BTS’ RM begins his first-ever solo NPR Tiny Desk Concert not with a song from his new album indigobut from one of the most unique works of his career, his 2018 mixtape Mono. “In the cold morning air,” he sings on “seoul,” translating out Doolset Bangtan“I open my eyes without anyone noticing.”
indigo is “the last archive of my twenties,” RM explained of the album, implying a first, a second. So his self-titled mixtape from 2015 Mono. Three years later and now indigo, a sequel and final act in this turbulent, surreal, chaotic, battered, shiny era. Even if you weren’t a member of the biggest band in the world, even if you hadn’t gone from aspiring poet to underground rapper to global superstar in 10 years, this is how you could describe your twenties if you’re lucky enough to have made it through them .
RM has held a lot in its hands over the past decade; As the leader of BTS, he brings the group together, and as the only one fluent in English, he serves as the group’s lead interpreter abroad. These early mixtapes captured different phases of what comes after adulthood: the intense, raw, angry emotions of rm followed by the whispering warm sadness of Mono. This latest work, his first official album, sees RM leaning further into his shared roles as curator-artist, translator-writer. One of the funnest parts of analyzing RM’s work is how much context there is to go on. He’s known as a museum-goer, art collector, and voracious reader, and these elements flow into his writing (particularly with his affinity for cross-linguistic wordplay). On social media he shares photos, paintings, quotes from books, music snippets from artists he likes – another archive of his own alongside the concert clips, red carpet shots and paparazzi photos from the airport.
“My whole life was an exhibition” he told the writer Lenina Cruz in The Atlantic. “Unconsciously or maybe consciously I have been exhibiting my life for decades. So [I said], Okay, let’s turn this into a real exhibition.” This exhibition is indigo, curated through collaborations with Erykah Badu, Anderson .Paak, Tablo, producer Docskim, Mahalia and others, across a spectrum of hip-hop, folk, synth and city pop. Each song is meant to have its own genre, its own mini-act in this final 20-something tapestry.
Which is particularly noticeable indigo is that despite all the changes for Kim Namjoon, this exhibition often repeats the emotional states of those early records, repeating in a cycle. Loneliness, bitterness and heartbreak alternate and shift and come back; You cannot live in blissful, peaceful tranquility forever.
This is a point of tension Indigo, the spectacle of everything combined with the cyclical nature of good and bad things happening to us. What he’s doing without anyone knowing, combined with the very real, very thorough archive of BTS’s public comings and goings. A song like “Lonely,” shared by RM, which he wrote during BTS’ four-day residency in Las Vegas in April, can pair its melancholy lyrics right away with smiling photos of RM in front of the stadium. “I wanted to smash things in this room,” RM said of his Las Vegas hotel in one accompanying album film, released by BigHit Music. Outside, the fans gathered, expecting and having the time of their lives. Those joys aren’t diminished, but they do coexist with the complications of what Namjoon was feeling at the time: homesick and drifting away.