THE BOYS FROM SEOUL: Or Why BTS is now The Biggest Band in the World

 It goes something like this.

137 million views in YouTube thirty-two hours after its premiere.  

If that is not crazy, then we no longer have a definition of sane.  But then again what is surprising is that we are not surprised.  If there was anyone to beat the record of BTS for YouTube views for a single day, then it is bound to be ... uh, BTS.

So in a single swoop, the Boys from Seoul knocked off their own record for last year's Dynamite with their much anticipated latest release Butter.  Yes, it was wild enough that when they came out with their first all-English song last August that the music world danced to their upgraded disco beat.  There is nothing short of unbelievable when you achieve even greater popularity and reach to a larger worldwide audience when everybody is locked up in their homes, imprisoned by the restrictions of the pandemic.

People are asking, "How could they have soared higher whereas other artists are literally scrounging for every available possibility to reach out to an audience and have their music heard?"  In that crowded world of pop music, it is anything but easy to find your own minute space and warrant attention from a distracted crowd. 

The answer to that is simple as it is complicated.  

These seven young men have been together for a decade and have become an organic unit that functions with as much precision as their choreography.  When Jeon Jung Kook dances and sings without missing a beat or expelling a distracting breath to miss out the rhythm of a song, then you know this is not an accident ... or a freaky coincidence: it is a product of years of hard work, training, dedication and focus.  And, yes --- something that Koreans and some of our Asian brothers are so proud of and which we are sadly lacking : discipline.

These boys are not one-note singers nor one-step dancers.  

If you watch their YouTube videos showing them in various phases of rehearsal, then you realize that their was not an easy journey to get to the top.  These boys literally fall on the floor, short of breath, withstanding pain in between numbers of their concerts. Members attest that Kim Seok Jin is more than his self-proclaimed monicker of Worldwide Handsome: he rehearses until the wee hours of the morning to make sure that he is up to par with the moves of his team members.

As the cliche goes, it is an even harder adventure to stay on top ... and boy, these guys and their management know exactly how to do it, how to go about it ... and better yet, how to raise the ante.  If ever this group of Korean boys assembled barely a decade ago got from way out there to high up beyond anyone's imagination, then it is because they worked hard for it. And deserve it.

BTS never fails to surprise.  

In the arena of popular culture where you think everything possible has already been done and redone, BTS changes the game plan.  

The boys and their management realized that what are accessible to them can be turned into channels to connect with the fans --- that ever loving, ever loyal Army that practically covers perhaps a fourth of the world's music loving population --- and create a virtual relationship into something real.

BTS has turned social media and the entire tapestry of the internet to their advantage.  

Whereas others can be destroyed by the cynicism and, yes, even evil that lurks in between the various apps and platforms, BTS made the worldwide web the vital and effective conduit to their fans.  After months of immersing myself not only in the music of BTS (as I found out that I am not the only senior citizen who holds such immovable loyalty for this fandom) but in the subculture of videos and still images they regularly provide their Army, I have come to realize that admiration has become such a shallow term.  That is not the kind of relationship you have with the group: you end up knowing them personally with the glimpses of themselves that they yield in their social media releases.

You are in awe of Park Jimin's dancing and singing skills --- but you are also made aware of his personal journey to get become the performer that he is today. When you see the video of the young man crying backstage because he made a mistake by missing a note of a song they are singing, you realize that --- hey, this is not just a kid who wants to reap the privileges of celebrity.  This is an artist driven by passion --- and you cannot look down on their brand  popular music as "so-so". This is not about manufactured showmanship that many tend to accuse the entire domain of KPop.  This is about focused dedication to one's chosen art. And the fans know about it because they are made aware of it.

That is it.  Because of social media and the internet, the relationship of BTS and their millions of fans may be virtual but personal.  Because of their consistent presence in the internet, they reach out to anybody willing to find out --- and reveal who they are as individuals as they are as a group.

We know of Min Yu Ki aka Suga and his overwhelming talent as a composer and music producer.  We know that Kim Nam Jun known as popularly as RM --- is the leader of the group not only by name but also serves as their spokesman (being most versatile in the English language) and hyung.

We are completely aware of Jeong Ho Seok or J-Hope's awesome dancing powers and sparkling personality --- or Jungkook's tattoos --- or that Jin is a terrific cook and has an entire show which shows him eating and savoring all the delicious food that gives him pleasure.  Things like that matter to fans --- especially now that they are all in various forms of quarantine confinement --- because they feel they have an intimate relationship with their idols.  This matters a lot because the connection becomes both solid and fluid. It is a fandom dedicated not only to the music of the Boys from Seoul but to who and what they represent in the here and now.

