The Euphoria of Beauty and the Compulsion for Art

Note: I wrote this essay over several weeks but wrote the main argument and narrative over the next few hours after the event I describe in the piece. I decided to keep it intact to respect and convey the immediacy of the experience. 

Last night, I cried myself to sleep after seeing a concert. I cried for two hours after it ended, full-body sobs taking over me on the sofa where I had sat to watch the livestream. The sobs overcame me every time I tried to calm myself, close my eyes, and go to sleep—it was, after all, three or four in the morning my time. I had to take a Tylenol, but the crying took over me in the kitchen as I grabbed a cup of water, opened the faucet, and doubled over the counter in pain. 

The sobs did not cease until I forced myself to lay in bed, the tears falling freely on my pillow and my body shaking intermittently from the crying. The sleep somehow came. 

I am confessing something very intimate. It was a kind of profound grieving that I haven’t come to terms with. Walking around the house in a daze after a few hours of sleep, I questioned myself, feeling half-ashamed of my breakdown.  

The concert was the last stop of Agust D’s D-Day Tour, which took place in Seoul, Korea, at the KSPO Dome (capacity: 15,000). I wrote recently about the album that gave name to this tour, a record about liberation and overcoming one’s darkest ghosts.

In the album, as he did in the multilayered, cinematic, and cathartic 28-dates tour, Min Yoongi covered an arc going from his early days as an underground rapper and traced his journey from depression, trauma and self-hate to his liberated and healthy present self. In the last show of the tour, the final stage he will likely do before he enlist in the military, Yoongi broke down in front of the audience.

Yoongi has said that all the emotions that appear on D-Day have been resolved—I think that has helped me to listen to the album. Yesterday, standing in front of a sea of ARMY (BTS’ fandom) who loved him and respected him, with two of his bandmates who are already serving in the military in the audience, with one of his band members having shared the stage for one epic song, we witnessed in real time Yoongi have the realization that every wild dream he had ever held in his heart had come true in spectacular fashion.  

We saw, in impotent and stunned silence, how his emotions started to overtake him during “Snooze,” a song in which he offers his hand to all of those musicians and artists coming behind him to let them know that they do not need to suffer the way he did to achieve their goals. A few minutes later, he tried to get through “My Dear Friend,” a song where he speaks to a long-lost, estranged friend, a wound that seemed reopened right before our eyes.

I often wonder how musicians manage not to cry while performing their songs. Maybe it’s because the feelings have been processed or healed by the time they are performing them. Yesterday, as Yoongi played those songs, he seemed to be wrestling with those emotions again in the present tense, combined with the heightened state of performing the last show of his first solo tour, an enormous physical and psychic undertaking.

The contract between performer and audience, in which the artist offers their music through a perfected ability of “controlling emotions” and in which audiences let their emotions run free (screaming, singing, crying, clapping, laughing, etc.), was suddenly broken and reversed. And with this reversal of roles, magic happened as ARMY held Yoongi through his tears by singing the words on the song he could not sing:” 다 괜찮아질 거야 (It’s all gonna be alright).”

It is difficult to convey to anybody not living through that moment the magnitude of the experience. Because as Yoongi struggled to perform the song, an immediate reassuring wave of love and respect was sent towards him across the seats of the KSPO Dome and the millions watching through the live stream. My breakdown afterward, earth-shattering to me, was just a tiny ripple among the thousands and millions of emotions collectively experienced in that moment.

***

What happened last night was more than a breakdown. While many books, songs, films, and paintings have caused deep impressions on me throughout my life, only two other works in the past have caused such a crisis: Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids and Pedro Almodóvar’s 2019 film Pain and Glory. 

Just Kids (2010) is Patti Smith’s first memoir. Just Kids tells the story of Smith’s early days as an aspiring writer and artist in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. In simple but affecting prose, Smith describes her chance encounter with a beautiful young boy and the friendship and later love story that developed between the two. The young man was Robert Mapplethorpe, who later became one of the most influential artists of the 1970s and 1980s through his striking black-and-white photography. 

Smith tells many stories of their life as literal starving artists and provides rich and deeply loving analysis of the evolution of Mapplethorpe as an artist — it’s invaluable first-hand insight into a life that transformed itself through art to the point that living itself was a form of art. 

Before becoming a musician, Smith worked in a bookstore for years while writing album reviews for music magazines. What is remarkable about Just Kids and Patti Smith’s perspective as a writer, singer, and artist is the lack of romanticism with which she views their early lives as artists. Living as artists was extremely difficult—especially financially, and as she tells it, she and Mapplethorpe were often at the edge of a precipice. Creating art and loving each other while doing it was also challenging. 

Smith took a while to figure out her means of expression before becoming a poet and singer. But all the time, she fought for a spiritual act of creation by writing, drawing, and painting, but also by observing, acknowledging, loving, admiring, and encouraging the making of art. In a word, she and Mapplethorpe embodied art in the act of living by having every intellectual and emotional space in their lives occupied by art. 

