Jimin’s Muse: Perfect, Blue
by Karenna Blomberg
There’s nothing BTS members seem to love more than crafting a narrative with their albums. Jimin’s first solo album, Face, was a perfect example of this. It was a vulnerable look at the different stages of a destructive cycle of depression, and the struggle to escape from it. His second album, the recently released Muse, purports to be a more upbeat album about the search for love. But closer examination reveals that it’s also a continuation of the story Face began—of someone who is trying very hard to seem like they know who and where they are, and confronting the fact that they still don’t.
The album begins with “Rebirth (Intro)” and the line: If I’m trying to be special / can I get closer to you? It’s a strikingly heart-on-the-sleeve opening line, and one that feels almost jarring coming straight out of the empowering Set Me Free, Part 2. However, the connection is still there—the song, as indicated by its title, expresses a desire to start new, with Jimin’s focus turning outward to a single romantic interest, referred to throughout the album only as “you.”
In almost every song in the album, Jimin speaks directly to this “you.” While it’s certainly just a pop music thing to address every song to a romantic interest and it generally means little as to the artist’s intentions with the song, in Muse you get the sense that Jimin is speaking to the same “you” in every single reference. “Rebirth” is a sweeping landscape of an intro track with choir vocals and picturesque lyrics that repeat the notion that Jimin wants to be “special” for his “you.”
After “Rebirth” comes the carnival-inspired “Interlude: Showtime” and “Smeraldo Garden Marching Band,” a visual tribute to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with big band influences in production. “Smeraldo” is a sappy sweet song with a childlike, colorful music video. While holding its merit first and foremost as a fun love song, the Beatles connection begs the question of whether there is another aspect to the track (as well as the instrumental preceding it).
The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album was their means of escape when their oversized celebrity lost its appeal. In it, the band members each took on a different persona and performed the album not as The Beatles but as a fictional band. However, The Lonely Hearts Club Band characters the Beatles played in the album were not purely an act. The characters were, in a way, an extension of the band members and more specifically who they wanted to be—performers free from the bonds of their past image and their overgrown fame. With an awareness of BTS’ mindset as a group and as individuals going into mid-2022 (when Muse was mostly recorded), it’s not shocking as to why this theme may have appealed to Jimin and his production team.
But the bandleader imagery goes further than a Beatles reference. Muse as an album is exactly what “Interlude: Showtime” implies it is—a show, an act of intense happiness and love. The idea that, like Sgt. Pepper, the Muse album is a semi-fictionalized chronicle of a performance, is somewhat reminiscent of BTS’ “The Truth Untold” and its concept of someone "performing" love for someone else while hiding their true self behind a metaphorical mask. But unlike that song, which expresses despair at the idea of having to mask one’s true self and divorces the person behind the mask entirely from their masked persona, the performance central to Muse seems to be infused with said “true self’s” earnest longing to love and be loved. There is no desire to use the mask to hide the truth. Instead, it’s almost as if in performing in the lovestruck, happy-go-lucky “Smeraldo Garden” mask, Jimin hopes for his “true self” to become the mask.
This might not be an expected comparison in a discussion of such an upbeat pop album, but I can’t help but think of Perfect Blue—a film about an idol-turned-actress whose real life and artist persona begin to blend and merge indistinguishably. The main character of Perfect Blue, Mima Kirigoe, finds herself lost after a difficult career transition, and she struggles to recognize what parts of herself are true and what is performance. In Muse, is Jimin happy or is he hoping that he will become happy if he performs happiness? Could it be both at the same time? As we move through the tracklist, the songs become more and more desperate for love and intimacy. The album navigates from saccharine desires to hold your hand in “Smeraldo Garden Marching Band” to an intimate, romantic “Slow Dance” to the sexually-charged “Be Mine.” Like in Perfect Blue, where we watch Mima and her celebrity persona become one and the same, Jimin sings songs of love while his own underlying desire for the things he sings about (his desire for “you”) boil closer and closer to the surface.
Still from Perfect Blue
All this builds to the climactic “Who,” where that line between what Jimin (or, if you prefer, the character of “Jimin”) performs and what he’s feeling fully blurs. The music video cuts between the “performance”—what appears to be a scene in a film on VHS complete with cheesy 90s CGI—and a film set that is falling apart, with construction workers and crew and even an ambulance sitting in the background as Jimin asks “Who is my heart waiting for?”
“Who” adds a new dynamic to Muse as an album, as the self-assured romanticism that the previous tracks conveyed is undercut by a powerful expression of loneliness. The many implications that the album is merely a performance suddenly make sense. As much as Jimin in this album wants to love and to be loved, he can’t. Perhaps—although this could be up to the individual for interpretation—it’s because he’s just emerged from the dark tunnel depicted in Face.
Still from “Who”
While “Who” does retrospectively flip the meaning of the previous songs on the album, it doesn’t rob them of their initial meanings. Every song is just as happy, romantic, and sexy as it sounds, but with the addition of “Who” among their ranks each has a twinge of loneliness woven in its fabric that reminds the listener that, as deeply as Jimin feels the value and veracity of what he sings, he is still ultimately putting on a show.
While numerous reviews suggest that Muse is a “happier” album than Face, painting it as the polar opposite of its sister album’s melancholy feels misleading. Muse is not Jimin saying, “I was sad, but now I’m happy and in love.” It is, instead, a refreshingly honest look at how one emerges from a low point—a cautious, curious exploration of how to love and be loved again, and how the ache to love again is almost as deep as the ache of the emptiness you’ve just escaped.
We consider a muse to be a source of inspiration, and in most conversational settings that is the common function of the word. But when consulting actual Greek Mythology, the muses weren’t sources of inspiration for others to create art. Instead, they were quite literally knowledge holders. They were wise beings with vast knowledge, and this allowed them to be the ones telling the stories and creating the art. In seeking a muse, perhaps Jimin is not seeking a source of some kind of divine revelation, nor is he looking for a person so perfect that he wants to write songs about them. Maybe, in seeking a muse, he is seeking an answer; a reason that already exists out there that gives him the hope to create again.
Still from Perfect Blue
On that note, let me return to Perfect Blue. The movie ends with Mima being recognized from afar by a stranger after confronting and accepting all her warring personas. The stranger remarks to another person that it couldn’t possibly actually be the real Mima Kirigoe. To herself, Mima looks in a mirror and assuredly remarks, “No, I’m real.” A moment like this happens in Muse in the closing track, the previously released fan song “Closer Than This.” “Closer” acts almost as a reprise to the performative “Smeraldo Garden Marching Band.” Both have a bouncing beat and sweet lyrics that swear undying loyalty to someone you love. But where “Smeraldo” is loud and extravagant, “Closer” is humble and heartfelt. “Smeraldo Garden Marching Band” is a love song while “Closer Than This” is a love letter. “Smeraldo” was a performance of passion, and “Closer Than This” is a confession of it.
Muse is simple yet wildly more complex than it seems. It is as much about loneliness as it is about love, and it is as much not about Jimin as it is about Jimin. But capping the album off with “Closer Than This” acts as a response to the performance of love in “Smeraldo Garden Marching Band,” and an answer to the reaching for an intangible love in “Who,” as well as the rest of the album’s B-sides. If you’re really sappy, you can even say that the song’s title emphasizes that Jimin feels that his bond with ARMY is so strong that we are closer than this emotional gap between us of performer versus audience member. Regardless, as Jimin sings I’ll never let you go / never let you go, it feels like his own version of Mima’s line: “No, I’m real.” It acknowledges that no matter how distant he may feel from himself, or his work, his fandom, or anything in between, the basis of his passion is and remains real.
