Notes on "Seven"
I thought about this music video the whole weekend. That's three days of a week out of seven, and it's still too long.
Jungkook is the second to last BTS member to make a solo song after the hiatus/pause of the juggernaut boyband, which is unsurprising given that he is one of three members uniquely poised to be successful solo. It’s the young age and the baby face mixed with the easy, charismatic presence on the mic that has worked for people from Christopher Cross in 1981 to Justin Bieber in the late 2000s. Jungkook sounds good whether he’s rapping (what he used to do early into the career) or singing (also something he’s done since debut), whether the genre is post-grunge melodrama or, like “Seven”, an adult contemporary-tinged R&B track with the cloak of UK Garage.
Of course, the UK Garage genre (shortened to UKG) is living a moment both in K-Pop and American pop music — for the second time of its thirty-one year existence, the genre is in conversation with the rest of the world (the last time being 2012, with EDM riding a high), if not directly at the center of pop. The revival has been spearheaded by PinkPantheress, of course, but has no doubt found more footing through the Youtube algorithm pushing the related drum’n’bass and lo-fi hip hop (which, one could argue, this version of UK Garage is simply the sped up version of). Then there’s NewJeans finding chart success in the Billboard Hot 100 (at exactly #100). UK Garage has already charted in the US before. In fact, in 2002, it was an UK Garage song — Craig David’s “7 Days” — that dropped off the Billboard Hot 100 and ended a thirty-eight year streak of British acts appearing on the pop charts.
Craig David’s “7 Days” is a clear ancestor of “Seven”. Name and lyrical main conceit aside — only so many ways you can write a pop song about a week, after all, and I’m not even bringing up The Cure’s “Friday I’m In Love” here — “7 Days” and “Seven” also share a musical DNA. “7 Days” mixes a Latin guitar with R&B sensibilities, Britishisms (”chewsday” for Tuesday is a humorous one) and the slow, sensual kick that UK Garage also uses. “Seven” — sorry, “Seven” (feat. Latto) (Explicit Version) — is more firm in its UKG ideas and buries the acoustic guitar, not Latin, deeper into the mix. Also, Jungkook sings like a pop singer, no way around that.
“7 Days” details a situation in which Craig David is hanging out with the lads, and upon meeting a beautiful girl in the tube, hits on her. She doesn’t decline, she doesn’t mind — no, she’s pretty keen, this twenty-four year old, and so after taking her for a drink on Tuesday, they’re making love Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. But, like God, they rest on Sunday. There’s a bit of a story here, even if it is quite slight and not exactly heavy on details besides how keen he is to sex, “making love”, the more adult version of it. Jungkook’s song is even slighter, more blunt. In the explicit version, he tells us exactly seven times, “That’s why, night after night, I’ll be fuuucking you riiiight”. There’s only declarations of intent. He’s going to show her devotion, deeper than the ocean: kissing her waist and easing her mind, leaving her with that afterglow. He met her in another life, so she should break him off another time. He must be so favored to know her — which is why on every day of the week, every second, she knows, night after night, that he’ll be fucking her right.
Imagine me, sitting on a mahogany table, with the fog machine working behind me. Imagine me on the set of Beyond Belief. Imagine me as Jonathan Frakes when I am asking these questions. I am compelled to ask: is he bragging about giving her an orgasm? Also, is this why he tells her she can’t break off with him, because he’s fucking her right? Why is this song about how great he is and how she’s meant to accept it? Latto’s verse, of course, doesn’t help my questions. She’s just here to accept the pride, as in, his load.
The song is so deeply unsexy despite being about sex. It’s more painful hearing Jungkook sing “fucking you riiight” with this mechanic gusto than Enrique Iglesias declaring, simply, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude / but tonight I’m fucking you” (urgh). Ironically, Iglesias’s “Tonight (I’m Loving You)”, which has the most unfortunate explicit version in recent history, uses the exact same substitute as “Seven” does between the clean and explicit version, but what makes Iglesias sound slightly (slightly) better at the song is that he isn’t crooning it to the listener and sounds more compelling on the rest of the song, which is heavy on EDM.
