Teaching with RM’s Indigo
Last December (2022), I eagerly awaited RM’s album, Indigo. Shortly after the release, I went from streaming to developing a unit for my memoir writing course around the album. I didn’t purchase Indigo with the intention that it would become a text for my class, but it happened, and I’m glad it did.
I’ve used BTS content in my courses before. I’ve shared the group’s interviews to talk with students about what it means to think about universal themes. In a graduate course on rhetoric and resistance, we examined BTS and ARMY’s connections to social justice initiatives. In my history of writing class, I use examples of BTS and ARMY to help us think about the work of translation and negotiating community-building.
BTS has inspired me to think not only about teaching and the role of joy in teaching and learning but also about offering myself grace when reflecting on the past. I don’t often look back with forgiveness and understanding as I should. The most vivid memories for me often hold sadness or mistakes; those are the stories I often recollect the most. However, listening to BTS (and getting older!) inspires me to look back with grace and compassion as I continue growing and celebrating the many versions of myself. (That should be a post for another day, but I’m not alone in thinking about what it means to be a middle-aged fan who finds inspiration in their music.) This new (to me) way of thinking about the past, recalling memories, and holding space to reflect on my own stories directly influences how I teach memoir writing.
I teach a version of a life writing, or memoir, course each year. The class invites students to think about what counts as a memoir. In the broadest sense, memoir is personal writing that aims to tell a story about one’s life, but the shape it takes varies depending on the writer, their intentions, and the audience one may try to reach. I select texts that provide students with a range of stories and potential models for how they might craft their own.
Most recently, because of my own attempts at memoir writing, I began thinking more about the role objects can play in telling stories. Whether it be a shared playlist curated for a friend who wants to learn more about what music we like (back in my day, we traded mixtapes), the pictures we place on our desks or walls, or even the odds and ends we keep in that drawer that houses our archives of miscellaneous things, there are often stories connected to these objects. I wanted to offer students an opportunity to think about this, too, and Indigo felt like a fantastic place to start. So, in my spring 2023 memoir course, I had students listen to Indigo as one of our texts. Briefly, I want to share what worked well, what surprised me, and what I will do differently next time.
If you’ve read or watched any interview with RM, you can quickly tell that he is a candid, introspective intellectual. As an educator, I’m in awe of his grace and sincerity when responding to (and asking) questions. I wanted to imbue that spirit of reflection, introspection, and questioning as part of the unit.
Indigo as Inspiration
Like many, I was eager to get my physical album in addition to being able to stream the tracks. In fact, opening the physical album made me even more excited to craft an assignment for students. The physical album was not just the cd but also included a curated archive of objects connected to the album and RM’s taste. Housed in a small white box, the physical album included photocards, a Polaroid, a fabric card, a photobook with lyrics, photos, cyanotype prints, and album information. A postcard edition of the album included a lyric book, postcards with pictures/prints corresponding to the album, photo cards, and a QR guide. Immediately, when I saw the contents and arrangement of the box, I was reminded of the boxes one might find in an archive. Of course, RM’s description of the album, “Record of RM…” and “the last archive of my twenties,” certainly sets the tone for an archival experience, but I didn’t realize how “archive-like” the physical copy would be. From the description on the front of the box to the notes in the booklet, the experience of both listening to the tracks and going through the physical contents reminds me of the process of being in an archive. As someone who relies heavily on archives for my work, I love the excitement that being in the archives gives. You never know what you might find.
Indeed, it wasn’t just the album packaging that inspired my assignment; the tracks on Indigo cross genres and offer a range of sounds, energies, and bilingual storytelling. I won’t turn this post into an album review, but just to give a few examples of the range, I’ll say that much like the cover of the album suggests, there’s a track for almost any activity, from “Wild Flower,” a powerful and vulnerable reflection on fame and success, with powerful vocals from the legendary youjeen of the Cherry Filter band, to the clever and fiery wordplay in “All Day” with Tablo from the epic, Epik High. There’s “Yun,” a pensive, reflective track featuring the one and only Erykah Badu that speaks to what it means to be an artist who cares about authenticity and “Still Life,” an upbeat track with Anderson .Paak, that is impossible to listen to without dancing along. I felt the variety would interest students who are often curious about what it means to try out different voices in their writing.
Introducing Indigo
I invited students to begin by thinking about what it means to use music as a means of storytelling and sharing lived experiences. This was a familiar idea; in a previous unit, students curated playlists to accompany memoir essays, examining how music often acts as a container for our stories and memories. Indigo gave students a unique opportunity to think about how we share our lives and stories publicly. In interviews, RM has spoken about what it means to be aware of one’s life being on view–and indeed, as the leader of one of the most popular groups in the world, he knows from lived experience.
Students were responsible for listening to Indigo (at least twice all the way through), reading translations of the lyrics if needed, watching an interview RM did for the album, and viewing his performances on NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) and at Dia Beacon. After spending time with the album and performances, students participated in discussion forum posts that asked them to reflect on the album’s themes. I offered the following questions as reflection prompts:
● What would you name as the central themes in this album?
● Do a little research on the indigo dyeing process. What do you think the connection might be between the indigo dyeing process and the creation of the album?
● What does it mean to archive an experience or time? How do you imagine an archive to be both a portal for understanding a particular moment or experience and a means to invite others to create their own interpretations?
