Thinking about...D-Day by Agust D
With his third album, ‘D-Day’, Agust D critiques today’s society and calls for a new age where we liberate ourselves from restrictive conventions. He reflects on the information age, the nature of love, his own pain, and ends with messages of hope for his juniors and those he loves with this final solo album before he enlists in the military. I wrote a (very long!) analysis of each track, because Yoongi’s lyrics and musical choices are insightful and convey his thoughts truly and beautifully.
1. D-Day
D-Day creates an upbeat, energetic start to the album. The song, interestingly, is one that is uplifting, motivational and somewhat comforting, but uses strong beats and sounds. It is interesting that the song is called ‘D-Day’, usually synonymous with something dangerous, ominous, or bringing doom – yet, he begins the song with “Future’s gonna be okay,” and “D-Day’s coming, it’s a fucking good day.” His optimism for the future is seen in a wordplay on the lyric, “look at the mirror and I see no pain.” The way he pronounces “mirror” resembles the Korean 미래 (mi-rae, future). Thus, he suggests that he both looks in the mirror, at himself, and feels no pain – he accepts himself; he also looks at the future and feels no pain, he accepts what comes to him on this D-Day. He sees D-Day not as a day of death or pain, but of rebirth – he says, “the stupid past is over now, let’s toast again to us who will be reborn.” He reclaims D-Day as the day we kill hatred for ourselves and learn to accept ourselves as whole. Once we learn not to “regret the past, don’t be afraid of the future”, that’s the day we kill an essentialist notion of ourselves that sees only our flaws and pain. It is with this outlook he begins the album – he looks forward to a future of love, where we bloom as “lotus flowers” even in a world full of hate
2. Haegeum
Haegeum is a multifaceted title track filled with myriad meanings. Haegeum is a Korean instrument, but is also a word that suggests lifting a ban on something that was previously forbidden. Another more literal interpretation I found as a Korean learner was 해 + 금, where 해 (hae) means ‘sun’, and 금 (geum) means ‘gold’. The title of this song thus suggests the sun rising over a new golden age, where Yoongi is “liberated from the forbidden”, in his own words. With this song, he rejects the state of the world today and the stereotypes that are forced onto him in an extremely interesting way.
Reflecting on ‘Daechwita’, the title track of his previous album ‘D-2’, I could immediately see its similarities with Haegeum. The title tracks both heavily feature themes of Korean culture. ‘Daechwita’ is a genre of Korean music, but also means “a big blow,” which fits perfectly with its theme of speaking out against the criticism and backlash Yoongi receives as an idol. The title of this song features a wordplay similar to Haegeum’s – while at first glance appearing to describe Korean music, they also suggest Yoongi’s intentions and message for the song.
Haegeum is generally very similar in sound to Daechwita, but presents almost an opposite theme. With Daechwita, Yoongi sets himself apart. He describes, through the song, his rise to success. He emphasises his effort and struggles to reach where he is, and distance himself from those who criticise and hate him without reason. He also showcases such a theme in the music video – he portrays himself as a king with a scar, typically not someone who would have been allowed to rule in Korea. Thus, he rose to success and power despite his differences and hardships.
Haegeum, however, brings Yoongi back to his roots. He is no longer a king, and in the music video, even portrays himself as a criminal who kills a version of himself in a position of power (this time, a policeman). In the song, he says “this lively rhythm”, whose Korean tones are similar to Daechwita’s, “is a new kind of Haegeum.” He thus restyles and reforms ‘Daechwita,’ which reinforced his success and position as an idol, into a rejection of the very conventions that define and restrain him. The music video mirrors this by showing typically taboo, mature themes, resembling an action movie. A scene he pointed out was of him smoking – something typically looked down on for idols like him, but he rejects things that are supposedly ‘forbidden’ for him as he accepts a new style and era for himself.
Generally, Yoongi seems to be tired of the ‘information age’ today. He sees this as something that constrains and restricts us. It forces people into constant purposeless debate and controversy online, and this excess of information makes it difficult to make a clear judgement about what you truly believe in. He tries to determine the source of this restriction – why are we so bound to money, hatred, prejudice and validation? Is it possible that we put ourselves in this position? He recognises the dangers of this dependence and how fickle opinions and discourse are in this sea of information. He thus uses the song to advocate for a new age – one where we reject what restricts us, where we speak for what we believe in and do not pointlessly spew hatred or create baseless debates and discourse. In this way, he once again looks toward a better future, a new golden age, filled with more realism and less superficial tendencies.
