[MV] BTS - ON (Kinetic Manifesto Film : Come Prima)

I'll start with the positive. Amazing location, stunning choreo, beautifully shot, awesome dance team, cool epic track, and I quite like the styling. Massively looking forward to live performances of this. They're doing a ton of shows in the States and all kinds of interesting promo stuff. Exciting!

What else is there? Well, it's the vocals. And maybe it's always going to be the vocals now. This is... a hard pill to swallow, but I guess now is the time. I'll put my thoughts in the full post.

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Some time before the Love Yourself era started, BigHit made a stylistic choice to process nearly all vocals on music coming out of the company to an extreme. This 'autotune/vocoder/synthesized' vocal sound is now utterly pervasive in all of BTS's work, as well as TXT's.

Those who have followed KPOPPY for a while will know that I'm very sensitive to the autotune sound. My brain registers this sound as pain. It causes me to feel somewhat ill and very uncomfortable, no matter who the singers are. I've just made it through a single listen of the entire MOTS:7 album and I dread trying to listen through it again. The vocal processing is on every single song. The only song I will be able to enjoy listening to is J-Hope's solo 'EGO', because the processing drops away after the first verses and the rest is pretty clean. That's it. One song. (EDIT: Two songs! RM's solo 'Persona' is also clean!)

This is genuinely heartbreaking. I love every track on this album. Great instrumentals. Love the melodies. Love the overall sound, ideas, and lyrics... all except for the vocals, which are nearly intolerable to me. It's like I'm super hungry and go to my favorite restaurant in the world, order my favorite meal in the world, created by my favorite chef in the world, and at the last second before I take a bite, the waiter comes by and pours a sauce all over the plate that I'm allergic to.

So, this is me swallowing the pill, that it's pretty clear I won't be able to enjoy any new BTS music until the choice is made to stop processing the vocals like this. Same for TXT. I'll just be keeping You Never Walk Alone and Young Forever and Dark and Wild and literally everything before the release of DNA... on heavy rotation, and hope there will be some future point when I can hear the actual voices, that I love so much, from my favorite group again.

Killer video though!