Jimin of BTS is turning heads worldwide with Muse, his ambitious and experimental new solo album. One of the tracks getting the most attention is the great single, “Smeraldo Garden Marching Band,” featuring South Korean rapper Loco. Jimin takes explicit inspiration from the Beatles 1967 psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with a playfully experimental theme song for a fictional band, as horns toot away. The video is also a clever Sgt. Pepper homage. But the Beatles connection makes sense on a much deeper level. It’s a fitting reference point for an artist who’s on the kind of self-discovery journey that Jimin is making, as he goes from youthful pop star to adult artiste.
Sgt. Pepper was a turning point for the Beatles — they were done with touring, eager to close down the teenage-hysteria part of their story, and determined to let everyone know they were going to keep evolving and experimenting. They fantasized about giving up being the Beatles and starting over with a new secret identity, by pretending to be a whole new band led by the mythical Sgt. Pepper. Paul McCartney got the idea from the “S” and “P” on salt-and-pepper packets while on an airplane, a very Macca way to stumble onto a massively influential artistic concept.
The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” theme song had the vibe of an old-school English marching band, with spiffy new uniforms to match. The concept included one of the most innovative and influential album covers of all time. But what mad Sgt. Pepper a classic was the fact that the Beatles rose to the concept with wildly imaginative songs like “A Day in the Life,” “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “Fixing a Hole,” and “Sgt. Pepper” itself.
Jimin does the same trick here in “Smeraldo Garden Marching Band.” It’s a lighthearted march going for the style of a South Korean marching band. He sings about the imaginary flower Smeraldo, which for him symbolizes the personal secrets people keep to themselves because they’re too afraid to tell the truth. It’s a whimsical image, but it has an emotional heft to it, which also fits with the spirit of Sgt. Pepper — there’s so much adult pain and loneliness in that album. “Lucy in the Sky” might be a druggy fantasy about “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” but it’s also John dreaming of Yoko, before he finally met her.
Muse is Jimin’s unified seven-song suite, exploring the themes of experimentation and adult self-discovery, from the opening “Rebirth (Intro”) to the climactic “Who.” He made his first solo album last year with Face, but Muse is more complex. Like the rest of his bandmates in BTS, Jimin had to put music on hold for his mandatory military service. So he’s returning to his art and his audience, but as an older and different person. He keeps singing about people trapped in their isolation because they’re too fearful to share their secrets — in other words, it’s music for a lonely hearts club.
Sgt. Pepper has a unique place in pop iconography as the place where artists go to transform themselves. It’s a shrine they can step into and come out on the other side as somebody different. That spirit is in the way Paul McCartney sings in “A Day in the Life” about getting on board the double-decker bus, lighting up a smoke, until “somebody spoke and I went into a dream.” It’s not a music touchstone because artists want to copy it, or imitate it. It’s a place they go because they want to make contact with the most experimental and adventurous sides of themselves.
That’s why the Beatles always embody that spirit for pop artists who want to progress. This spring, as Ariana Grande made her ambitious and introspective breakup album, her avowed inspiration was Rubber Soul, the 1965 classic in which the Beatles made their definitive move from moptops singing about girls to artists singing about women.
Prince made the most famous Sgt. Pepper move of all time with Around the World in a Day in 1985 — after the phenomenon of Purple Rain, he wanted to prove he would never settle for repeating himself. So he shocked everybody by coming back with the Pepper-style flower-power fluff of Around the World in a Day, with the hit “Raspberry Beret.” It sounded nothing like Purple Rain or 1999, but for him that was the point. “You know how easy it would have been to open Around the World in a Day with the guitar solo that’s on the end of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’?” he said to Rolling Stone in 1985. “I don’t want to make an album like the earlier ones. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to put your albums back-to-back and not get bored, you dig?”
Sgt. Pepper moves are a tradition for pop stars who want to progress from that “yeah, yeah, yeah” energy to a more self-consciously adult level. In the late Eighties, when New Kids on the Block were the hottest boy band around, they decided to show off their serious side with their brazen Sgt. Pepper homage “Tonight.” Around the same time, Tears for Fears did the exact same thing with “Sowing the Seeds of Love.” And who can forget when Panic! at the Disco went from emo punk to psychedelic flower power with Pretty. Odd?
Like BTS, the Beatles were a brilliantly original pop group from the start, even when the world tried to dismiss them as nothing more than the latest teenage fad, a bubblegum product for fangirls. And like BTS, the Beatles proved that the fangirls were absolutely right. The Fab Four blew up with hits like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Love Me Do,” and “She Loves You,” with their trademark “yeah, yeah, yeah” refrain. Some things never change — people tried to simplify the Beatles the way they simplified BTS 50 years later.
BTS were always into mega-ambitious concept albums. Even before their solo careers, they were always going somewhere new with their lofty concepts, as in the ever-amazing Map of the Soul series, taking off on the psychological theories of Carl Jung as well as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. But even then, with such an explicitly intellectual bent, they still got misunderstood in the U.S. as mere teen-pop smoothies. They got compared to Beatlemania in the most superficial and clumsy ways, most notoriously on the infamous and appalling Tonight Show appearance where Jimmy Fallon dressed them up in 1964 moptop wigs and suits. He meant it as a compliment — comparing the BTS explosion to the Beatles’ explosion on The Ed Sullivan Show — but it was condescending to BTS, who had their own undeniably original style.
That’s where Jimin is coming from with Muse and “Smeraldo Garden Marching Band,” as he steps into a new era of his life and art. It’s not about imitating the Beatles. It’s about finding the newest version of yourself, as you let the past go and reach for the future.
