The World Set Free: BTS at the United Nations, 9/20/2021
Yesterday in advance of the opening session of the General Assembly, the United Nations allowed the Korean pop group BTS to both speak and perform from the dais of the auditorium which typically houses the General Assembly. Introduced by Korean president Moon Jae-in, the seven-member band orated a carefully prepared speech promoting the Covid 19 vaccine while holding up some hand-made posters decorated with pictures from their fans. Simultaneously, the band released a video of themselves performing the song ‘Permission To Dance,” which was set both inside and outside the iconic U.N. Secretariat Building in Turtle Bay, Manhattan.
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Some people may decry BTS because of the manufactured nature of its music, but whatever you think of their smooth, platitudinous pop, it’s hard to imagine disliking the group’s physical presence. Hating them in motion would be like disliking sunshine. Normally known for their colorful quasi-rap wear, in this video the band performed in the kind of formal suits and ties that U.N. visitors and members would be expected to wear, sliding sinuously across the aisle of the empty hall, then bursting outside into the spacious grounds beside the East River. In addition, the routine featured many of BTS’s signature gestures — fingers formed into beating hearts, flat-handed waves, shins akimbo, faces bearing beatific smiles and bodies exuding a fluidity that almost defies gravity. Really, the limbs of BTS are like sentient hard jello.
In short, BTS’s U.N. video didn’t differ much from their typical fare. And yet there was something about this video that set it apart, and upon reflection it was not the music, the motions, or even the grandiosity of the setting: after all, in 2019, another Gen Z-er, Greta Thunberg, spoke to the world from the same location about climate change, and to equally good effect, staring down throngs of adults and hissing her condemnation of them for their lack of action around climate change: “We will never forgive you.”
BTS’s version of a rhetorical appeal is quite different, but at bottom, their message is similar. On the surface, their video, like the speech they made lauding young people for their fortitude during the pandemic, exuded optimism, joy, and hopefulness. But the video’s ulterior message was as bleak as Thunberg’s. They’re too polite and smiley to say it, but BTS isn’t going to forgive their elders either. They come here to bury them, not to praise them.
At least, that was the underlying feel of the video, which depicts a U.N. that has been entirely abandoned. Abandoned to what: Youth? Climate Change? Death by Covid? No matter its name, something has emptied the great hall of humanity, and the vision it creates thus speaks powerfully of the failure of our institutions to save us from destruction. Now haunted and eerie, the BTS U.N. video argues that those whom we have appointed to speak up for peace and sanity, health and safety, and a better life here on earth, have for some time now been as silent as the grave. Or as RM said in his speech to the Assembly, “We all feel an encroaching sense of dread that our time on this earth is limited…and all we can talk about are the things that we mourn.”
And so, as the video begins, a single member of BTS stands at the podium, as if he has replaced U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. He’s immediately joined by another and another; they high five and are then joined by the rest of the group, with whom they dance up the aisle of the gapingly empty assembly hall. Outside the hall in the entrance way, we see the doors that are typically barred by layers of security, metal detectors and men with guns, are now free from barriers. BTS bursts through them, just as we were all able to do in the days before 9/11, and there on the steps of the UN, they dance nimbly together in unison, as do their shadows, indicating that is noon. Noon in New York City and not a soul around? It must be the rapture. The camera pans up to a clear blue sky — free of airplanes, free of smoke, free of thunder and lightning and weather and heat — and off they go to lark on the spacious lawns along the East River, joined now by a select few pedestrians and picnickers, who dance along behind them, albeit at a polite and chilling social distance.
And then the video ends with the world set free as we realize collectively that the reason that BTS don’t need permission to dance is because soon there will be no one left to give it to them. All that will be left are young people like them, who, in their own words are now treading a path that “can’t be seen by grown up eyes.”
The World Set Free: BTS at the United Nations, 9/20/2021 was originally published in Fools Rush In Again on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.