3. HUH?! (ft. j-hope)
The third track, featuring BTS member j-hope, continues these themes of rejection and annoyance, this time, addressing people who constantly have something to say about things that have nothing to do with them.
This song starts out like a typical ‘diss track’ – Yoongi asserts that the people who hate him in fact desperately want to be like him. They know nothing about him and claim to hate him so much, yet they’re ‘all about him’ – after all, it takes energy to consistently seek someone out and openly dislike them. He suggests that they’re wasting time and ruining their lives focusing all their energy on spewing hate. He asserts to them, “the Internet world and reality are quite different” – a common theme in discourse online today, where often, people who spend too much time online seem to have lost the ability to detect nuance and critically think and understand the things happening around them.
j-hope’s verse on the song responds directly to these people. He repeats the word “huh?” as he asks them about the things they think, do and say towards him. He seems to question them – with a casual tone of confusion when he says “huh?” again and again, he shuts down people who critique his every move and want him to engage with them, showing that he can’t understand their obsession with him, and is too nonchalant to care.
The theme of the ‘information age’ recurs in these first three tracks. Yoongi suggests that the sea of information around us hinders us from recognizing and critiquing structures of oppression like capitalism, which he explicitly mentions in ‘Haegeum’. Through his anger, though, he still wishes such people well – “If reality is a gutter, get out of it/I pray that even you’ll do well,” and hopes that they will grow from these habits.
4. AMYGDALA
AMYGDALA is a painfully emotional and reflective track. The amygdala is the part of the brain that processes fear and anger. With this song, Yoongi reflects on particularly painful situations in his life and wonders if he made the right choice. The lyrics and sound of the song perfectly describe his turbulent mental state and mirror the all-too-familiar feeling of such a breakdown.
The song opens with Yoongi’s voice laid bare accompanied only by the guitar, as he says, “I don’t know your name/Travelling through my memories.” The hypnotic sounds he uses to produce his vocals give off the feeling of being alone and lost in his mind, sifting through his memories in a void all alone. After this, he begins rapping, describing events like his mother’s heart surgery – he truly travels through his memories, and as he does, the music speeds up as does his flow. His thoughts are racing as he sifts through his memories and re-analyses the pain he felt again and again.
The pre-chorus, with the lines “The best choice/the choices of next lanes/choice, choice, choose the lines,” are pronounced similarly in Korean (최선들의 선택/다음 차선들의 선택/차차 선들의 선택, 선택, 선택) (choiseondeur-ui seontaek/daeum chaseondeur-ui seontaek/chacha seondeur-ui seontaek, seontaek, seontaek). This shows how he is oscillating between the past and the future: he thinks about the best choice he made in the past, the choices he should make in the future, all while stuck in a thought process that seems to sound the same to an outsider – but really, he shifts back and forth between his memories and where he is today.
The chorus reaches the peak of this buildup – he almost screams the lyrics, “My amygdala/My amygdala/Come on save me/My amygdala/My amygdala/Hurry up and get me out of here.” He seems to have reached the peak of losing himself in this madness, as though his mind is about to explode with these thoughts, shown by the peaking of the mic as he screams, but the auto-tune shows that even his screams are suppressed. He begs to feel any emotion, he begs the fear and pain that these memories should induce in him to come back and shock him out of reliving these experiences. With this song, he opens up his deepest emotions and memories, perfectly capturing the pain of reliving traumatic events and wondering how you reached your current point in life, and if things would be different had you made a different choice
5 &6. SDL and People Pt. 2 (ft. IU)
I grouped these songs together in my analysis because they are auditorily and structurally very similar. Additionally, they resonate with me a lot as someone who has often experienced loneliness and as someone on the aromantic spectrum.
