Agust D Is Dead. Long Live Agust D.
A review of the South Korean rapper & BTS member’s second mixtape, D-2
It’s been a month since D-2 came out, and I’m finally done with my track-by-track review. It’s not as long as my Map of the Soul: 7 review, nor is it quite as in-depth, but I hope you enjoy. I used Doolset’s lyric translations—please show her and other ARMY translators your love, support, and gratitude.
Thanks so much for reading.
1. MOONLIGHT
“Fuck it, I’m just doing it.”
So begins the first record from Suga’s alter ego since 2016. It’s been four years! (Four motherfucking years!) The opening is a departure from that of Agust D, which ran out the gate red-eyed and full of wrath. Instead, here, we get muted synths and record scratches, before a funky bass line and guitar riff kick in; it’s old school and smooth as hell. When Suga starts talking, it feels like a throat clearing—“Okayokayokayokay. Yeah.”—but he sounds relaxed, as though he’s pulling up to have a chat with an old friend. Compared to the last mixtape’s opener, “Agust D,” “Moonlight” is a gentle preface—one that signals both emotional change and musical evolution. “Honestly, I don’t know how many songs to put in,” Suga lies with a laugh. “Fuck, I’m just doing it.”
Lyrically, the song does what good opening hip-hop tracks often do, setting the tone and letting listeners know where the artist’s mind and life are at these days. It also works as an introduction for people who’ve never heard Suga’s music before. “The beginning was small, Daegu, yeah, from a basement in Namsandong to a penthouse in Hannam the Hill now, ha.” (Suga likes using vertical metaphors for success—basement to penthouse, from the ground to the sky.)
The song is about what’s changed in Suga’s life since 2016, but more importantly, it’s about what hasn’t. Yes, he’s more famous and wealthy now, but in the verses he admits that he’s still worried about many of the things he was worried about four years ago. He acknowledges that his ascent with BTS hasn’t left his relationship to music unscathed. For fans, witnessing the improvement of his writing and producing skills over the years has been almost purely a joy; for him, that growth has required pain. Days stacked on top of days of self-doubt and stagnation.
“I wrote Verse1 fucking fast, / but can’t make Verse2 no matter how hard I rack my brain.”
“Being called immortal is fucking overwhelming / I started just because I liked music / but the adjectives they attach to my name feel too much sometimes.”
“In my head, the reality fights with the ideal tirelessly / My biggest enemy is the anger inside me / The more dreadful is the battle with the laziness inside me / Sometimes I resent god, asking why he made me live a life like this, / what I’m doing, and if I love music at all.”
The last line recalls Map of the Soul: 7’s “Black Swan,” which was a dark reflection about an artist becoming estranged from the work they love. Similarly, “Moonlight” nods at the anxiety that inevitably comes with making a sequel, which helps explain why Suga, in interviews, has talked about trying to free himself from arbitrary expectations for how new his new record should sound and instead focusing on making the kind of music he wants. After grappling with this tumult inside his head, the chorus returns to steady ground—or rather, to the immutable sky above:
The moonlight that shines on me at dawn. It’s still the same as then. A lot changed in my life, but that moonlight is still the same. [Note: I love how this song pairs thematically with both RM’s “Moonchild” and Jin’s “Moon,” though each uses lunar symbolism in different ways.]
Little touches make this one of the most sonically distinct songs in Suga’s discography—the horn-like synths, for one, and the fact that it’s one of the only tracks on the record without a trap beat or a cloud-rap style. I love that he decided to sing on the chorus but have mixed feelings about the way his voice is processed; it clashes a bit with the otherwise throwback feel of the song, but perhaps that dissonance was intentional. In an interview about D-2, Suga talked about his interest in contrasts, particularly visual contrasts, for “Daechwita,” and specifically mentioned the juxtaposition of modern clothes in a traditional space. Here, too, old clashes with new.
In one of the last verses of “Moonlight,” he nods back to “Never Mind,” a song he wrote a year before Agust D came out. “If you think you’re gonna crash, accelerate even harder, you idiot,” he raps. Some things change; some never do.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m a genius.
Sometimes I feel like I have no talent.”
2. DAECHWITA
“Born a slave, risen to a king.”