And what do they represent? Positivity. Focus. Inclusivity.

They openly talk to their fans --- mainly the kids --- about loving themselves, about the value of self-acceptance and embracing one's weaknesses as much as strengths.  They take active roles in making statements about controversial issues like racial prejudice, xenophobia and even poverty and hunger.  They are not mere dancing dolls but representations of the youth who use their music and popularity to matter in the world and push their followers to work for positive change.

It is no wonder why in a matter of twenty-four hours that their new single, Butter, accrued more than one hundred million views.  Fans and enthusiasts actually waited for that exact moment when the single was premiered --- followed by a tidal wave of reaction videos from all over the world.

And what should prove most exacting is that Butter is actually a tribute to their fans and an announcement that as a powerhouse, BTS  is here with its army.  The song is about the charm and magic of BTS that is "smooth like butter" with their ability to "melt your heart in two" because of their "superstar glow."  Taehyung even sang it inside the elevator in the MV : "...don't need no Usher ... to remind me you got it bad." As if it were not enough, RM raps, "Got ARMY right behind us when we say so ..." while the rest of the boys bodily spell A-R-M-Y to tell their fans, :"We got you ... you got us."

In a world fatigued by a pandemic,  discolored by politics and seemingly ruled by distorted reason and hate, seven boys from Korea come out singing and dancing and telling us, "We are going to be all right."  We believe them and love them for that.

So do we still wonder why they are what Variety Magazine branded as the Biggest Band in the World now ... even without the blessings of the Grammys?

Indeed at this point, only God know what they will do next --- or just how high they will get higher.  There is difficulty jumping into that entire mindset of comparing them to the Beatles because times were so much simpler in the early 1960s as it has become sixty years later.  BTS exploded into the cultural landscape --- over and beyond Asia --- but the world proving that talent, music and art knows no language, no cultural differences, no discrimination.  They happened at the right time and exactly the right place in human history.

And we are loving them for it. So ... " Get it! Let it roll!"

THE THINGS YOU LEAVE BEHIND: Why "Move to Heaven" is Television at its Best

 If there is one good thing that the more than a year of quarantine has done to me is my sudden immersion into Korean Dramas.

I never understood the fascination of audiences for subtitled television series because I never had the time to comprehend the possibilities.  Some of my friends and even more of my students have already partaken of the feast of Hallyu but I was too preoccupied dealing with my clutter and deadlines.  Then, all of a sudden, there came this virus that forced me to stay at home (as a matter of life or the risk of death) and I had all those spare hours to make a religion out of viewing Netflix.  

Crash Landing on You came at the perfect time: right when quarantine was declared with various permutations and imaginings of the ECQs, Hyun Bin and Son Ye-Jin started stealing the hearts of the Filipinos. OK, so let's give it a try.  And before I knew it, I was hooked.  Then a friend of mine recommended an older series called Pinnochio (2014) starring Lee Jong-Suk and Park Shin-hye --- and what hit me about this show is that it was not about your usual falling in love with the right person at the wrong time sort of shtick.  This was about honesty, integrity and the power of broadcast journalism.  OK, I got more hooked.

I realized that KDrama is not just about frou-frou and if they indulged in meringue entertainment, they made sure it was good.   They were not going to give you run-of-the-mill done-this-seen-that sort of stories just because it is kind of show that has an assurance of selling.  They have the courage to innovate, the guts to pry into delicate themes that others (that means us) find too high for the masses or not entertaining enough of the suffering madlang people to forget about their problems while being anesthesized by tv.

KDrama works not only because of variety but because it takes risks in dealing with themes and genres that would challenge their audiences not only to be entertained but to think.  Whether it is historical dramas reinterpreted in both comedy (Mister Queen, 2020 / Love in the Moonlight, 2016 or Hwarang, 2016) or mixed with fantasy (Tale of Nine Tailed, 2020 or Mr. Sunshine, 2018) or dramas dedicated to social issues (Life, 2018 or Itaewon Class, 2020), the novice who is just immersing himself in Korean popular culture realizes its respect for intelligence and dedication to imagination and innovation.

