With Right Place, Wrong Person, RM Becomes Someone Else

Mary Siroky
·6 min read
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The post With Right Place, Wrong Person, RM Becomes Someone Else appeared first on Consequence.

In 2017, RM of BTS re-introduced himself. In the early days of the band, the artist born Kim Namjoon was referred to as Rap Monster, a stage moniker that let audiences know what to expect from his position within the team. But a few years in, the name didn’t feel right to him, especially as BTS’s music was entering a chapter dedicated to the trials and joys of coming of age. He shed that first skin and reintroduced himself just as RM, which he said could also be interpreted as “real me.” With his new solo project, Right Place, Wrong Person, he now attempts to shed that identity, too.

In his 2022 debut solo album, Indigo, RM used the song “Wild Flower” (with youjeen) to dig into his complicated feelings about fame in a time when BTS were fresh off a string of wildly successful English-language singles but preparing for mandatory enlistment periods in the South Korean military. “When your feet don’t touch the ground/ When your own heart underestimates you/ When your dreams devour you/ When you feel you’re not yourself,” he laments.

Grappling with identity is a thread that runs squarely through Indigo — “What a stranger, I don’t know this fool,” he sings on “Change pt. 2” in reference to Wiki pages filled with information about him. “I wanna be a human, before I do some art,” is his desperate wish on “Yun” (with Erykah Badu). Prior to that, when he fell into the writing of Carl Jung as inspiration for BTS’s Map of the Soul: 7, he kicked off the album with a solo track titled “Persona.” “Who the hell am I?” he asked. “I just wanna go/ I just wanna fly.”

If Right Place, Wrong Person confirms anything right off the bat, it’s that in the time following the release of Indigo in 2022 and before his enlistment departure in December of 2023, those feelings weren’t assuaged at all. They grew and grew, until RM decided to dedicate an entire project to The Midnight Library fantasy, the It’s a Wonderful Life dream so many have — what if I was someone else, or never here at all? What would my life be like if I’d made a different decision? How would I fill my days if I wasn’t RM of BTS?

Right Place, Wrong Person is a fascinating experiment conceptually. Here, it feels incorrect to call him RM, because this is not the RM of Indigo, mono., or even of BTS. He succeeded in stepping into an entirely different space — one that’s confrontational, dissonant, and unnerving. He worked closely with San Yawn, creative director of South Korean artist collective Balming Tiger, who are known for their boundary-pushing visuals and playfully askew sonic creations.

This energy bleeds through to almost every corner of Right Place, Wrong Person — RM fights against rhythms like a fish swimming upstream. There’s often a lack of recognizable chord progressions and plenty of intentionally atonal designs. Around every corner is a fresh reminder that the sun-dappled and remarkably cohesive world of Indigo is gone; this is a land of hostility. For a rapper and creator who has built a reputation specifically as an intricate, observant, and often referential writer, he commits large swaths of songs to repeating the same phrases.

As someone who has spent years establishing himself as such a clever, deft rapper, it’s notable that he chooses the melodic route as often as he does throughout Right Place, Wrong Person. It’s perfectly admirable (and creatively necessary) to expand your skill set, but at the end of the day, RM is still a better rapper than vocalist.

Both of the collaborations are the clear bright spots on Right Place, Wrong Person. The track with British rapper Little Simz, “Domodachi,” is energetic and tight, and her verse is excellent. “Around the World in a Day” welcomes Moses Sumney, and is probably the best offering on the LP — a hazy, comfortable beginning cracks midway through and gives way to an incendiary moment of catharsis packed with elements plucked from the late ’60s.

But so many moments elsewhere on the record are puzzling — the music is odd, clearly by design, but that doesn’t always translate to feeling interesting. Too many of the songs here fail to play to RM’s many strengths, a tough fact to reconcile when speaking of someone so deeply and immensely talented. There are moments where we get to immerse ourselves in his capabilities as a very strong rapper, but they’re too few and far between; many of the songs start with lovely, lush instrumentals, but almost all of them go on to lean into distortion of some kind. A portrait of his vocal range at its best can be found on sultry Indigo cut “Closer” (with Paul Blanco & Mahalia), where his melody line isn’t just comfortable, but deeply alluring — there’s no such equivalent on Right Place, Wrong Person.

RM is on record as having felt particularly frustrated and disillusioned by the success of BTS’s English-language music, which earned them achievements they had long deserved and opened doors into rooms from which they’d been previously barred. RM, though, was concerned that the music they were sharing wasn’t a fair indicator of the layered, carefully crafted worlds in BTS’s discography. But a project like Right Place, Wrong Person doesn’t necessarily feel like the answer to this problem — it’s most enjoyable if you buy into the fantasy that this is not RM from of BTS, because so much of the record feels like it lacks the nuance and heart that characterizes his artistic brand. If someone enjoyed this project, they’d find almost none of its elements elsewhere in his solo music, nor would they find anything sonically familiar in the BTS canon.

Right Place, Wrong Person is a big swing, and presumably scratched a creative itch. But at the end of the project is the reminder that this is pretend, alongside the reality that he is still RM of BTS, with all the nuances that truth entails. Without him, there simply would never have been a BTS at all, and there’s a chance that this experiment, in which he played around with the idea of making music without the pressures of his existing musical identity, ultimately reminded him of that fact. And at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, at least, George Bailey comes home.

With Right Place, Wrong Person, RM Becomes Someone Else
Mary Siroky

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