Both songs first tackle the difficulty of defining the world love. “This thing called love/Maybe it’s just a fleeting list of emotions” (People Pt. 2), alongside “Who else are you smiling for?/ Who do you cry for?/Could this be love?” (SDL) Yoongi examines how glorified the word ‘love’ has become in our society. It is difficult to understand what love truly is when we place so much value on romantic love and create so many expectations surrounding it. Thus, Yoongi asks in People Pt. 2, “Is love wholly perfect on its own?” Such questions are common for arospec people. Due to society’s conceptions of grandeur surrounding romantic love, the depth and strength this feeling is supposed to create, we often are confused if we experience any love at all, since we do not identify with the conventional descriptions of such love shown in media. We wonder if it’s just something fleeting that is meant to pass by us unnoticed, and we will never get to experience this grand feeling. Indeed, Yoongi recognises this too in SDL – “Thanks to the grandeur of the word love/What is easily forgotten is called love.” He suggests that by placing so much expectation and worth on grandiose depictions of love, we lose sight of the love that we can feel for simple, small things. And thus, as arospecs learn more about themselves, we recognise that there’s not just one kind of love, and love doesn’t need to be something huge and grand – we can feel it towards anyone and live a satisfying life even if we don’t experience the romantic version of it, or feel it conventionally.
The songs also speak similarly about the difficulty of maintaining close relationships. “Relationships are really difficult/It wasn’t right from the start/The gap between the two of us/Trying to narrow it down is unreasonable” (SDL), meanwhile “I want it, a sincere connection with others/Forever’s something like a sandcastle, you know/It comes crumbling down at the calmest of waves” (People Pt. 2). In SDL, Yoongi recognises that, upon revisiting certain relationships, you realise that they were never meant to work anyway, and holding on trying to salvage them is more painful than letting go. Similarly, in People Pt. 2, he describes the hope of ‘forever’ in a relationship as a sandcastle. You can construct a sandcastle so easily on a beach with a sand bucket or even just your hands, but it falls apart due to a wave that you would never expect. Waves and tides, just like time, keep coming and washing away relationships you easily built into sandcastles of forever.
He says, loss is scary to us not because of the loss itself, but rather because being alone is scary. That’s why, to him, life is “a struggle against loneliness” (People Pt. 2). We fight to hold on to relationships we cherish, but that fall away despite our best efforts. The English verses of these songs break grammatical conventions, and seem to describe this fleeting nature of love. “Somebody does love/But I’m thinking about you” (SDL) and “So time is yet now/Right here to go/I know, you know, anything does know.” While SDL seems to compare the love Yoongi sees around him to the relationships he has had in the past, and questions what love really is, People Pt. 2 emphasises living in the now – time is fleeting and always ready to go, and the only time to cherish is now.
Thus, through both songs, Yoongi emphasises that people and relationships are indeed fleeting, so it’s best to cherish what we have in the present. He urges us not to reduce all our love to “glorified memories” (SDL). He wants us to learn that even though love is fleeting and relationships can be difficult to maintain, we are still “more than enough to be loved (People Pt. 2).” In this way, he assures me that loneliness comes with life and it doesn’t change that I deserve love. He also shows that love need not be something glorious and grand, it can be in the small things and still leave me satisfied, no matter what kind of love I feel.
7. Polar Night
Polar Night was a song that took me some time to interpret and understand. I think Yoongi uses this song to address people who see a polarized, black-and-white world – a world that features their truth as the right one, and anything else as darkness. “I’m not interested in facts, if you’re not on my side”, “If you’re not on my side, you’re my enemies”. He addresses people who advocate strongly only for their own view without seeing a complete perspective. He describes their “selective hypocrisy” and their choice of “interpretation that only suits [their] mood”. He suggests that they advocate for “a cheap justice” that doesn’t actually call for fairness, but only furthers their agendas and positions of power. They thus do not truly understand that the world around them is nuanced – they don’t allow people to speak for themselves and understand other worldviews, as they’re too busy forcing their version of truth onto others.
Indeed, he asks if we truly interpret the world correctly at all when caught up among so many conceptions of truth and lies held by different people. “Between so many truths and so many lies/Are we seeing this world right?” He suggests that there’s nothing true or false at all and no way to push for only one objective truth – we are all under an oppressive system, so none of us are truly the makers of an ultimate, right truth. We all make mistakes and are all caught under oppression, tainted by the tough world that surrounds us – “It is all dirty,” he says, and almost as a hidden, softer afterthought in the backing vocals, he adds, “Am I also clean?” “Are you clean?” Possibly, we are not, as nothing we do under an oppressive system can be truly ‘clean,’ or ‘unethical’. He suggests that we are shaped by the world we live in, which is all ‘dirty’, it’s all dark like a polar night. There is thus no way to call out for your own perspective without placing yourself in the context of the environment that shapes you. Yoongi never answers the questions “Am I also clean?” and “Are you clean?” He ends the song with these questions, leaving us to think over them and about the systems we live in today.