In the year that came to pass I have had my share of favorites: yes, I was swept away by Park Bo Gum and Song Hye-Ko in Encounter (2018) but my favorites have been set on Sky Castle (2018) because of its uniqueness in showing the rigid parental control Korean families had over their children's education or the delicate yet beautifully imaginative It's Okay Not to be Okay (2020) with Kim Soo-Hyun and Seo Yea-ji dealing with mental illness with its Tim Burtonesque imagery.  Yes, there is the recent Vincenzo (2021) with Song Joong-Ki with its larger than life production, black humor, uncanny treatment of violence and lessons in the art of the creative torture of villains.  Or maybe you can never get enough of Park Seo Joon and Park Min-Young in What's Wrong with Secretary Kim? (2018) because of its crisp treatment of the tropes of romantic comedy.

But recently, my quota of favorites went to far excess.

After finishing Navillera (2021) starring Song Kang and Park in-Hwan, I thought I had seen the best of what the genre had to offer.  That heartbreaking story about a seventy year old retired postman wanting to be ballerino in order to fulfill a lifelong dream to appear on stage dancing Swan Lake was almost ridiculous as a premise.  Instead, it turned out to be one of the most heartwarming stories to keep you not only sane but appreciative of life and the passage of time in a period of world calumny.

KDramas offer not escape but affirmation in their delicate yet life-affirming themes: Navillera, which talks about acceptance, forgiveness --- and how love literally conquers all including the frailty of the mind.  During the final scene of the closing of the series, I found myself crying my head off not only because of what the series wanted to say and successfully conveyed ... but because it went beyond the narrative. It was an introspection of mortality and the realities of existence.  I do not want to sound all that philosophical: to put it bluntly, it is an in-your-face-realization that time slowly takes away your control of life.

I was still having a hangover with Navillera --- and Vincenzo when I decided to see the pilot episode of something which I thought was promising. I saw the trailer: it was about trauma cleaners --- those who cleaned up and collected the possessions left by those who died alone or who do not have immediate families to look after them.  Not exactly the happiest premise but let's give it a try. After all, it was just going to run for ten episodes.

I was never prepared for this.

It took me time to blog about it because I wanted the feeling to filter so that I may have a better understanding of what I went through.

What started out as a glimpse of the pilot of Move to Heaven  before I hit the sack because of an early appointment the next morning turned out to be start of a compulsion. No, it was a short-term addiction that leaves you in a state of cold turkey after consuming the entire series. (I had confessions from others who saw it all in one sitting --- so that means about ten hours in a single day gulping down each episode. And I do not blame them.)  I was not prepared to see one of the most beautiful television shows that does not only deal with such sensitive and unspoken subjects but treated with such care, sincerity, beauty and intelligence.

Yes,  Move to Heaven is about a twenty year old boy Geu-Ru (played magnificently by Tang Joon-Sang, the baby solider in Captain Ri's squad in CLOY)  who is suffering from Aspergers and left all alone after his father dies.  Now he is left under the care of his uncle, Sang-Gu (again excellently portrayed by Lee Jee-Hon who you will not recognize as the same actor in the title role of Taxi Driver).  Never has two opposite personalities been forced to be together: a mentally challenged kid --- and his thug uncle, fresh out of incarceration and an underground MMA player. Added to this is a nosy busybody next door neighbor,  Yoon Na-Mu (played by Hong Seung-Hee --- who I did not even recognize as the granddaughter in Navillera).

So after watching so many KDramas, what makes Move to Heaven all too special: the reasons are simple yet hard to explain unless one sees the entire piece --- episode per episode.  This is one of the most beautifully written, directed, acted and photographed television shows I have ever seen.

It was beautifully written because the shows are episodic --- as the Move to Heaven Cleaning Team deals with each and every client, stashing away the things that were left behind as Geu-Ru reads the thoughts of the dead before giving these remnants of existence in a yellow box to the next of kin.  The choice of stories is ...how shall I put it? Heartbreaking? Ingenius? It was never pretentious because they were so real so that the events may not have happened in Seoul but right in the background of your personal memories.

The stories never went over the top because of the direction of Kim Sung-Ho from the materials written by Yoon Jin-Ryeon: the subtlety, the nuances, the choice of camera angle, the care in details.  I have told this to my students: every episode is a master class in television direction.

Moreover, the themes tackled by the ten-part series are not only heartbreaking. They are heart-crushing.  I cried at the end of Navillera but I was crying at the end of every episode of Move to Heaven. It was that bad... in a great, cathartic,  soul-purging way.  When you find yourself bawling your eyes off at the end of Episode 4, you realize that you are actually recollecting fragments of your own personal memories and translating them into the experience of the narrative that you just witnessed.