I’m just going to say it: The first 33 seconds of this song is one of the coolest fucking openings I’ve ever heard. I’m obsessed with it, and I’m obsessed with “Daechwita.”
It’s the title track for a reason. It goes hard the way “Agust D” and “Give It To Me” did, but it’s many cuts above those songs in terms of conception, production, and overall musical sophistication (not to mention it has one of the most cinematic-looking BTS-related videos ever shot). It feels like a song only Agust D/Suga/Min Yoongi could have made—a South Korean rapper and idol group member who suddenly found himself at the top of the world a decade after he started as a trainee. The sampling of an actual daechwita performance, the incorporation of a ceremonial introduction at the beginning, and the historical-drama style of the music video (not to mention the historical references within the lyrics itself) all set this song apart from other hip-hop tracks, despite its heavy use of other popular trap elements. “Daechwita” is, in a word, inspired.
In interviews, Suga has said repeatedly that this song is meant to be consumed as an auditory feast—because it sounds cool and is exciting to listen to—and that the lyrics are secondary. In a way, he’s succeeded because you don’t need to dwell much on the lyrics to absorb the waves of savage energy this song emits. The heavy-sounding kicks, the stuttering hi-hats, the somber bell are all in service of a chorus meant to be yelled while kicking someone’s ass (or at least while imagining you’re kicking someone’s ass) and mesmerizing verses with flow switch-ups anytime things start to feel too calm. Delivery-wise, Suga doesn’t lock into a single mode; he’s sometimes yelping, sometimes growling, sometimes lowering his voice to a bored drawl (and recalling most obviously RM’s iconic verse in “Ddaeng”).
Lyrically, it’s a straightforward boast track, featuring chartered planes, expensive clothes, money, crowns, and a “rags to riches” story. But Suga stitches in culturally specific historical references that other writers, translators, and vloggers have delved into more and that reward close-reading and further research. (I won’t get into the music video itself, since that’d require a separate article.)
One interpretation that I like, and which is supported by the video, is the notion of a former Agust D being confronted by a new Agust D—the first has become a tyrannical king consumed by notions of his own greatness, so desperate for the heads of his enemies. The first mixtape fixated on how Suga wanted to beat lazy and talentless entertainers; full of hubris, he wanted to conquer them all. But in that mixtape he also confronted his fears about becoming a monster. It’s interesting to think of “Daechwita” as Suga toggling between that older persona and a new one—one that’s more restrained but no less assured of his worth, one that has proven himself on a global stage and doesn’t need to demand heads anymore. When he screams “I’m a king, I’m a boss,” I think he’s doing that partly as a sincere declaration and partly as a performance—there’s a little bit of the hysterical despot coming out there. But then there’s his thoughtful last verse:
I got everything I wanted, I wonder what else I should have to feel satisfied
The clothes, clothes I wanted, and then money, money, and then goal, goal, and then what should come next
Yeah, what would come next, I suddenly realize where I am, the current situation where I have nothing above me
I, who has only been looking up, now would like to just look down and put my feet on the ground like that
You can interpret the music video as the present Suga killing the egotistical self that was birthed four years ago and reaffirming a desire to remain humble. Again, with the vertical metaphors: “I, who has only been looking up, now would like to just look down and put my feet on the ground like that.”
Still, this is just one interpretation. I don’t think “Daechwita” is a sequel to “Interlude: Shadow,” which was much more explicitly about two identities colliding (I wrote more about that song in my Map of the Soul: 7 review). I enjoy this track primarily for the visceral experience of hearing a song begin and feeling your heart rate quicken a little, of closing your eyes, nodding your head, and letting it all wash over you.
“I’m so thankful that I’m a genius.”
3. WHAT DO YOU THINK?
“Whatever you think, I’m sorry but I don’t fucking care at all.”
Next to “Daechwita,” this is the angriest song on D-2. According to Suga, the lyrics were even angrier when he first wrote them in 2018. During his May 28 Vlive, he described how, when he shared lyric drafts with the Big Hit team, staffers were shocked and said he should change them. Bang PD, meanwhile, told him to do what he wanted, but Suga ended up changing them to be less harsh anyway.
Let’s take a look at what “less harsh” looks like, shall we?
