RM, or Kim Namjoon, is best known as a member of BTS (which also includes, of course, Jimin, J-hope, Jin, SUGA, V, and Jungkook), who I’d wager probably don’t have to introduce to you, and has been their leader since their debut in 2013. He officially debuted as a soloist in 2018, with Mono, but he’d been making solo music for a while before that too.

Here are my credentials: so, I covered BTS a while back in one of my earliest reviews—that’s due for a redo later this year for sure—but this was before I really made an effort to connect with who idols were as people. Then I stumbled across his Tiny Desk performance with my mother and was really impressed by the artistry on display, so I covered his album Indigo in my solo rankings series. And I liked that so much that I decided to give him a review of his own—with my mother along for the ride. So let’s get into it!

Album #1: Mono

Seoul was one of the few songs of RM’s we’d heard at the aforementioned Tiny Desk concert, so we knew a bit of what to expect going into this song. Though it’s mellow groove and hip-hop heavy sound aren’t the kind of song either of us would usually go for, we were won over. Part of that is that there’s so much clever lyricism and wordplay in this song, especially with the word Seoul, which is used at different points to mean the city, to mean “soul” as in heart, or to sound like “so” in lines like “I love you Seoul” / “I hate you Seoul”. “In terms of lyrics, it’s definitely a cut above a lot of the kpop songs [you’ve shown] me,” Mom noted, which I can’t help but agree with. As much as I dearly love SHINee’s Ring Ding Dong or songs of its ilk, I confess that few artists hold a candle to something like this. In fact, the only one I could conjure up in the moment was Jonghyun.

“I think in terms of the video itself,” Mom continued, “it’s making it feel like you yourself are driving through Seoul…the sense of movement, the fact that we don’t see him at all…it takes a lot of confidence.” I think I agree with her. Despite the album being called Mono, the video is full of color, making the city feel less like a collection of places and more like something living and breathing. It’s a great song, if that wasn’t clear from all my rambling, and I could probably write a whole review on it alone, but I don’t have that kid of time, so we need to move on.

Forever Rain also doesn’t show RM’s face, but besides that, it’s as different as you could get. Where Seoul was all recorded video in eye-watering technicolor, Forever Rain is all black and white (monochrome, if you will), illustrated wonderfully with pen and ink in a way that reminded me of the novel The Invention Of Hugo Cabret. An introspective look at his struggles with depression, the song uses the very idea of time across its lyrics, getting across this deep sense of feeling stuck standing still while the world goes on without you. There are many excellent lines in it, but for my money, I think the best is, “whenever it’s raining, I get the feeling that there’s a friend tapping on my window.”

From the album, I enjoyed the melancholy piano and deep, ethereal vocals of Tokyo, the gorgeous strings and the gently encouraging lyrics of Moonchild, and the lovely gradual build of Everything Goes (my hidden gem). These songs aren’t necessarily ones I’d listen to every day, but I can appreciate the artistry that went into them.

Album #2: Indigo

Still Life was the second song we heard of RM’s on the Tiny Desk concert, and is probably the one that left a greater impression on me. It’s actually still what wakes me up every morning, and all things considered, there are many worse ways to get up than Namjoon vocalizing in your ear. In all seriousness though, I think that this song is by far his strongest single. It continues the talented lyricism of Seoul and Forever Rain, comparing a life not yet lived with a painting not yet completed. The line “life is better than death, I’ll prove it” really touched me, though if you’re looking for great lines, you’re spoilt for choice.

The sense of fun that permeates Still Life is just great too, earning a good few shoulder shakes out of me—you know the kind, when you’re too lazy to get up but your body just has to dance along—and by the end, we were both nodding along. He has a charm that’s very hard to manufacture, the kind that you feel like is about to wink at the camera and sell you toothpaste. And you’ll buy it. When I said this to my mother, she laughed but agreed, saying, “He’s a star. It’s very different from the tentativeness and awkwardness of some other groups in front of a camera.”

Wild Flower is the other single from Indigo, and like his past ones, deliberately explores the idea of opposites that aren’t really opposites. Where in Still Life it was the idea of a still life moving and in Seoul it was the question of whether love and hate were one in the same, Wild Flower looks at the struggle between showing your authentic self to the world while also wanting to keep something for yourself. Perhaps fittingly for a song we both theorized to be about “fame, “This is more typical of what I expect from kpop,” Mom laughed, “put people in extreme weather conditions and have them stare into the camera.” The song itself is also more “usual” along the lines of kpop, a typical pop song that’s nonetheless anchored by great lyrics and great performances by both RM and the featured artist, Youjeen.

Indigo, as mentioned above, was the album I reviewed for my soloist ranking, and thus it was really my first look at the kind of person RM is. It may be that that makes it my clear favorite of his three albums, but I also think that’s it’s an excellent piece of art on its own, even with no context. There’s the clever turns of phrase in Yun, dedicated to painter Yun Hyong Keun (“I wanna be a human before I do some art”), the surprisingly gentle Forg_tful with its catchy whistling hook, and the call to action in All Day, just to name a few, but my hidden gem was Lonely.