Lyrics aside — yikes… — I don’t like the song, although I do enjoy that little extra kick that comes in the second verse, making the song way more vivid and original than it really is. This is the type of song so reliant on its chorus that the hook is tantamount to brainwashing, and not even a particularly effective one — it’s tiring to sing along to. He might as well be singing about his day-to-day activity. I actually saw the music video on mute first, which made the music video quite funny at the start — but the second time, I saw it with the music, and every flaw revealed itself to me, and every single time after that.
I thought about this music video the whole weekend. That's three days of a week, not seven, and it's still too long.
In the music video, the first thing we learn is that the love interest (actress Han So Hee) doesn’t look thrilled to be here. On Monday, they sit in the restaurant together, and she’s arguing with him. His response… are the song lyrics. The more frustrated Han So Hee looks, the more the world around them falls into disarray. In the restaurant, an earthquake appears. A chandelier falls on another couple’s table. She wants to leave the restaurant. He holds her back. She turns around, forcing him to let go… except he doesn’t let go. Tuesday, she’s in the subway, and he’s outside, hanging on for dear life with the casual attitude of someone who would die happy knowing they were doing what they loved (the music video makes it very clear that “doing what they loved” does not involve actual sex). Wednesday, So Hee does her laundry in a flooding place, while he sings at her. She’s shouting at him, but the water pushes them up to the ceiling, and she has to take a dive. They survive Thursday. Jungkook has to be carried on a stretcher, but he sees So Hee cross the street, and so he’s magically fine, snagging a bouquet to serenade at her. It rains heavily on Friday, complete with a wind so vicious that while So Hee holds onto a washing machine that survives the blow, Jungkook holds onto a pole and lets go the wrong moment. The funeral is Saturday, and Latto does the eulogies. Then he wakes up, peeking over the casket. So Hee is so over it, but on Sunday, he’s on top of a plate used for construction, and he’s serenading at her, and she smiles, telling us she kind of finds it cute. Then we flash back to Friday. After hearing from him endlessly, she stretches her hand out. He takes it, and they leave together.
The moment I thought everything was unfunny: the ending, which made me feel distinctly lacking in heterosexuality. Why is she taking him back? He’s not even listening to you! Also, this is creepy! No is no!
A moment I still find funny: he can’t even stay dead. Like Taylor Swift in “Anti-Hero”, but like, for romantic reasons. Also, him peeping out of the casket with a wide smiling face — that baby-face — is genuinely hilarious. And, to director team Bradley & Pablo’s credit, Jungkook singing the lyrics while she’s talking to him, is a fun idea.
God, the “safe” version is so much better.
Jungkook debuted incredibly young, at just sixteen, and the early BTS music videos — “No More Dream” and “N.O” and “Boy in Luv” all highlight this hopelessly. I can’t help but think back to the first original solo song of Jungkook’s. That was back in 2017, him at twenty years old, on the album Wings with the title “Begin”. The song is timid and hazy sonically at the start, using synths to create a mood of confusion, Jungkook sings: “The fifteen year-old me that didn’t have anything / The world was so big, and I was so small” with gravitas in his voice, just the slightest tremor, before the song opens up ever so slightly with metal drums and a slower pace. “Love you my bro-ther, I have brothers / I discovered emotions, I became myself / Now I’m me / You make me begin” Sure, sonically, this is a derivative of the 2017 EDM from the Calvin Harris-es of the world. But the vocals sell the song’s true purpose — that of Jungkook feeling indebted to the other members in helping him grow up in the safest way one can grow up within the cruel K-Pop industry, the devastation he felt when he saw the other ones cry and feeling the inability to help them the way they did him. Unsurprisingly, BTS leader RM penned this track — who has a knack for intimate details, who will write to find emotional catharsis.
It’s been six years since “Begin”. I don’t mean to say that every beginning (ha) is meant to be this heavy. But for a first taste, “Seven” feels faceless, and says very little about Jungkook. Part of that is by design. Mostly, though, it pushes him too far down into the mix in favor of a couple kicks that happen to be modern right now.