The philosophy of BTS’ silence

Courtesy of Jubayer Bin Azad Arin

There has been outrageous progress in the world over the last century or so. We have, with varying degrees of success and much-needed sensitivity, expanded the franchise of education to women and political agency to the formerly disenfranchised; we have developed a certain delicacy regarding the recognition of diverse groups. Technology is a glowing, 6-inch rectangle that lives in our pockets, granting us instant access to the grand works of civilization and the ability to capture our most precious moments with a resolution that far exceeds the actual quality of the memories themselves. And yet, there is a sense that in the process of acquiring everything, we have misplaced the one thing that wasn’t a thing at all: Silence.

For those who have grown up with the internet in their hands and airpods permanently in their ears, it’s perhaps hard to understand how life used to be. Our permanent connection to the digital world means that we are never without entertainment, reels, music, tweets and other tidbits of titillation designed specifically to ensure that not a single millisecond of our finite time on earth is left un-monetized by a tech conglomerate in cargo pants somewhere in San Franciso or Texas. But it used to be so different (and I’m dating myself here). Five-hour car journeys were just that. Five hours of looking out the window at the geometry of highway dividers. Breaktime at school was fraught with the agonizing and awkward small talk with the people around you. Picnics down the park were accompanied by the sun’s silence rather than TikTok’s tempos.

Now, we are no longer bored anymore. Or at least, we no longer have the right to say we are bored.

But that silence, the empty space, the nothingness, the weird moment from which things can arrive, holds a very special place in Asian philosophy. And it is, for reasons that are both aesthetically jarring and fascinating, exactly what BTS has decided to drop into the middle of their latest record, “ARIRANG.”

I spent the past week with the album in my car, trying to work out what it was, how I felt about certain tracks, and what producers and writers the boy band’s entertainment company had hired for them this time. Despite my own reflexive cynicism, I kept gravitating toward "Like Animals" and "They Don’t Know ‘Bout Us," two tracks that are sonically disparate but manage to achieve a certain, for lack of a less-pretentious term, artistic coherence. They are really interesting to me. I’m still trying to guess whether Suga actually played the outro guitar solo having seen him spend most of the documentary without one. I also love what they did with the video for “2.0”, a high-budget, frame-by-frame homage to a Korean hero of mine, Park Chan-wook.

I thought “Merry Go Round” sounded too much like a “Currents”-era Tame Impala song (not surprising as it was co-written and produced by the band’s Kevin Parker), and after contributing to Bad Bunny’s incredible cultural moment with “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” that Tyler Spry only gave the band “SWIM” and “Please” kinda felt like he did them dirty.

But the album’s real gravitational center is “No. 29.” The sound of the Divine Bell of King Seongdeok. This piece of Korean history was listed as South Korea’s National Treasure No. 29 back in the early 1960s and where the track gets its title. You hear the huge sound of the gong and then silence. Nearly two minutes of silence. Actually, if you pump your speakers hard, you’ll hear the reverberation of the bell continuing, but if you’re not paying attention it essentially feels like nothing.

It functions as a kind of sonic DMZ, a neutral zone situated precisely between the album’s aggressive hip-hop opening and its more shimmering, electro-pop "B-side." A moment of forced stasis that demands you stop consuming and just... be. Which, in the context of a global pop release, is both ballsy and weirdly moving.

So what does silence mean? In Korean, we can refer to this as “yeobek” — it translates literally to "lingering white space." But it’s more than just nothingness. It’s not just a void in the way Westerners tend to view emptiness, i.e., as a terrifying lack of "stuff.” It represents a cultural and philosophical approach to emptiness, emphasizing an intentional, meaningful space. Yeobek points us to a space deliberately left empty (or unfilled) to create a sense of harmony, connection and contemplation. We are encouraged to fill the void with our own imagination or perceptions. It reminds us that silence and blank space is important because it is from there that we are given infinite possibilities.

If this sounds a little philosophical or abstract (which to be honest it usually does when typed out on a computer), you can see it functioning quite concretely in traditional East Asian art. Consider a classical painting of a single plum branch. The branch doesn’t exist "in" a forest or "in" a garden; it simply is, floating in a vast, milky vacuum of white space. Or a ceramic vase portrayed in a dimension of total nothingness. Because there is no background noise, no distracting horizon lines or secondary foliage, the branch (or the vase, or the lonely fisherman on the river) is allowed to exist with a hyper-vivid intensity.

Contrast this with a picture in which the tree branch is in a field, with a sky behind it, a house in the background, people walking on the road, and birds flying towards the horizon. We forget that the branch is there. Moreover, the specificity of what we see limits our mind to that particular experience. We lose infinity.

This all plugs into the deep foundational circuitry of Taoism and the Yin-Yang. That ancient symbol of equilibrium that you’ve seen on the South Korean flag (where it’s rendered in red and blue and called the Taeguk). This is the radical idea that existence is a balanced equation of opposing forces: Sun/Moon, Night/Day, Winter/Summer, Noise/Silence. If you try to maximize only one side of the equation, if you insist on a world of permanent sunshine or noise, you’re actually violating the fundamental Order of Nature.

And thus amidst not only the noise of their album, but also the surrounding psychological pressures of late-stage capitalism that the listeners live through and the group endure, the silence they present is a reminder that we have unlimited possibilities. That from the silence, anything can emerge. That silence, rather than being negative or meaningless, something to be filled with an endless stream of content, is, in fact, what we require. It’s what makes things beautiful.

It is worth noting that BTS is not exactly pioneering some brand-new territory here. John Cage, a close friend of legendary Korean artist Paik Nam June, was heavily inspired by Asian philosophy. His 1952 track “4′33” which was just silence leaned heavily on Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies and asked the audience to reflect on the ambient sounds. Then you have Miles Davis, arguably one of the most influential human beings to ever touch an instrument, who once defined music with a brevity that is almost physically painful: “It’s the space between the notes.” Just think about that for a second if you can and let it really sink it what that genius is saying: Music is the space between the notes.

And that’s what BTS did on their recent album. A lot of the talk will be on the metrics, data, and (very questionable) streaming practices. On the love and hate of their production, the often outrageous T-Pain-era use of autotune as an artistic choice, the percentage of English and Korean lyrics, complex conversations surrounding the appropriation of AAVE, and the general love/hate dynamic that fills Reddit and Twitter. But I think one of the more interesting things BTS gave us on "ARIRANG" was nothing. Because it was in that nothing that, for just under two minutes, everything was possible once more. They gave us the yeobek that was missing from our culture.