one, the clown, the quiet, thoughtful one… some might say like the characters in the Beatles, the most successful pop band.

It is doing the Bangtan Boys a disservice to say they are growing to a stature that yet matches the Fab Four in the 1960s. It is also a misunderstanding to describe this as super-safe capitalistic drivel. BTS is growing up in public and already one of the biggest commercial forces in music. The boys can afford the finest production from Hitman and Hiss Noise among others, and the best-known collaborators â€" Sia, as mentioned, plus Ed Sheeran and Halsey.

This is emphatically not the greatest album ever, just a classy calling card that effectively says “Take us seriously or make a serious mistake.”