RM’s “Right Place, Wrong Person” is the right album at the right time
“I’m goddamn lost,” RM sings in “LOST!” the title track of his new album Right Place, Wrong Person, a fun, upbeat song about his struggle to find his right place in the world. The song comes deep into the tracklist, encapsulating the album’s central theme: the confusion of feeling out of place in our surroundings or situation, unable to conform to societal or imposed expectations, or even disconnected from our dreams and goals.
The song’s video, a funny, absurd recreation of the inside of RM’s mind, shows him trying to reconcile various selves while finding his way through a strange office maze. Though humorous, the video evokes a sense of unease, bewilderment, and even annoyance. It is the art film response to the lush and cinematic video for his album pre-release song, “Come Back to Me,” where we see RM lost inside a house and finding different versions of himself in alternate times or realities. Both videos are rich illustrations of being the wrong person in the right place or the right person in the wrong place. The fluidity between these notions is at the heart of Right Place, Wrong Person, an album that chronicles RM’s dislocating experience of being an artist in the public eye since his early youth.
However, even if the feeling of being lost is a key theme of the album, Right Place, Wrong Person is far from lost in its artistic intent and vision. Rather, the album is direct and trenchant, unified in its lacerating assessment of the past, a sonic experience of barely contained chaos and poetry across eleven songs. It is also a departure from Indigo, RM’s first solo album. Released in December 2022, Indigo was an elegant collection of songs that, despite revealing a wide range of emotional states–respect, loneliness, release, anger — can be described more as rational and restrained, a tone set by the album opener “Yun.” There is nothing restrained about Right Place, Wrong Person.
Musically, the album is experimental, combining genres from free-style jazz to hip-hop to indie rock. Propelled by prominent bass lines and manic drums, retro synths and juxtaposing sonic moods, the songs blend into each other like the rooms RM’s character navigates in the “Come Back to Me” video, with no clear beginning or end. Unpredictable and disorienting, the first few listens of the album felt like an unsettling dream. However, the predominant emotion was exhilaration from seeing RM subvert all expectations of how this album would sound.
“Right People, Wrong Place,” the opening track, quickly establishes the emotional register in which the album operates: RM, in a quiet voice, repeats a thought, “right people in wrong place,” over and over. It’s slightly discomforting, and this feeling quickly turns into alarm when a voice, RM’s, yells, like a flash of lightning, “get the fuck out of my sight!” More voices, muffled in the background, scream against each other as splintering synths and drums, like a sudden heartbeat, appear in the song. Something really wrong is happening; we can’t quite understand it, but we can feel it. RM doesn’t look back after that.
The pure, undiluted anger of “Right People, Wrong Place” morphs into many manifestations throughout the album: betrayal, disappointment, defiance, and disdain towards those who have wronged him. There are searing, unforgettable verses and lines throughout, RM switching between Korean and English with his usual ease. At times, this linguistic back and forth creates moments of incredible energy, one more element that adds to the album’s sense of chaos and dislocation.
“I’m just a pack of a cigarette
I’ma burn down all the love and the hate, the right, the wrongs
Even the goddamn world I been livin’ in for my whole life
Smoking kills, I know,
It’s my fuckin business, you bitches, don’t talk shit
Ashes fall like a snow
I been changin’ all the flow” (“out of love”)
Freed from external and self-imposed restrictions, RM’s lyrics, usually full of exquisite and elevated philosophical questioning and wordplay, are stripped to their basic, most raw form. Madly, this only enhances his words’ power, humour, and piercing impact. Nobody who has hurt him is safe, and he will let you know in the sharpest and most unambiguous terms.
In “Nuts,” a song where he talks about a past relationship gone very wrong, he switches from the third person at the beginning of the song to addressing the person directly at the end:
“I finally feel alive now that you’ve left
Every night, I write my will to my past self
All these memories that’ll vanish with a glass of whiskey
[…]
Pray to a God I don’t even believe in
To break free from my 20s when you were my everything”
A few lines later, he magnificently carries the religious motif of praying “to a God I don’t even believe in,” saying, “It was a relationship too tough to break; there’s a stigma on my chest, It’s called you.” Stigma, a shameful mark on the reputation of a person, but also, in the Christian tradition, the marks left on the body of Christ, his feet, hands and chest, after the crucifixion.
If Indigo carefully guided us through the exhibit that was his 20s, Right Place, Wrong Person does not gently hold your hand. This is RM descending into the carnivalesque Rabelais style, a literary mode described by critic Mikhail Bakhtin “that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humour and chaos.” This is the energy of “Groin,” a funky, humorous send-off of figures like politicians, one particular monk, haters, and everybody who has placed impossible expectations on his shoulders.
“Not a fuckin’ monk, speaking of me
The things they say get misconstrued
Not a fuckin’ diplomat”
The album’s brilliance is that RM digging into the entrails of his fury through music only further demonstrates the depth of his gift. He doesn’t need to prove anything anymore; he has over ten years of poetry and beauty behind him, both in his solo music and BTS. Though I know it’s not, Right Place, Wrong Person feels almost like an exercise in flexing, in the sense that he can take off one hat and put on another and still shape the darkest side of his psyche into high art.
He did it with the help of a brilliant team of musicians and artists from the underground music scene, most importantly San Yawn, director of the music collective Balming Tiger, with whom RM collaborated in 2022 in the single “Sexy Nukim.” He also features American singer-songwriter Moses Sumney in “Around the world in a day” and the electrifying, unforgettable British rapper Little Simz in “Domodachi,” a magnificent shapeshifting song about toxic friendships.
As the album progresses and RM starts to find a kind of peace, his lyrics become wrenching in their beauty and honesty: “Feelin’ so full here with me, Everything’s untakeable, My peace is unbreakable, Take my heaven for free, Your words and face don’t kill me,” he sings in “Heaven,” a spacious, gorgeous mid-tempo rock song.
In “ㅠㅠ (Credit Roll),” the second to last song before the closer “Come Back to Me,” RM sings, “When the credits roll, do you hang tight?” These lyrics apply to the album, as he thanks the listener for making it there. But I love the idea that the lyrics could signal more generally to this period of his life that he’s closing. Who will stay after he has finally said his truths so openly, subverted expectations and shown a piece of his soul he had to suppress for so long?
Right Place, Wrong Person, released on May 24, 2024, is available on all music platforms.
This review was originally published in The Things We Love.
Andreina
