Map of the Soul 7

This was a book club book, but has been on my personal list for a while. Firstly I'm glad this is out there in the world, because it does shed light on how amazing BTS' lyrics are and how they aren't just belting out love tunes, but actually thinking long and deep about the music they are making and most especially how they tied in the psychology of Carl Jung's Persona, Shadow & Ego into their personal experiences on the stunning album Map of the Soul: 7.

Having said that, I did find that the interpretations of a lot of the songs seemed off to me. Like someone who doesn't REALLY know BTS and their journey just looked at the lyrics and analyzed it to fit the psychology they wanted to share and didn't actually deep dive into the personal experience behind it. There were a number of instances where I actually completely disagreed with their conclusions.

A small example is where they were dissecting Interlude: Shadow and made the statement that the lyrics “Please don't let me shine, Don't let me down. Don't let me fly” is of being rich and fearing poverty. Sorry...what? The whole song in my opinion and of many other analyses that I have watched or read has this song being a fear of fame growing so large and high that there is only one direction you can go afterward (down) and a fear that the fame comes with all kinds of pressures, expectations and responsibilities that they never anticipated and it has all become very restrictive and is sometimes causing them to not love it in the way they used to. Now this was only one example, but there were many others that I thought weren't really quite right.

As far as the psychology part, I can't really comment on it, as I've never taken any kind of psychology course or read really anything else other than fluffy pieces online. What I can say is that I did find it very interesting and certainly found myself fitting these concepts to my own life experiences and dissecting them through that lens, which I actually did enjoy.

Overall I felt like it leaned a bit too heavily on the psychology and not as much on the BTS aspect, which is why I wanted to read it in the first place, so I'm not sure I was really satisfied with that aspect of the book.