A friend of mine warned me: "Beware of Episode 5." So I was forewarned. Yet when I finally finished that episode about the ER Doctor and the cellist, I found myself in a literal state of hagulgol at 1AM.  Why? Because it was about a delicate subject treated with such sensitivity and reverence that you realize that yes --- despite the dreariness, the ugliness, the vulgarity of the world we live in --- there is a quiet corner out there where love exists and sometimes in thrives upon the death of someone tacitly leaving marks of great emotions.

I do not want to ruin the experience by giving spoilers --- but a show that tackles the pain of abandoned and forgotten parents, the agony of unloved children --- the way we tend to judge others because of our own perception not really knowing what goes on in the mind of those we so easily condemn --- or how in the deepest of hearts there is such purity in the soul of a boy suffering from Aspergers --- or that a thug is a sensitive soul dealing with pain ... Move to Heaven has found its perfect place in a world so confused and seemingly hopeless.

I have had my fair share of KDramas and I love and study them.

If you should want to give yourself the chance to see just one KDrama, try Move to Heaven. In the here and now, this show represents what television should be ... and what it can yet become for us.  It's the best there is on Netflix now.

LONG LIVE THE QUEEN: Or The Annual Offering of the Global Muse to the Altar of Media

 Too many times has it been quoted and re-quoted: the Pinoy is obsessed with the three B's --- boxing, basketball and beauty pageants.

Pinoys are such suckers for these forms of entertainment that there was a time when the Pambansang Kamao had a live-via-satellite match, the entire country literally freezes.  And perhaps this is the only time that the crime rate drops to zero.

We love seeing Pinoys in all forms of contests just to have the over enthusiastic among us find some reason to rally behind a kababayan. We love the good old salpukan and salpakan whether it is through vicious upper cuts or three point shots or an entire vocabulary of catwalk sashaying (Shamcey's tsunami walk, Catriona's lava walk, etc.) as long as a countryman is there representing the archipelago against the world.  We love to find a reason --- any reason to cheer behind a local hero --- because in real life, we badly need them to give us a sense of who we are.

But please take note. 

This year the caretakers and brand managers of Miss Universe no longer calls it a beauty pageant.  

It has is now called a competition.  It can now be placed side by side with online gaming, speed Rubics cube contests or creative party games using ping pong balls.

Soon it may turn out to be an Olympic sport like ballroom dancing or figure skating. Whatever.  But it is still --- and basically --- a contest where women from all over the world are gathered, made to wear surreal versions of their national costumes (this year somebody represented her country with a costume complete with a dressing room, another came dressed as a predecessor of Godzilla while another literally had led lights embedded in her gown), vavavoom swimsuits and evening gowns with enough Swarovski crystals to cause epileptic attacks when spotlights are aimed on them.

Hey wait! There is absolutely nothing wrong with beauty contests.  

Sabi nga, for Filipinos it is a celebration of our love for beauty --- and our addiction to party at the slightest provocation.  Should we still wonder why we Pinoys go gaga over beauty contests whereas every eskinita, baranggay and town plaza w0uld mount a pagandahan showdown at the slightest provocation.  Little girls are dressed in frilly outfits in Little Miss Something contests with exaggerated adult walks --- and, uh, sometimes there are not even girls.

We are such fun-loving, party-addicted, gimik-stimulated race that we turn funeral wakes into mahjong and Bingo extravaganza.  We sing at the slightest provocation, turning videoke machines into instruments of social destruction as every other Filipino aspires to hit notes higher than Regine Velasquez or Lani Misalucha even if he or she cannot carry a tune to save our lives.

Eh, maski nga at the height of revolutions, we are singing and dancing, di ba? Taka ka pa why we make such a big deal about the Miss Universe Competition at the height of a pandemic surge on the very day that almost six thousand new cases of viral infection have been reported by the DOH. Keri lang.

A friend commented, "Ang taas-taas ng standard sa beauty queens pero pagdating sa pulitiko ... tae!"

Well, yeah.  

There is no way you can intersect these two different dimensions of reality because the very fact that there is an obsession for boxing, basketball and beauty contests is because of the ugly reality of politics.  Or of real life, in  general.  Dude, these are placebos.  These are anesthesia. These are perhaps coping mechanisms under the pretext that laughter accompanied by excitement and suspense --- are the best medicines to dealing with the drudgery of everyday life.