I’m sorry but I don’t care at all about how mediocre your life is
or about the fact that you can’t escape the shithole after failing
Thinking that my success has anything to do with your failure,
you’re fucking great at being delusional
Your sense of humor is so so, you fucked up at your fault, no no?
The ******** who’re listening to this song would get fucking pissed and faint
Unlike the diss tracks on Agust D, his rapping style here is more relaxed; you can all but hear him smirking during the chorus, and he lets a derisive chuckle slip out every now and then. He and RM have always been more comfortable with swearing in their music and in general, so it’s nice to see him embrace that here in a way that he can’t do with BTS. The language isn’t emptily foul; this is, after all, a track with bar upon bar decimating assholes and naysayers. [Note: Yoongi has talked also about creating “traps” in some of his songs for “roaches” to get caught in—essentially criticizing without naming anyone in particular, and letting people tell on themselves by getting mad at his lyrics. What follows are just a few of the traps.]
The bastards who benefited from media appear on TV more than I do
Little brats bragging about their money, I wonder how much it can possibly be …I hope all those bastards who tried to get a free ride by selling our names shut their mouths up
“What do you think? What do you think? What do you think?” he repeats, tauntingly, in the chorus. At times, he slips into the same flow he used at the end of his verse on “Cypher Pt. 4,” channeling some of that fury and creating thematic continuity. He’s gone from name-checking Billboard to more frequently mentioning the Grammys. (Can’t stop leveling up.)
Two of my favorite parts of the song address specific issues:
“About the questions asking if idol music counts as music, I don’t fucking care.” This prejudice is something he (and the other BTS rappers especially) have had to reckon with as artists, and it’s something they’ve faced from a judgmental public. These questions about the legitimacy of idol music are exhausting, myopically framed, and rarely posed in good faith.
“Woo woo, we’ll go serve in the military when the time comes.” I realize this line doesn’t technically say anything new, but it does do two things: It affirms (AGAIN) that BTS intends to do their military service, despite many people continuing to falsely insist that they plan to seek an exemption AND it crystallizes Suga’s openness to broaching the issue in his music.
The song swings between past and future, pointing to military service and the Grammys, but also to familiar language from older tracks. “The ten zeros in my bank account”—that’s 10 zeros in Korean won, by the way—“it’s the money I loaned with my youth as collateral,” Suga raps, recalling “the success [he] earned at the cost of [his] youth” line from “The Last.” (This, of course, is a theme in BTS’s music as well. “Dope” is literally about them working until their youth rots.) And, of course, the beloved and iconic lyric: “I wanna big house, big cars, and big rings” gets remixed as “I got a big house, big car, big ring / bring me anything, I’ll give you my black card.”
That willingness to re-evaluate old lyrics and ideas in a new light makes clear that it’s not mental laziness that’s driving Suga to declare, “Whatever you think, I’m sorry but I don’t fucking care at all.” If he doesn’t care, it’s not because he hasn’t thought about it. It’s because he doesn’t have to.
“I hope all those bastards who tried to get a free ride by selling our names shut their mouths up.”
Link to translation here.
4. STRANGE
“We’re given multiple choices and our taste is controlled by the capital.”
In my track review for “Ugh,” I wrote, “Nothing makes me as sad that I don’t speak Korean fluently quite like a rap-line diss track.” Now, I’ll add to that: “…or a Namgi collab track.”
One of the best things about any BTS rap-line song is how, as the members trade off verses, you get to see how differently each approaches the subject at hand. I think that difference is especially interesting on tracks with RM and Suga. Just look at “Respect,” from Map of the Soul: 7, where RM took an abstract approach to the question “What is respect?” even analyzing the Latin roots of the word; Suga, meanwhile, looked at how the concept manifests in real-life social situations.
Here, on “Strange,” too, they examine notions of wealth, greed, corruption, and social discord through different lenses. The track begins with a pensive-sounding, echoing piano, an instrument that holds a certain resonance for Suga—it’s an object that his music often associates, nostalgically, with the past and his youth. The notes of the piano sound distant here, suggesting a distance or alienation from history. Suga’s voice comes in, sounding distorted, as the piano continues to twinkle in the background— “Everything in dust, do you see? Everything in lust, what do you see? Someone please tell me if life is pain. If there’s a god please tell me if life is happiness.”
