Legendary Canadian concert promoter Donald K. Donald has died

When RM is going through an existential crisis, which is pretty often, he might think of the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, or maybe the lyrics of Tyler, the Creator. BTS’ leader loves that other poetically inclined RM, and keeps coming back to an oft-quoted section of his 1905 poem “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”: “Let everything happen to you/Beauty and terror/Just keep going/No feeling is final.” In other words, just swim.

Lying in his cold army bunk, scalp buzzed close, struggling with 18 unrelenting months of insomnia during mandatory military service, RM would listen to Don Toliver, to Playboi Carti, to Dijon’s debut, to Joji’s ballad “Past Won’t Leave My Bed.” When the lyrics got his brain humming with too many ideas for his own, he’d switch to streaming classical and ambient music. But he really latched onto Tyler’s “Darling, I,” and the chorus phrase “Forever is too long.” Tyler and Teezo Touchdown were singing about dodging monogamy at all costs, but RM teased out his own, deeper meaning. “Maybe at that time, the military felt too long for me,” RM says. “I just kept singing the phrase all the time. And I was being healed just by singing along to it.”