Revisiting The WINGS Era 5 Years Later — The Journey To Self-Acceptance
“There are numerous ways in which God can make us lonely, and lead us back to ourselves. This was the way he dealt with me at that time.” — Demian, featured in “WINGS Short Film: First Love”
ARMYs remember the Wings era to be one of the most cryptic of BTS’ musical concepts. It was introduced with a series of short films focusing on each of the seven members alone in their own vast empty spaces, shots flickering with imagery of pianos set on fire, water overflowing in a bathtub, or paintings shedding tears. The only dialogue featured in these short films were of leader RM voicing over quotes specially selected from the novel Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth by Hermann Hesse, intended to provide hints to the bigger themes of the whole era. The release of the music video for “Blood Sweat & Tears” would complete the ongoing puzzle started by the films, but it didn’t make it any easier in understanding what was actually going on.
I remember poring over my computer, scrolling through pages and pages of theories about the Wings era and “Blood Sweat & Tears” on Tumblr and Twitter in its initial release in 2016. And I understood none of it! Everything flew right over my head, especially the larger themes presented throughout the era. Only now, five years later, do I understand what Nietzche means when he describes the relationship between “chaos” and “dancing stars.” Only now do I understand the significance of Abraxas, the deity first mentioned at the end of Jin’s solo short film for the song “Awake.” And I wanted to write this piece not only to explain these details, but to revisit the beautifully twisted chaos that was BTS’ second full album, Wings, in honor of its fifth anniversary.
Released in October of 2016, following the close of the youth trilogy The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Wings surprised fans with a deep dive into darkness — into temptation, greed, lies, and evil. Dark concepts are common among K-Pop artists, but the dark world BTS presented was shown with a specific meaningful purpose. Scenes were overwhelmed with a number of other references in the forms of many different art mediums. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” acted as a backdrop to V falling off a balcony. Michelangelo’s sculpture of Jesus in Mary’s arms “Pietà” stands brightly lit behind J-Hope as he unsheathes a sword in a shallow pool. A baroque piece by Buxtehude, called “Passacaglia in D Minor,” was even played by Suga on an organ in the music video’s interlude. The purpose of all these different pieces presented in the music video alone can be summarized by a quote by Friedrich Nietzche featured in the video, written in German,
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Nietzche’s quote leads to a psychological idea known as “self-actualization,” or essentially, the point in one’s life in which they finally accept themselves as they are, recognizing not only their limits, but their strengths. In this stage, a person could realize their full potential and be able to act on it as fully and continue confidently onward in life with this awareness. In order to reach this idealistic sense of self, a person has to go through trials and challenges, much like what is described in the Hero’s Journey, the template consisting of all the steps a protagonist must take in order to emerge in the end, ultimately transformed.
This idea of trials toward transformation is emphasized heavily throughout Wings, demonstrated lyrically in their music and all throughout the era’s visual aesthetics. Drawing from Hesse’s Demian, we are also introduced to the idea of meeting between the two realms of good and evil, transitioning, and finding balance between them. It doesn’t completely separate itself from the previous Youth Trilogy era, which represents the first realm. It instead continues onward into the second realm contained within Wings, the next stage in one’s life in terms of self-discovery. It’s the stage of adulthood, which the youngest member Jungkook had just entered only a month prior the music release.
“My parents’ house made up one realm. This realm was familiar to me in almost every way… Mother and father, love and strictness, model behavior, and school.” — Demian, featured in “WINGS Short Film: Lie”
“The other realm, however, overlapping half our house, was completely different… A loud mixture of horrendous, intriguing, frightful, mysterious things, including slaughterhouses and prisons, drunkards and screeching fishwives, calving cows, horses sinking to their death. Tales of robberies, murders, and suicides.” — Demian, featured in “WINGS Short Film: Reflection”
While The Most Beautiful Moment in Life examines youth of this generation and the hardships they face in regards to friendship, love, and society, Wings presents the inevitable war within oneself — between everything you have known about the world up to this point and the murky unknown beyond it. This is the stage — the realm — that has always existed within you, waiting to be discovered. Once you do, you find yourself confronted with temptations and other evils meant to derail you. Do you overcome them or do you embrace them?
“Blood Sweat & Tears,” “Lie,” and “Stigma” are tracks within the album that especially focus on those evils and consequences of the choices you make when confronted with them. As RM shares in the press conference for Wings,
“We have an expression — ‘Boy Meets Temptation.’ I think this expression fits our concept well. Truthfully, as people go through life, everyone faces small and big temptations. But the bigger the temptation, people will think about and anguish over it more. We see this as a part of growing up. As we interact with the outside world and with other people, the kinds of conflicts that will arise and how we will grow from it.” — Translated by BangtanSubs
The lyrics to “Blood Sweat & Tears” talk about chasing after desires one would know isn’t good for them but they find it too “sweet” to separate themselves from them. The speaker gives everything into these temptations, no matter how risky it is or dangerous. Personally, I’m unsure of what they warn are the consequences of these actions, but in the song they recognize that everything is on the line with the choices they make, and how they are willing to lose everything for this decision. Similar to Icarus, the Greek figure portrayed in Bruegel’s painting, as much as they know not to fly too close to the sun, they do so anyway out of the risk of melting their wings and plummeting to their deaths.