With this chorus, Suga introduces the conceits of polarity and contradiction that will continue through his verse: the decay of dust vs. the vitality of lust. life as pain vs life as happiness. He goes on to spin a picture of the world as a broken system, one in which conflict triumphs, and “capital injects morphine called hope with dream as collateral.” A desire for wealth and ownership is so embedded in people’s consciousness, so entangled with their dreams of future happiness—that it breeds a kind of sickness. Then he’s back to the binaries: “In the world, it’s only the two, black and white, that exist / In the endless zero-sum game, the end is entertaining to watch.”
Suga calls “polarization, the ugliest flower in the world” and laments the dissolution of truth and the reign of lies, before posing the questions: “Who would it be that benefits the most? Who would it be that gets harmed the most?” Again, his verse resorts to a rhetorical structure based on opposites—truth vs. lies, benefit vs. harm. Without a clear foundation of reality to build upon, this world treats “the one who isn’t sick…as a mutant,” and “the one who has his eyes open in the world that has its eyes closed, now they make him blind.”
As he raps, his voice rendered abrasive by the production, the background melody takes on a music-box feel. The effect is pleasingly dissonant—the harshness of Suga’s voice and the lullaby-like gentleness of the keys. The chorus repeats itself before handing things off to RM, who has a much different take.
He dismisses the notion of anyone being truly “outside” of this broken system enough to critique it objectively: “You think you got taste? / Oh babe how do you know?/ I mean for god’s sake / Errything’s under control / We’re given multiple choices / and our taste is controlled by the capital.” Aside from the fact that these lines make me desperately want to have a conversation with RM about Marxist philosophy, they’re also fascinating to hear from a musician whose work and enormous popularity has been made possible by the very structures he’s critiquing. That’s not a criticism of him or of BTS—I am honestly interested in how someone as intelligent and observant as him thinks about the apparatus of taste-making and constant consumption that surrounds him.
Whereas Suga sees a necessary hierarchy—the haves on top; the have-nots on the bottom, with one constantly taking from the other—RM sees both as prisoners of the same system. Neither is free; each is trapped in a different cage. “However much money one has /everyone is a slave of this system / People are busy boasting about their dog collars and dog houses, / fighting all day about whose shines.” For RM, everyone—no matter how rich or poor—wears shackles, even if those shackles manifest as designer bracelets for one and as three-dollar chains for the other. In some ways, this is the harder approach to stomach. Who wants to have empathy for the ultra-wealthy, those who are benefiting materially in every way from a system fueled by the subjugation of everyone else? But RM’s verse suggests that the polarization of this system isn’t the problem—the system itself is a problem, and polarization is the only expected outcome.
Hence, his response to Suga’s earlier verse: “The one who isn’t sick in the world that is sick — treating them as a mutant isn’t more strange for me. /
The one who has his eyes open in the world that has its eyes closed — that he has his eyes open alone is so much more strange for me.” A jaded-sounding RM meets this reality with less surprise or horror. Suga is (rightly) outraged on behalf of the one who isn’t sick being treated as sick, where RM is leery of the very possibility of there being a lone truth-seer in this world. (I’m resisting the urge to rant about this track in relation to Brave New World.)
These two perspectives aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. One can be angry about inequities within a system, and also recognize one’s own powerlessness and complicity in that system, and the way that no one is truly free. “Strange” does not strictly frame its two halves as separate arguments; each complements the message of the other, just as RM and Suga have always complemented each other as artists. The song wastes little time in conveying its complex yet perfectly accessible bit of social commentary. It’s as serious as “Respect” was playful.
As the track comes to a close, it sounds as though a music box is winding down to silence, having run out of both tension and beautiful notes. Or as though its lid has been shut by someone who cannot bear to listen to its sad song anymore.
“They say ‘have a dream’ when no one has a dream.”
5. 28 FT. NIIHWA
“Would it have been better to not know the world?”
After three intense songs in a row, “28” offers a bit of respite, sonically if not thematically. At a little over two minutes long, this track feels like a mid-mixtape interlude. It begins with crackling static over pitched-up, hazy vocals, and shiny synths. When Suga starts rap-singing, he sounds reflective but not tortured about his ongoing journey into adulthood. For teenagers, the notion of late-20-somethings ruminating on becoming grown-ups might seem silly, but for 28-year-olds (or 29-year-olds like myself), “adulthood” feels like a horizon ever stretching in front of you, something that magically recedes as you attempt to draw near. Until one day it actually does come closer.