8. Interlude: Dawn
This song seems to pick up where the previous one left off. It is an instrumental that seems to signal the coming of the dawn and the sunrise, with a sound that is very similar to its title. It starts out soft and slow, but has a deep, dreamy aura, as though the sky is just lightening with the first strokes of dawn. As more instruments join in, the song grows louder and crescendos into a rousing theme, as though signaling a sunrise after a “Polar Night.” The image this song created in my mind resembled a timelapse of a polar night of stars over the snow slowly turning into a beautiful sunrise.
9. Snooze (ft. Ryuichi Sakamoto and WOOSUNG)
Snooze seems to lay out Yoongi’s advice as a senior idol to his juniors in the industry, who must go through rigorous training and face the very high expectations of their company and their fans. BTS frequently mentions the theme of dreams in their songs. From beginning with No More Dream and questioning, “what’s your dream?”, urging youngsters to not waste their lives without dreaming of a future, they moved to Paradise, which suggested that a dream need not be something grand – “it can even be what you see in your sleep,” and having no dreams is really okay too. With Snooze, Yoongi brings both these themes together as he addresses young idols from a position of experience. He assures them that while they should dream as they try to make it big as an idol, this is a tough path ridden with struggles. Thus, it is okay to rest, it is okay, “to not even dream” for few moments, as they take a step back from the demanding life path they have chosen.
He explains that though they look up to him, the path of being an idol is rarely easy. He says that criticism is rife in his industry – “when the hand that greeted you turned into a pointing finger.” He provides them with advice from his years in the industry – not to laugh at others’ scandals, not to forget those who eternally support them, and the double-edged sword that success can be. He lets them know that although the road of being an idol is “painful and lonely”, being affected by it is normal, and they deserve to cry, feel the pain that comes with it, and that he will always be there to support them and pray that their dreams come true no matter what they go through. His descriptions of “falling petals” and “flower roads” allude to previous descriptions of BTS as ‘six petals’ by eldest member Jin, who asserts that he holds on to BTS like “six petals.” Yoongi seems to take on this metaphor, suggesting that he holds on to juniors as ‘petals’ – whether they fall or bloom with their dreams, he will support them and cheer them on from his position of experience and love towards what they go through.
Eventually, he assures them, again and again with the repeating words, “Everything will be okay.” The repetition of this line is powerfully comforting – it is a strong reinforcement that even through all their pain, they will survive, and it will all work out at the end. With the final verse, he leaves them with hope – “you will fully bloom after the hardships/Dream/the beginning may be weak, but the end may be great/Dream.” He urges them to keep dreaming, but also ensure that they take time to process the hardships that they will go through. He hopes that at the end of it all, they will finally bloom and reach the heights they wish to. The emotional tones of his rap, laid bare, with no edits as in the first few songs, complement WOOSUNG’s emotional belting voice to beautifully convey this message of love and hope to his juniors.
10. Life Goes On
Life Goes On puts a different spin on the original ‘Life Goes On’ by BTS. The original song was about staying together despite troubling times and difficulties like the pandemic. However, with his version of the song, Yoongi accepts the inevitability of growing apart from someone while still loving them. In a way, this song is possibly his goodbye to BTS and ARMY before he enlists in the military. “Let’s say good bye, not bye, hello/ Even if the world doesn’t go my way/Let’s count just a few nights as we wish/I’ll never forget the day we meet again.” “Time is like a wave/It will be washed away like the ebb/But don’t forget to find me.” He accepts that he drifts apart from us and must leave us behind, but he knows that eventually, we will come back together as one. He says, “I’ve been running like it was the last time but I’m still scared/I know, I know this place right now/A place that will soon become a memory/Don’t be afraid until the end of my life/Because life will go on forever.” He thus accepts that although his first 10 years with BTS end, life will go on to bring him to new heights where he will make new memories on his return from the military. He thus ends the album with a hopeful, loving tone with this song, assuring us and his members that life goes on, healing all things at the end.
Yoongi’s albums are always insightful in how they critique today’s society. However, his music is also reassuringly human – by exposing his own vulnerable feelings and thoughts, he provides comfort and understanding of things that many people have experienced and been through. With this album, then, he seems to hope for a new age – he released this as a D-Day, the last day of an old age of being repressed and tied in. With D-Day, he is ready to move forward with hope, be liberated and accept what life brings to him, and urges us to do the same.
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