It was my hidden gem in the original review too, both for its great lyrics and for the great buildup in the pre-choruses that never fails to capture my attention no matter how many times I hear it. I even didn’t mind the anti-drop, which, if you’re a longtime reader, you’ll know is pretty surprising for me. Either way, I loved this album so much that I even included it on my list of Top 50 Kpop Albums (read that here), so that should tell you just how much I’m restraining myself from going off on every little detail of what makes it so great.

Album #3: Right Place, Wrong Person

After four lovely yet different songs and music videos in Seoul, Forever Rain, Indigo, and Wildflower, the first thought my mother and I had watching Groin was along the lines of: what the ever-loving fuck is this? Why is he calling me a bitch? Why is he toeing the line of cultural appropriation and pretending he’s from the Bronx? Why? Why to any of this? “You were saying, about how his lyrics were a cut above the rest, and he’s so poetic, and so on?” I asked my mother, who responded, with her usual comedic timing, “Well. This song sucks.”

In case you think I’m being overdramatic, I’ll take a picture of the lyrics and put them underneath, and you can make the judgement call yourself. As for us, I confess that we lasted a total of two minutes before we turned the video off and promptly went to the next one, so my apologies if this is your favorite song of his, but…yikes.

Next up on our list of singles for Right Place, Wrong Person is Come Back To Me, whose melancholy atmosphere and sparing instrumentation is about as large of a 180 as you can make. “This is almost too much for a video, in a way,” Mom said, “it’s kind of an old school video like 80’s MTV, telling a story more than the song itself”. Like Groin, the song is almost all in English, a choice that I think works to its detriment, stripping it of the pointed wordplay and clever lyricism that defined the last two albums and made them work so well, but unlike Groin (thank God), it’s far more in line with the quiet, contemplative sounds of the previous songs. The MV is beautiful, showing RM in a collection of different rooms representing different parts of his life, but I feel like there’s something I should be taking away from it, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is. My mother felt the same way.

The first word that comes to mind with “Lost” is “interesting” for me, with a music video set that melds a muted 70s corporate aesthetic with a much brighter one reminiscent of the 80s MTV that Mom noticed in Come Back To Me. The song itself melds hip-hop with a muted funk sound that works quite well, but I again think that the choice to make a song mostly in English takes away what could have been the emotional crux of it. “He’s very good at music videos that amplify the messages of the songs,” my mother said. “There’s this ongoing idea through the singles of mazes and identity, trying to figure out who you are.” It’s such an interesting (there it is!) idea, but with both Come Back To Me and Lost, I felt like I wanted to like them much more than I did.

I confess that I meant to check out this album when it first came out over a year ago and everyone was raving about it, but that I didn’t actually get around to it before now. So I was interested to see if it lived up to the hype. After having listened through twice, I’m honestly still not sure how to describe it, besides feeling like there was some underlying truth or some central message that I just was not getting. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m not a BTS fan and so I was missing all the references that would make it make sense or what, but I just can’t understand what people see in it.

Make no mistake, there’s a lot of talent on display here, even I can recognize it. There are parts like I enjoyed too, like the almost country-esque guitar in Domodachi, the great vocals of Around The World In A Day, or the woozy, evocative feeling of Heaven, which was easily my favorite. But overall, it feels like this is a completely different artist than the one I loved in the past two albums. Why are we doing 2014-era-BTS blaccents and saying “motherfucker” every two seconds? Look, I’ve been beating around the bush for two paragraphs; I just didn’t like it, and that’s the truth.

Verdict: TL;DR

I’m glad I did this! As mentioned, I knew a bit about RM before this deep dive, but really. So, besides rewatching his Tiny Desk concert (which is just as delightful as the first time), I found the time to watch his conversation with Pharrell Williams on Rolling Stone where they delve into his creative process, as well as part of the documentary he made on the making of Right Place, Wrong Person. I also, as always, had a great time sitting on the couch with my mother reacting to this MVs and getting her thoughts. I was actually in the middle of recovering from a cold when I wrote this, and it ended up being just what I needed.

(Also, side note, as I said to my mother, I still can’t believe that he learned English from watching the show Friends. I think it was Jimin that said “Hey, I also watched Friends and I can’t speak English”, and I can’t blame him; either the man is a prodigy or I’m not learning Korean the right way. )

My Top 5 songs were Still Life, Lonely, Seoul, Everything Goes, and Heaven, with Sun as an honorable mention. RM gets an 8.75 out of 10 from me, a score that honestly took me a long time to settle on. But let me explain my reasoning. Despite my dislike of Right Place Wrong Person (and my bewilderment at the legions of people who adore it), I decided that my love of his other two albums—especially Indigo—-and my appreciation of his artistry warranted it. RM is truly one-of-a-kind, from his lyricism to his musical vision to just his presence in each of his songs, and despite both my mother and I being people who generally don’t like hip-hop, we found ourselves invested anyway.

As my mother said after Forever Rain finished,”[His lyricism] isn’t even like that of songs like [Dreamcatcher’s] Break The Wall or MAISON, which are great because of their messaging. Here you feel like every word has a weight; every word has to be there.” And I think she’s right. I think that my earlier comparison of RM to Jonghyun was more accurate than I realized, despite them mainly creating music in different genres. It’s difficult to stand out in an industry as fast-paced as kpop, and yet they both manage. It’s something to be celebrated.

Next time, we’re onto a girl group that’s been a long time in the making. Tschüss!