In the first verse, stabs of piano pierce through, doing the percussion work, before becoming more sustained in the pre-chorus, which drops into half-time. “Perhaps, I’m gradually becoming an adult / I can’t remember / What are the things that I hoped for / Now I’m scared / Where did the fragments of my dream go.” This song is about the anxiety of getting older and also the perspectival tricks that our minds play on us as we grasp the idea of leaving behind youth. Engaged in the every day tasks of living—waking up, surviving, creating, trying, failing, celebrating, mourning, sleeping—we rarely dwell on the capital-D Dreams we set out for ourselves. Vague hopes turn into vague regrets.
The same person who once said it was okay not to have a dream is, nonetheless, haunted by the dreams he holds for himself or that he wishes he had. The pre-chorus blossoms into a swirl of sound for the chorus: “Though I’m breathing, / it feels like my heart has broken down / Yeah, to talk about now, it’s about becoming an adult who finds it only overwhelming to grasp onto a dream, / I’m becoming an adult.” The lyrics have the feel of an elegy to them. To be young is painful.To grow older is painful, but also to die in some small ways.
Change is something we do every day and that we take for granted. “I thought I’d change when I turned 20 / I thought I’d change when I graduated / Shit, like that, that, when I become 30 / Yeah so what changed with me,” Suga sings in the lead-up to the second verse. (As I type this I am two days away from becoming 30, wondering the same things.) The profound sadness of the lyrics are tempered somewhat by the upbeat, shimmering feel of the song. “Sometimes, tears suddenly pour down with no reason / The life I wished for, the life I wanted, a so-so life / Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter anymore.” Though the song grapples with loss, it also suggests a measure of acceptance and demonstrates a certain maturity. As so many Agust D lyrics do, “28” showcases how easily sorrow and fear can tip into apathy—apathy that comes not from true indifference but that appears as a protective shell around a heart that can’t help but feel everything.
“For just one day, without any concerns, for just one day, without any worries, to live, to live, to live.”
6. BURN IT FT. MAX
“You of the past, you of the present. Whoever it is, bastard, light the fire.”
Ah, fire—a force with a long history in Suga’s oeuvre. The element of destruction, transformation, and rebirth.
“Burn It” is the song with the most raw “Tony Montana” energy on this mixtape. The production is dark and intoxicating. The track opens with the American singer MAX delivering the instantly memorable, four-line chorus: “I see the ashes falling out your window / There’s someone in the mirror that you don’t know / And everything was all wrong / So burn it till it’s all gone.” MAX’s soulful voice cuts through the growling noise like a warning, as though he is trying to hold off the storm approaching. (His ghost-like ad libs float through ominously.) When the distorted guitar comes in, it sounds volcanic, like lava churning. You can almost hear the embers scattering into the air and hissing as they extinguish.
“Let’s go back to the past days,” Suga raps, his voice low and lazy, “to the times that destroyed me, /to the life that was possessed by jealousy, loathing, inferiority, hans / After having a taste of success, how am I different from the me of back then / Well, there’s no big difference.” Much like “28,” “Burn It” dwells on the question of how much a person leaves their “past” self behind—the promise and inevitability of change is terrifying, but so is the prospect of remaining the same. Which is why the motif of an all-consuming fire is so powerful here:
Let burn the past me …
Fire it up, fire it up harder, I wonder what would remain in the end
I don’t know I don’t know, after burning it all off,
maybe only the ashes would remain, or maybe it would remain the same
Fire connotes anger and passion; it purifies as it destroys. The recurring image of the song is that of the speaker, constantly trying to burn himself away, only for the smoke to clear and to see his face reflected in the mirror once again.
The key to the song, though, comes toward the end, when Suga introduces the idea that the most potent force isn’t the fire itself, but the will of the person conjuring it: “You of the past, you of the present / Whether it would become a blazing sun / or the ashes left behind after being burnt — / always, the choice and decision is yours to make.” The fire can’t burn anything away that you want to keep. Analogous to the fire are overwhelming emotions such as “weakness, hatred, loathing, and even rage,” which Suga raps may be “just a mirage” used to pressure someone to become “passionate.”