When everything’s at stake, it’s not so easy to make the decision. Like Jimin in his solo track “Lie,” you can often find yourself teetering between two choices, or in his case, two opposing sides of yourself. “Lie” presents Jimin’s internal conflict of attempting to escape the temptations and lies he wraps himself with, and hoping to return to a point in his life where he was more innocent and happy. As explained by RM in his live stream “WINGS Behind Story by RM,” Jimin wrote the lyrics based on the lies he told himself such as the idea that he wasn’t good enough. The lyrics express regret in feeding into these lies and a desire to find a way out of the pain they bring him. This is shown visually in the short film introducing this track. Through an epic contemporary dance piece performed in both a closed-in hospital room and hovering over a bathtub, Jimin displays a battle against himself and his lies, swinging between overcoming or letting the lies win. The dance ends with Jimin falling into the bathtub, yet before his body is fully submerged in the water, he rises from his hospital bed.
What V’s track “Stigma” and its short film demonstrates is an internal battle that ends with more despair than hope. Never outright explained by V, “Stigma” appears to primarily be about something he — or the speaker he portrays — has done that he is ashamed of. Throughout the lyrics, he expresses guilt and sorrow for keeping secrets and not having the courage or capability to protect his family. The song additionally serves as an extension of the character he played in The Most Beautiful Moment in Life era, a boy that suffered abuse at the hands of an alcoholic father and stabbed him to protect his sister, which is revisited in the Wings Short Film for “Stigma.” In Wings, the sins V had committed catch up to him, no matter how much he tries to run away or leave them in the shadows. Eventually all things reveal themselves in the light.
As the light shines, it unveils your sins, your faults, your scars… everything you wish stayed hidden about yourselves or wanted to shove away. Ultimately, as much as anyone would want to and try, there comes a point where you realize you can’t run away. Succeeding in getting the things you want won’t always be possible either. This is where you have to face yourself, accept your flaws and your limits, and do the most with what you have as you move forward. Jin shares this sentiment in his solo track, “Awake.”
“Maybe I, I can’t touch the sky
But I still want to reach my hand
I want to try running, just a little more”
— “Awake,” translated by doolsetbangtan
Upon my first listen when it was released, I thought it was a sad song. I thought it was a song about insecurity and the fear that one can never be good enough. Yet when I read it now and listen to Jin’s voice in this piece, I can’t help but feel a wave of comfort as someone that relates a lot more to it now than I did back then. He says, in this track, that he may not reach what he intended to, do what he intended to, or do it perfectly, but he chooses to keep fighting anyway, and keeps working to continue getting better. Maybe he can’t fly, but he can still run, as far as he possibly can.
This song achieves the goal of the entire era — a better understanding of oneself, the stage of self-actualization. Positioned as the last of the solo track section of Wings, “Awake” serves as a resolution to the trials the other members face in the solo tracks before it, as that point where the two realms meet together peacefully, where evil and good coexist and for the better.
This is the part where Abraxas comes in. The deity is mentioned in the narration at the beginning of the short film for “Awake:”
“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.”
— Demian, featured in “WINGS Short Film: Awake”
In order to create anything new, the old needs to be destroyed. Once destroyed, the pieces can be melded together with an assortment of others. This is what Abraxas represents. Abraxas is a god that unites the two realms of everything that is good and evil. While it’s noted in Demian that the Catholic God represents all that is good in the world, Abraxas represents the idea that evil completes the good and makes the world whole. These two sides of life are unavoidable and necessary. Further, brokenness and destruction are also unavoidable and necessary. Your previous beliefs will shatter, and the innocence of your childhood will never be seen the same as it used to be. The moment you accept this and destroy your egg to create a new, more vast world within you, that’s when you grow. That’s when you earn your wings and fly.
Wings is an introspective work that follows when one meets adulthood and comes face-to-face with their own inner darkness. If I had the time, I would probably delve a lot deeper into this era. I would discuss where the rest of the solo tracks fit with the overarching themes of growing up and the necessity of this darkness. I would dig into what happens the moment we transition from “Awake” into “Lost” and the rest of the album. I would explore the relationship between Demian’s Eva Frau and J-Hope’s solo track “MAMA.” Maybe another time! Wings is an incredibly rich era part of an even richer and wildly interconnected discography. With its many different layers and details that draw from literature and art, this only scratches the surface.
