Book Review: Recommended Reads for Women's Month

 

Bangtan Hermana Notes: Under RM's Umbrella

In the trailer for BTS’s free live concert, Namjoon stands beneath a black umbrella with Gyeongbokgung Palace behind him. The frame is simple, but it gathers several motifs that have quietly followed him for years: rain, endurance, and the long walk forward.

Rain has always been part of Namjoon’s lyrical landscape. In “Forever Rain”, he lets the rain fall like a companion in solitude. In his collaboration with Tablo, “Stop the Rain”, the storm becomes internal. It something closer to pain than weather. The rain is not something to defeat, but something one learns to endure.

So seeing him now holding an umbrella feels like a subtle shift in that narrative. Before, he stood in the rain. Now, he walks with an umbrella under the sun. The canopy casting a shadow on his face.

I have observed how, in Korean visual culture, umbrellas often appear in moments of protection, waiting, or reunion. K-drama scenes frequently use them to signal that someone is standing with you through the storm and a companion in warm sunny days. It is a quiet image of care and persistence.

The setting matters too. Gyeongbokgung, the great palace of the Joseon dynasty, stands behind him. It is a monument to history, destruction, and restoration. Namjoon is not facing the palace. His gaze is forward. History stands at his back while he looks ahead. As leader of BTS, this juxtaposition is indicative of the resumption of his role post-enlistment.

He looks pensive and resolute.

Even the small details echo earlier chapters. The chain at his waist carries the silver spoon charm many ARMY noticed as a callback to Baepsae, the song that challenged the idea that some are born to run while others must stay in place. The crow-tit kept running anyway.

Rain. Pain. Endurance.

Perhaps the umbrella simply says this: the storm was real, but it did not stop the journey. And now the road continues.

BTS and ARMY have climbed the hill and crossed the passage of the solo era. This is Arirang. This is our love song. We never walk alone.

Apobangpo! Purple and true!

#BTSHomecoming #BTS_ARIRANG

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Author Visit: At the University of Batangas, Lipa

 

The highlight of my Author Visit in the University of Batangas was my interaction with 600 plus high school students. It was a huge audience which made pre-writing activities challenging, but we pulled through. I gave students thinking prompts that center on local knowledge and history, especially stories of folk people in Lipa. What they gave back were modern stories about food, geography and community relations. The teachers and librarians, headed by Madame May Corong and Ms. Angel Aldovino, will send over works of students for me to read. I hope we could get at least 30% of written output.

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Bangtan Herman Notes: Arirang is Light and Love Songs in Times of Loss and Tension

Bangtan Herman Notes: BTS Arirang's Message in the Track List

 

Bangtan Herman Notes: Arirang and the Return of Folk Philosophy in Pop

When BTS foregrounds Arirang in their season of return, it becomes a slow and quiet radical gesture toward sustained artistic authorship.

In the humanities, we are taught that folklore is not ornamental. It is structure for memory to dwell in held in rhythm. It is philosophy carried in story.

When J.K. Rowling inserted The Tale of the Three Brothers into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she was not merely world-building. She was constructing a moral architecture inside the novel. The folktale framed the ethical questions of power, death, and humility. It became the spine of the story.

When Candy Gourlay invoked Bernardo Carpio in Tall Story, she did not use folklore as exotic color. She used it as metaphor for diaspora, for invisibility, for the longing to be seen. The folktale becomes a binding thread for migration, body, and belonging. By doing so, Gourlay created access for readers to sit with complexity.

Folklore, when used well, carries philosophy that we can understand in relation to the world.

And now, BTS turns to Arirang.

This is not nostalgia but positioning a complex idea.

Arirang is Korea’s most enduring folk song. It has carried grief, labor, migration, colonization, separation, and hope across generations. It exists in multiple regional variations because folk songs survive through adaptation. They are not fixed. They are gathered.

So when BTS centers Arirang for their comeback album, something shifts.

In a hyper-capitalist music industry where albums are products and rollouts are spectacles, choosing a folk song as anchor reorients the frame. A folk song is not owned. It is carried. It does not explode; it gathers. It does not demand attention; it accumulates voices.

And the promotional campaign mirrors the form.

Instead of loud saturation marketing, we are asked: “What is your love song?”

Spotify playlists inspired by fan voting. Public installations. Slow reveals.

A sense of unfolding rather than unveiling.

This is not absence of promotion. It is alignment between form and function.

A folk song gathers before it is sung fully by the community.

What we are witnessing is not marketing confusion. It is humanities thinking inside pop strategy. There is something profoundly human about this. Folklore reminds us that culture precedes commerce. Stories belong to people before they belong to platforms. Identity is inherited, not manufactured.

In this sense, Arirang becomes philosophical.

It asks: What do we carry forward? What binds us across difference? How does a song become a people?

And perhaps most radically: What happens when a global pop group chooses to root its comeback in local knowledge rather than global validation?

I remember asking ARMY Daughter this question. She said, “They do not need validation. You wrote once that BTS, all seven, have become auteurs.”

And I circle back to the GQ article last Feb. 14 where Namjoon said this, “I think it’s time for us to move beyond astonishing people and think again about what kind of message we can send to people.”

This is why the moment feels different. They are entering this era of return as authors of their own artistic identity.

BTS is not merely referencing folklore. They are activating it as living philosophy. And in a way, it is phenomenological. They are reminding us that pop music can still be a vessel for collective memory that springs from interiority. They trust that fandom can be a site of cultural participation, not only consumption.

As a Filipino who works with folktales, who believes stories hold us before we hold them, I find this fascinating. Because folklore has always been about survival. Folklore carry what empire cannot erase and singing them even when the stage is gone.

If Rowling used a folktale to construct the moral spine of a fantasy series, and Gourlay used legend to hold together questions of diaspora and belonging, then what BTS is doing with Arirang is similarly architectural.

They are not borrowing folklore for ornament. They are grounding themselves in it. And us, too. We are ARMYRANG.

To center Arirang at this stage of their career is to situate their artistic identity within a collective inheritance. It signals that aesthetic is not confined to visuals and styling, or performance alone. Aesthetic can be structural. It can be philosophical. It can be rooted.

In this way, BTS joins a lineage of storytellers who understand that folklore is not backward-looking nostalgia, but forward-facing. It establishes who speaks, from where, and toward whom.

And perhaps that is the quiet radicalism of this moment: a global pop group choosing to anchor its return not in expansion, but in origin. Not in astonishment, but in articulation of their inheritance and coming back to ARMY as Seven.