The interplay between chaos and control in “Burn It” is nicely mirrored by MAX’s restrained yet emotional vocals, as well as Suga easily slipping between a rapid-fire, staccato flow and a more tired drawl. It’s one of the coolest sounding tracks on D-2, an elegantly arranged, mid-tempo sonic pleasure that sets up the mixtape’s even more introspective second half.
“I hope you don’t forget that giving up decisively also counts as courage.”
7. PEOPLE
“Who said that humans are the animals of wisdom. To my eyes, it’s obvious that they are the animals of regret.”
After the raging fire of “Burn It,” “People” rushes in like cool baptismal waters. For me, “People” is the highlight of the record alongside “Daechwita,” as different as the two tracks are. Where “Daechwita” is all hard contrasts, “People” seems to have no borders. After multiple tracks of difficult self-examination, “People” returns to the same existential questions with a lighter touch: “What kind of person am I / Am I a good person? / Or a bad person? … I’m just a person, too.”
For BTS fans, it’s hard to listen to this song and not think of “Trivia: Love” and the extended wordplay that RM did with the words 사람/saram (“people”) and 사랑/sarang (“love”). The concept of love surfaces throughout “People,” too, but this song is very much rooted in 사람 — in people not as embodiments of love but just as human beings. People whose selves are brittle and strong, ephemeral and eternal, broken and whole, people who are not fundamentally so different from one another. “Everyone would live on / Everyone would love / Everyone would fade away / and be forgotten.” Suga raps these words not cynically but matter-of-factly, as though urging the listener to take comfort in the cyclical nature of life, and to find—nestled in that repetition—freedom.
The lyrics of “People” overflow with compassion. This is a track that sees the pain of others with clear eyes and stretches out its arms for a silent embrace. But it also directs some of that compassion inward: “I’m just a person, too.” There are no kings, bosses, or monsters, here.
What about it
If you brush past, what about it
What about it
If you get hurt, what about it
Sometimes you might be in pain again
Sometimes you might get upset and shed tears
What about it
If you live like that, what about it
“What about it?” This rhetorical question anchors the chorus, just as the word “people” anchors the song as a whole, reminding it of the ground beneath its feet. But sonically, especially in the chorus, “People” takes flight. It’s been exciting to see Suga push himself as a singer, taking lessons, recording himself creatively, experimenting vocally. But his voice has never sounded it like it does here on “People”: smooth, tender, calming, uplifting. Warm and protective. It’s not a mode I’ve exactly heard from any of the other BTS members, even the vocalists—this chorus feels unique to Suga and his vision for this song. It’s what makes the track so special.
Near the end of the song, Suga returns some opposing ideas. “Your being ordinary is rather my being special / Your being special is rather my being ordinary / My being ordinary is rather your being special / My being special is rather your being ordinary.” But these lyrics don’t highlight difference so much as they underscore what people share in common despite superficial differences. This inverse relationship Suga describes between what’s special and what’s ordinary—for him as a famous musician, and for his listeners who don’t live in the spotlight—nonetheless allows for the existence of “special” and “ordinary” in everyone’s lives. Neither kind of life, neither kind of person, is worth so much more than the other.
“Flow along the way the water flows / Maybe there’s something at the end / A special life, an ordinary life, each of them on their own / It’s all good.”
The theme of constant struggle, of reified suffering, that appeared in all of the earlier songs is defused here. “What about it?” “Why so serious?” Suga intones, again and again—not accusatorially, not pessimistically. It’s a gentle chiding. As “People” goes on, his voice evolves from his usual rapping and singing style to more of a regular speaking-voice cadence. For fans who listened to the Shoop-D/KKUL-FM interviews he did with his fellow members, the tone and message of this song might recall the ending ments he offers in those segments. “People” feels like a direct message, or a prayer. It’s a song of encouragement from a friend who’s a good listener and has felt what you’re feeling now. In this way, it feels akin to “Zero O’Clock” and “So Far Away.”
“People” does what music can at its best—reach past all the artifice and abstraction of the art form, to offer not just beautiful sounds but also understanding and solace.