By hyping up fun and games, frothy as they may seem --- we are able to survive and deal with our personal and national hardships with a new source of resilience,  

Yet there is something more to it than meets the eye.  

We cheer for our representative in that annual Olympics of all beauty pageants because for the decade or so, we have been scoring terrifically.  Starting from Venus Raj, we somehow hit the right notes in selecting the kind of girl to send and who could go head-on and face-to-face with the Latinas and Europeans aligned onstage in a battle of pabonggahan.  

Yes, people are still correct in saying that the whole yearly exercise of parading women is overrated, overhyped and most of all, self-indulgent.  

The selection of Miss Universe does not and cannot have any major impact in solving the problems of the world not could policies affecting environment or poverty or equal rights be affected by a pageant participated by more than seventy nations.  Feminists even considers this entire tradition as backwards, demeaning, diminishing women into flesh fitted into swimsuits and flimsy gowns that emphasize their being sex objects.

Again, the rebuttal to all these allegations is that it is a matter of choice: the woman's choice.  Joining a competition as large and popular as Miss Universe requires not months but years of training.  The preparation of a noteworthy physique is only the final stage for the prepping --- it makes almost superhuman demands on the ladies who must condition their minds to throw themselves onstage and walk the walk, talk the talk.  There is an entire art to the pasarella but there is an even greater challenge in learning how to focus, keep that smile on your face and strike a pose like you were born with your arms akimbo.

And, worse yet, these girls are standing onstage with God knows how many millions of people watching worldwide, exhausted from rehearsals and yet perfectly conditioned to look poised, comfortable and glamorous made to answer mind-boggling questions to add gravitas to the proceedings.

Imagine standjing in that glittery gown with a slit cut up to way up there answering questions meant for Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand:" If you were the leader of your country, how would you have handled the COVID19 pandemic?"

Talaga lang, ha? In thirty seconds, you are expected to smile, look sparkly and answer a question about geopolitics, health and a crisis situation?

Or what about, "Given a choice ... would you choose to lock down your country or open its borders for ecenomic recovery during the pandemic?" 

Uh, you need to be Angela Merkel to come up with a convincing answer ... and not one coated with generalizations and a word or two about the will of God.  But still, you have to give it to the ladies who find the most credible answer conceivable in a high pressure situation.   

This all leads to the point of just how much pressure these ladies are subjected in a week ... just one week ... stuffed with rehearsals, pictorials, video shoots, promotional interviews.  It must take Olympic level training for the Queen Wannabes to endure both physical, mental and, yes, psychological stress to comply with a super tight and almost Spartan training schedule of rehearsals.

Added to all this is how Filipinos tend to not only support but demand superpowers from the lady fielded to the contest to represent the archipelago.  But then let us face it: we can never produce a Pia or a Catriona every effing year as it takes some genetic miracle to concoct a winning combination of beauty, brains, stamina and the killer charms of a cobra.  It is best to remember that it took forty or so more years before the crown landed on a Filipina's head after Margie Moran's triumph in Greece.  But for ten --- now eleven straight years --- the Pinay representatives always made it to the top 20 or 21, some landing on the top five with a share of runners-up.

But despite all that, fueled by the fire and brimstone of the internet, the pressure on the Philippine candidate can be ... uh, traumatizing,  

Yes, it must be all that hype that created near-impossible expectations added to the usual share of inevitable bashers.  There is no denying that Rabiya Mateo tried her best as attested by months of practice enhanced by almost military discipline.  Yet even at the very start, her selection has already been discolored by so many controversies and questions that added pressure to her to prove that she is worth her mettle.

And she did. If the hype built her to what the public perceived --- then it is all that hoopla, the somewhat miscalculated amount of rah-rah-rahs that made it a damn-if-you-do/damn-if-you don't battle for her.  Yet what is important is that until the end, she tried and never gave a reason for anybody to criticize her for her performance.

In a pageant that shall now be known as the Latina Edition where all the finalists were from the same region except for a token representative from India, it was more than good enough to hit the top twenty-one together with Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand. And in this pageant where other outstanding ladies from South Africa, Iceland, Canada and Nepal did not even enter the semi-finals, we should applaud Rabiya for slugging it out there to the very end.

And as for this year's winner? Te veo el proximo ano.

Now back to reality. And the pandemic.