MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Near the end of the day one of BTS’s two day online concert Map of the Soul ON:E (streamed October 10 and 11, 2020), RM, BTS’s leader, spoke to the virtual audience to offer words of comfort about the ongoing pandemic: “We are literally strong. The ARMYs [BTS’s fans] I know and the BTS you know, we are all strong. We’ll find a way. We always have. If there’s no way, let’s draw the map, the whole map again. So, no worries. We’re strong and we’re still connected.” In evoking mapmaking as a reassuring image, RM’s words reflect how the group has consistently used maps and mapmaking throughout their large oeuvre as a way to investigate their experiences and to emotionally connect to their audience. In the eight years since BTS’s debut, their albums have navigated the complicated inner landscapes of the group’s members, resulting in a multipart map which unfolds across a series of songs to create an cartography which empathetically connects BTS to their listeners. In confronting fantastical new horizons containing unknown challenges, BTS’s songs become markers within this multipart map denoting the bumpy boundary between, for example, school and the “real” world (Dark & Wild), the winding path between needing to be loved and loving yourself (the Love Yourself series), or the road through living in a pandemic (BE). Each record is anchored to both a real and a symbolic space, an internal and external wilderness through which the group steadily leads itself and its listeners into the ultimate utopia of loving themselves. This paper will investigate the arc of BTS’s albums and the songs within, analyzing the group’s numerous maps from youth to adulthood, conventional masculinity to one more subtle and nuanced, and from the darkness of self-doubt to the light of loving the self.