“It hurts,” you say. To which Suga replies, “I know. And it’s okay.”
“A gentle breeze, one that brushes past, one that soaks into my heart.”
8. HONSOOL
“Tomorrow will come and go again.”
“Honsool” is one of the more debated songs on D-2—a favorite of some, less-loved by others. Generally speaking, I fall in the second camp. “Honsool” doesn’t resonate with me, purely on a musical level, the way the rest of the mixtape does. I could see this track being shorter and the next one—“Interlude: Set me Free,” being at least a minute longer.
That said, I appreciate “Honsool” and the purpose it serves on D-2; I find it endlessly interesting to contemplate. For some, the super-distorted, slowed-down vocals at the beginning are creepy and unappealing, but I personally like how disturbing they are. They capture an inner voice speaking through the dull throb of a headache, through the heavy blanket of drunkenness. As Doolset explained on her blog,
“혼술 is an abbreviation of 혼자 마시는 술, referring to alcohol that one drinks alone or the activity of drinking alone. It emerged from a recent trend in Korea — eating and drinking alone (혼밥 and 혼술). Representing the growth of individualism in the society, it’s considered as a way to relax and recharge oneself by having some alone time away from the others and work/social obligations.”
If honsool is meant to be a way of refueling, this track highlights how easily dread can worm its way into these solitary moments of peace. Suga’s flow on “Honsool” is one we’ve heard plenty of times over the years, across many songs—it’s almost like a default style for him, one he slips into without really thinking. That slightly robotic and repetitive quality only lends itself to the song. “Stepping into the room, it’s the time that I fully face myself / The room that is filled with silence / After finishing a shower, / I detoxify myself with alcohol / Perhaps it’s the alcohol that puts a period at the end of the day that is blurry in my memory.” I love the irony of detoxifying oneself with a substance as toxic as alcohol, though drinking can obviously have a cleansing effect on the mind. In this case, the alcohol gives form to a long day, punctuating it—even if the production choices on the song are reminders of how drinking can render time and space formless things.
The old frustrations and refrains about how “it doesn’t matter anyway” are back, framed in the image of Suga coming home from an exhausting day at work and not partying but simply trying to take care of himself so he can do the same the next day. “Since it’s getting to my head, let’s be honest about my life / Oh yeah, money, fame, wealth, / trophies and stadiums — / sometimes I’d get scared of them / and would want to run away, mm / I thought I’d party every day when I become a superstar / But the ideal is slapping the reality in the back of its head.”
That Suga has never stopped talking about being afraid of the life he has—a life that so many people casually say they’d die to have—sticks with me. It’s one of the aspects of him as a person and as an artist that has not been burned away by time. For some listeners, that idea might get exhausting to hear about constantly. “Yes, you’re afraid. Yes, it’s overwhelming. We understand.” But his consistent efforts to be vulnerable and to own that never-ending fear isn’t depressing. His lyrics normalize that unease, making his unrelatable life somehow still feel relatable. “I, who’s like this, and you, who’s like that, / we just endure through the day, I guess,” he raps, touching on some of the same sentiments from “People.” As the song ends, its final lyrics perfectly set up the next track:
“Now I’m feelin’ like I’m flying.”
9. INTERLUDE: SET ME FREE
“One day, I crawl on the floor. On another day, I fly high in the sky.”
I wish this weren’t an interlude but a full-length song. Two minutes and 20 seconds is far too short for a track so unexpectedly beautiful. Hell, it opens with lonely synths and birds chirping, a motif that lasts through the whole song. After the claustrophobia of “Honsool,” Suga has flown himself, somehow, out into the open—to a space close to nature, with animals who are driven to make music freely and without the burden of consciousness. The birds never ask themselves why they sing; they just do.
Suga sings, too, his voice not even and smooth the way it was on “People,” but purposefully quivering and cracking at times. The yearning and uncertainty in his voice is palpable in every note: “Set me free, I’m floating freely in the void / Set me free, these days, I feel melancholy for no obvious reason.” The song doesn’t linger or languish, but simply captures the feeling of wanting escape. “Set me free, knowing that it won’t go the way I want / Set me free, knowing that it’s not what I want.”
“Why, why.”
