“Dis-ease” and the year of unease
Musings on a year filled with overthinking in a pandemic, through my take on BTS’s “Dis-ease”.
It’s been a year (and some more) since March 13th 2020. I feel obliged to share some things, so here are those things.
The amount of replays of BTS’s discography heard bouncing through the walls of my room (and house) has been uncountable ever since my discovery of the group. Truly. Their extensive body of work suited so much of my undefinable music taste, so much so my sister agrees. “Their songs suit you so well, I knew you would like them if I introduced them to you.” Though two years younger in age, she’s been an admirer of the group for three years before I eventually came to be as well.
I adore watching BTS’s performances online, taking in their quality tunes and attention-grabbing stage presence. As I’m longing to hopefully one day see them live, I’ve been carefully weeding through their songs and the stories behind them.
Very nerdy statement but, I love words. I love a good sentence. It’s most likely why I love to read and write. Words are able to take shape in different forms and convey so much more than what’s on its surface. (Listen to Epik High’s Tablo’s podcast episode on writing, because he expressed the virtue of words better than I can.)
So in order to fully appreciate BTS’s music, I usually take the time to read multiple translations of their songs’ lyrics, diving into interviews, and taking it a step further, getting to know some Korean words and phrases. I do this in fear of missing out on the beautiful words and meanings that risk getting lost in translation.
Although up to this point I can read and comprehend simple sentences in Korean, I am still not wholly familiar with the language. I have yet to grasp its full capacity enough to appreciate the lyrics as much as I would have if I were proficient in the language. I will keep on studying, but for now I put absolute trust and gratitude in the translations I use.
My first official BTS comeback experience was their pandemic-prompted, self-produced album, BE. Led by its title track, “Life Goes On”, the group underscore the emotional hardship faced by many of us during a time of fear and uncertainty, by giving comfort and healing messages to its listeners. Its other tracks, like “Telepathy”, express a longing for better days where we can see each other once more, while “Blue & Grey” serves to embrace the hues of sadness.
But one specific track caught my attention and still has a hold on it until now, as I listened and explored it more and more over time. It is, lo and behold, the album’s penultimate track, “Dis-ease”.
The Korean title for this song is “병” (pronounced “byeong”), which literally translates to disease or illness. Naturally, it tells about some sort of sickness. However, it’s important to note the hyphen splitting the word into two in the song’s title to form “Dis-ease” from “dis-” and “ease”. In English, “dis-” means to counter something, and in this case, “ease” would be that very thing. So this song also notes the absence of ease, or unease, possibly tied to the sickness the title represents.
With member j-hope serving as one of the main writers of the track, I had expected this particular track to have an upbeat feel, but otherwise layered lyrics — a familiar theme to his songs like “Daydream” and “Airplane”. Obviously, he did not disappoint.
Let’s start with the first verse, because I think it provides a good introduction to what the rest of the song will entail. I’ll insert a part of it below to make things easier. (For this piece, I used a mix of the translations done by doolsetbangtan and doyoubangtan):
It feels like I’ve let something pass me by
With a sip of coffee, I swallow my unease
An endless rest
A discomforting joy that has come to me so suddenly
24 hours, there’s so much time
Even if I sleep all day, there’s no problem right now
It feels as though I should be doing something to the point my body shatters,
but I’m just a bastard who eats all three meals
There is plenty to unpack in this verse. Listeners can guess from the start that this song is about the sudden shock of lifestyle change the pandemic has brought upon our daily lives. Here, j-hope raps about feelings of anxiety, then happiness, then confusion, and finally frustration that comes and goes during this time. This slurry of emotions so rightly resembles my own experience this past year. Maybe it resembles yours, too.
In the chorus, the group sang:
Maybe
It’s because I’m sick,
it’s because I think too much
I hate that
My childish self who is unable to keep things simple
I’m actually so young, only my body has grown
The lyrics “It feels like I should be doing something to the point my body shatters, but I’m just a bastard who eats all three meals a day” from the first verse captures the agonizing pressure to keep working and being productive during our time confined at home, but nonetheless failing in the end.