Students were quick to name themes around reflecting on the past, managing the expectations of others against your own hopes, growing and learning in the public eye, navigating liminal phases, maintaining discontent against hope, and the process of artistic creation. Conversations about the process of indigo dyeing helped us to think carefully about why this process also seemed to reflect the process of artistic creation: both are time-consuming, involve many steps, and involve some ability to let go and surrender to the process itself cannot always be easily planned for or contained, and as one student pointed out the process of indigo dyeing is often described as a “cumulative” process meaning that it takes time and patience to allow saturation to create the hue one may be looking for.
Next, working in small groups, they completed a notice-and-focus exercise that invited them to analyze the physical album. I circulated the album along with the postcard set and asked students to use the following questions for discussion:
● What does your group notice about the physical album? (Aim for a list of at least fifteen observations.)
● Given your list, focus on what you noticed. Rank the items on your list from most interesting to least. Focus on the most interesting or unusual. Choose a top five.
● Say why the five things your group selected stood out as the most interesting.
Students discussed how the physical albums reflected the lyrics noting the colors of the box lyric booklet and postcards. They pointed out that the visuals were crafted as carefully as the lyrics, thus building the reflection. Many noted the connection to nature, commenting that while there was no green (a color typically associated with nature), the varying shades of Indigo, along with the images of plants, were reflective of nature. Students were curious about how RM’s poses and pictures seemed to represent the passing of time.
This process of having them examine the contents naturally lead to conversations (again) about many of the lyrics, providing students another opportunity to think carefully about the songs and how they could be reflected in the physical contents of the album.
Finally, I offered students once more an opportunity to analyze lyrics in small groups using the same set of questions around notice and focus. I was impressed with how closely students worked with translations as well as the questions they had about what we might be missing for those of us who don’t speak Korean, and how even as many of us worked with Korean to English translations, we were able to see how his wordplay was intrinsically tied to his storytelling. Students noted the intensity of his voice, his ability to move between English and Korean as a form of play and control, and the variation of genres within the album. I’ve included the word cloud below to show some of the terms most often used in this second round of lyric analysis.
An Archive of One’s Own
At the end of our time with Indigo, students turned from reflecting on RM’s lyrics to beginning the work of curating their own archives and crafting their stories for the final assignment, a curated box of objects that marked an era of their lives and an accompanying essay that told the stories behind these chosen objects. Building from the inspiration of Indigo, we discussed how this might be an opportunity to think about the connection between objects and memory; time and story; audience and curation; and the possibilities and limitations of words to convey emotions.
I hoped students would feel they could create their own pathways into the assignment. I encouraged them to define “era” as any period they wanted to imagine, from thinking about a day in their life to a year or a particular stage that happened along a different timeline altogether. Similarly, I wanted students to feel that the process of curation was, in fact, part of the writing and creating-it was critical that they knew they could move through this process slowly and with care, taking things out and adding items as often as they liked. The same held true for their essays. It was also important that they knew the box could contain any artifact: objects, writing, books, scraps of paper, notes, pictures, etc.
I offered writing prompts (seen in the image below) for students if they needed help with how to start thinking about the project. The prompts allowed them to think about the themes they might work with and the possibilities and challenges of what archiving our lives means. As someone who has worked in archives for my family stories and scholarship, I am acutely aware of silences and gaps in archives. I hoped students might think of the role of silence and absences too.
As with most prompts for my writing courses, I wanted to provide students with a place to start without dictating the directions they might take (trying to take the critical pedaogies and BTS-inspired pedagogical approach). Having Indigo be our text for this unit allowed them to consider how the curation process was a necessary step for reflection and central to this project.
I was humbled by how much students shared through this assignment. They put great effort and care into thinking about how these artifacts would be the conduit for the stories they told. I was inspired by their final projects. These archives and stories represented their attempts to think about the outcomes and themes named as important for the unit: time, curation, audience, object, archive, and story. But even more important, they represented stories of perseverance, determination, love, sadness, joy, loss, hopefulness, curiosity, community, and more.
Teaching with Indigo Again
I plan to teach with Indigo and a similar version of this assignment again in the fall semester (2023). There are many things I’ll keep, and some activities I hope to add. For one, students had lots of conversations about what it means to read and analyze translations. We needed more time to discuss what the practice of reading and working with translations means. Together, even with careful translations from ARMY translators, we wondered what we might be missing and how that impacted our understanding. I hope to invite a translator who works in Korean and English to speak with students next semester so that they can offer their perspectives and provide us with more ideas to consider what it means to work across languages. There was also a need for more conversation around hip hop and RM’s identity as a rapper. I will include Dr. Myoung-Sun Song’s work on Korean hip hop for added context. There’s a way that I felt the presence of art through his lyrics, the album’s graphics and images, and his decision to perform at Dia Beacon. Knowing how much RM turns to art for inspiration and enjoyment, I want to invite students to consider the role of art as inspiration. There’s so much rich content that would help provide context and additional lenses to unpack RM’s work. Finally, as one student jokingly inquired about RM as a guest speaker, I know we’d all be present for his lecture if there were ever an opportunity.
The final exam for the class asked students to share 2–3 artifacts from their boxes and read a portion of their memoir. Each of the stories was so different, as were their archives, but there was one thing that stuck with me as each student went around to share: the importance of making time to reflect. There’s something about stillness and taking time to think about the stories we tell about ourselves. In an era where we are prompted to share, reshare, take pictures, use filters, and curate our lives, sometimes for ourselves but often for others, it is essential to remember our stories. What are the stories that reveal our truths? What are the stories that only we can tell? Can we quiet ourselves enough to listen?
I don’t know that I have answers to these questions for myself, but I’m grateful to the group of students in this class and to RM. Indeed, they are all trying to answer these questions and inspiring me to do the same.
