Oh, so you’re a connoisseur of ballet? Name every member of BTS, then. After the release of their new album Map of the Soul: 7 and the music video for “On,” Jungkook, RM, J-Hope, Jin, Jimin, V, and Suga are back with another music video that will almost definitely shatter YouTube. For “Black Swan,” the boys have basically become Phantoms of the Opera, surrounding themselves with ornate vaulted ceilings and gilded fixtures only to prove that they’re still the most timelessly beautiful works of art in the room. Yes, there are man-corsets. Yes, there is a scene where Jin ponders his reflection in a hall of mirrors. Yes, Suga’s shadow breaks free from his body and does a dance on the mural backdrop behind him while he raps, like some sort of gorgeous Peter Pan. Pardon the ballet pun, but BTS has never been more on pointe. After watching the video five times on loop, as you probably already have, you might ask yourself: What is the deeper meaning here? Could the emptiness of the theater represent the eerie feeling of producing entertainment that gets disseminated online, where you’re alienated from immediate audience reaction and feedback? Could the disembodied shadows and mirror reflections depict the members of BTS’s sense of the dual self, as both private human being and public, dissociated, mass-reproduced icon? Or are they just flexing? And does it matter? Nope! To paraphrase Natalie Portman as the titular Black Swan, “They were perfect.”
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