To me, that particular line mirrors “It’s because I’m sick, it’s because I think too much. […] My childish self who is unable to keep things simple” in the chorus. I inferred that these lines touched on our experiences of regression as a reaction to the pandemic, specifically a fear of becoming immature, in a sense that our daily routines have become simplistic and monotonic. However, the opposite goes for our minds. Instead, we are flushed with never-ending overcomplicated and anxious thoughts.
But, if thinking too much is considered childish, does maturity mean acquiring the ability to think simple thoughts? In other words, overthinking could be an easy fallback option, while simplicity requires practice and acceptance. j-hope mentioned this in his interview with Weverse Magazine, “…It’s easier just to think simple. If you think too hard, that’s when things get difficult. Because I’m me, I can’t just keep it simple all the time, but I’m trying my hardest to do my best.” So it seems according to him, thinking simply is sort of a muscle we must exercise unfalteringly.
The ideas of overthinking and anxious thoughts have been no strangers to us recently. For me, spending plenty of time alone allowed (mostly forced) me to think way too deeply about certain things, like you know, life, purpose, and the future. Being 21 years old, on the cusp of finishing my education at university, these thoughts are bound to end up in my brain anyway. But the pandemic has made the big, scary Uncertainty Monster even more uncertain. Like j-hope, I am working hard to keep things simple, because I know myself too well that if I don’t, I would probably fall apart.
Earlier this March, j-hope released the full version of “Blue Side”, the outro track from his 2018 mixtape Hope World, to commemorate the anniversary of its release. In his note for the release of the full version, he expressed homesickness for “the good days” in his life, a time in the past that serves as a blue room he could escape to.
Rings a bell? Yup, it’s almost identical to his desire to think simpler thoughts, that he spoke of in “Dis-ease”. But instead of lingering too much on the past, j-hope wishes the release of this full track would help him give closure to the “unfinished” song, and hopes it would reflect his maturity and change throughout the years.
“Blue Side” longs for a different, much calmer time in a person’s life. This longing is an especially familiar emotion, as many of us might have been feeling nostalgic for a time before the pandemic. “Dis-ease”, on the other hand, is more about confronting the situation to its face, criticizing not only the situation, but also the self for not being able to react to it ideally. Ultimately though, both are about the act of moving forward.
In the outro of “Dis-ease”, BTS encourage themselves and their listeners to take it day by day, and everything will be alright because darkness is not forever:
Now, stand up, one more time
It’s morning again, I need to live today out
Let’s go, one more night
I don’t know what’ll be at the end of this, ayy
There’s no eternal night
I’ve become stronger
Fireworks burst
I will never fade away
Nonetheless, at the same time, both these songs conveyed the reality that sometimes, while moving forward, we are still accompanied by feelings of uncertainty about the future, and tend to experience a desire to look back and crave something much simpler and safer in the past, which is why nostalgia is so heavily saturated these days.
According to j-hope, his key to self-preservation is that there is no rush in doing things. “Try again later if you can’t enjoy yourself now. You’ll probably feel different in the future anyway.” In time, we will change, be it major or minor, at full speed or in stride.
He also pointed out the conscious act of changing ourselves, not just waiting for time to do it for us. He said that changing the way we think, might aid us in staying sane. “…there’s things I have to deal with, and I should do things and think things I am able to bear. I thought about that a lot and accepted it. So I thought about what I could do during these hard times, and how I could help out my friends, my team. I think I’m still going through that process, too, so everything’s an “-ing”, because I might need to know what to do later about what I can do, even if I don’t quite know it yet.”
I think what the entire experience of reflecting and writing this has taught me is that, with all the uncertainty I am facing, there is probably no ultimate solution that will break me free of the anxiety forever. Whether it’s looking back to the past or waiting for the solution to come in the future, nothing is going to be solved if I stay still. “Keep one, two step. Let’s all keep calm and treat the diseases.”