10. DEAR MY FRIEND FT. KIM JONG WAN OF NELL
“We, who had big dreams, were young, we were only 20.”
“Dear My Friend,” whose original Korean title translates to “What Would It Have Been Like,” is the most explicitly personal song on D-2, which makes it an ideal closer. The track takes the form of a letter written to an estranged childhood friend, so it’s unsurprising that “Dear My Friend” opens with the ultimate nostalgic instrument for Suga: the piano. Gone are the distortion and reverb effects; this is a straightforward pop song with a linear narrative, one that could easily be at home on an OST. I’ll say from the start that I’m glad Suga didn’t try to recreate the inimitable masterpiece that is “So Far Away.” In fact, none of the songs on this record matches up to anything Suga has made before, which is what makes D-2 so, so good.
Kim Jong Wan of the rock group NELL (known for featuring on RM’s “everythingoes”—one of my favorite songs on mono.) lends his crystal-clear vocals to the song’s mournful chorus, “Maybe, if I had held you back then, / no, if I had stopped you back then, / still, as ever, / would we have remained as friends, what would it have been like.” These lines remind me of the lyrics from “People”: “Who said that humans are the animals of wisdom. To my eyes, it’s obvious that they are the animals of regret.” Regret doesn’t totally consume “Dear My Friend”—there’s a degree or two of emotional remove—but its mark is everywhere on the song. It has a wilted-flower feel.
“Dear My Friend” is a book of memories come to life, a one-sided reunion as fraught as any one-sided reunion can be. In it, Suga addresses a beloved friend who went down a different path in life that eventually landed him in the Seoul Detention Center.
Dear my friend, I’ll be honest with you
I still fucking hate you
I still remember the old days when we were together
Our times when we went to Daegu together to hang out
Countless days, “With the two of us, even the world is nothing to be afraid of”
With a measured, thoughtful tone, Suga spins to life the story of him and his friend and how they diverged. The severing of their bond, as Suga tells it, was not immediate; the fraying was drawn out over three-and-a-half hour bus rides, a trial day, a release day, an entreaty to try drugs. “There was no way to bring you, who was my only friend, back, and you became a monster / There’s no you that I used to know, there’s no me who used to know you.” Suga’s earlier rumination on time and the slippery nature of change doesn’t apply here: “I know that it’s not just because of the time that we’ve changed.” Dual emotions pull him in opposing directions: “Hey, I hate you, hey, I hate you / Hey, even at this moment as I say this, I miss you.” The hate, of course, is only fueled by love, but that doesn’t make things any easier.
Kim Jong Wan’s voice isn’t one that I would have thought a natural pairing with Suga’s, but having him do the chorus gives a deeply personal song something of a universal feel. It also gives the sense of a different side of Suga speaking, through another person—as though continuing to speak directly to his friend is too painful. (You can also read the chorus as the friend’s response—that if he had held onto Suga back then, if he had stopped him from leaving, things might have been different.)
Shortly after the three-minute mark, “Dear My Friend” swells and bursts, the instrumentals becoming symphonic and strangely hopeful sounding. As much as Suga hates his friend, the dominant mood of the back half of the song is that of affection and reverence for what once was. The wistful “ohhh ohhh ohhh” choir vocals and lofty guitars that help close out the song dissolve, like a hallucination, into the final melancholy, lonely notes of a piano.
One quality that so sets D-2 apart from Agust D is maturity—which isn’t to say that Agust D was immature. This new record is just clearly made by someone who’s a few years older, who has been wrestling with the same emotions and hurts and ideas for a little longer. Suga hasn’t exorcised the pain; he’s just found new ways to live with it. This mixtape is obviously made by someone seeking to settle some old accounts—with himself, with the world, with an old friend—and yet being okay with the elusiveness of closure. Throughout D-2, Suga glances back at the old road marker that was age 20, and squints up ahead to the rapidly approaching marker that is age 30. He seems to take a deep breath and let it out, shaking a little. Then he tilts his head and peers beyond 30 to another endless haze. He hears birds chirping, and through their song, he hears voices:
Burn it til it’s all gone. If you brush past, what about it. It’s all good. Why so serious. I’m becoming an adult. Set me free.
Enough of looking backward for now.
Flow along the way the water flows.
“Still, as ever, the memories of us together circle around me.”