A few years ago, I wrote about Just Kids and how I broke down in sobs in my bed after reading the final paragraph. I was overwhelmed by the realization that such a life could be lived and that the compulsion for art, both its consumption and creation, should not be diminished or ignored. Like art critic John Berger’s re-tethering to reality upon seeing van Gogh’s paintings face-to-face after a bout of existential anxiety, Just Kids reassured me that I’m not alone in experiencing grand, often sweeping feelings in front of particular works of art. That I should cherish, rather than suppress, my euphoria in the face of beauty. 

***

Pain and Glory tells the story of Salvador Mallo, an accomplished filmmaker who is going through a personal and professional crisis. Consumed by chronic pain and depression, Salvador (played by Antonio Banderas) is no longer able to make films, a fact he mourns deeply. For him, to be a filmmaker is his only way of existence.

My story with Pain and Glory is very similar. I was returning from covering a small concert by an artist I love as an official press—a lifelong dream I made only possible after quitting my consulting job and launching a freelance career. I was not paid for it; I got passes for the show and covered all the costs myself. I flew across North America in the middle of a snowstorm, mere weeks before the start of the pandemic. On the flight back, I was ecstatic, overflowing with fantasies, dreams, and possibilities. I chose Pain and Glory to watch on the plane.

Almost immediately, Almodóvar’s saturated colours and painting-like images captivated me. In an early scene, Salvador experiences a powerful memory of childhood: a little boy playing by a river while his mother (Penélope Cruz) does the washing with a group of women. They wash and sing under the sun, the memory vivid in his mind. What follows is Salvador’s journey through his memories, confronting all his current pain and past glories to find his way to art again. 

A particularly extraordinary sequence of the film shows a theatre piece taking place within the film. The play, a monologue, is played by an actor friend of Salvador, and the sequence works simultaneously as a work of writing, memory, and film, with no clear boundaries in between. I don’t know when I started to cry, but it was early enough. It started slowly at first, but as the film continued and Salvador goes on a journey to recover himself and his capacity to create, my crying became more desperate. I started to unravel. I had somebody sitting next to me, but it was dark and I was in an aisle seat, thankfully. Still, this was not normal. 

I stood up and sought refuge in the tiny plane washroom, where I cried for a few minutes uninterrupted. I cried for Salvador and his creative death and rebirth. I cried for artists and how, throughout history, they have managed to transform their lives, memories, and pain into universal works conveying what it means to be alive. I mainly cried for the pain that the unfulfilled desire for creation can cause.

***

The truth is, I have been trying to write this essay for four years. I had given up on it, but after experiencing Yoongi’s D-Day album and the final day of his tour, the missing piece of the puzzle came to me.  

As Almodóvar does in Pain and Glory, in the D-Day concert, Yoongi invites us to witness a journey into his memory, in which his painful search for himself unfolds right in front of the audience in real time. The VCRs, several haunting short films played like projections of his mind into the enormous concert screen, showed the splitting of his three personas (Min Yoongi, his BTS stage person SUGA, and his solo hip hop artist persona Agust D) and how they battled each other for his identity over the years.  Highly stylized and playing like scenes from a Nolanesque film noir, the VCRs showed a extremely sophisticated understanding of the self. In one video, one version of Yoongi kidnaps another. In a later one, Yoongi sets fire to a mock version of a room holding his alter ego, calmy watching the room burn from a director’s chair.

Like the play scene in Pain and Glory, the concert, with its meticulous set list and production design, created a trance-like atmosphere in which memory informed the present and the lyrics of the songs built a narrative in which we saw the artist finally embrace all his selves into one – it was transformative, healing, and cathartic. That he did this through his music is all the more spectacular, the coherence of his vision, even from a young age, moving and impressive. This was an artist’s manifesto: that creation can be the alchemy in which we transform life and pain into art. 

I see no difference in how Smith and Mapplethorpe fought for their right to be artists by relentlesly working and creating, despite all external forces impeding them, and how Yoongi fought for his life and music. For Yoongi, a precocious musician who started writing and producing music at just 13, fighting for one meant fighting for the other. To live was to create, and to create was to live. Like Smith and Mapplethorpe, for Yoongi to be a musician was not a romantic notion, but a practical question of survival.

In his lyrics for BTS and as Agust D, he speaks of the pain of depression and other external causes of trauma. But his lyrics also constantly talk about the need to create and the questioning that comes from that desire: What is ambition? What is success? What does it mean to want to be a rapper or a musician? What is the motivation for wanting to be a musician? What comes after success? These are questions he still very intelligently wrestles with, as can be seen in his 2022 documentary Road to D-Day.

A set of lyrics, which he brings back over the years in different songs from his various discographies, manifests his innermost desires: “I wanna be a rap star. I wanna be the top. I wanna be a rock star. I want it all mine […]. I wanna be the king” (“Interlude: Shadow”).

They later become affirmations in “Daewchita,” where he proclaims, “I’m the king, I’m the boss.” The video of the song, the first in a trio of videos exploring the conflict between his three personas, shows Agust D killing the alter ego saying those words. The narrative demonstrates his complex relationship with his ambition and how his impetus as a musician evolved as he grew up and matured. In any case, expressing out loud those youthful, lofty goals takes extraordinary courage and vulnerability. We seldom admit to the world our deepest desires, especially if they are as big as his. 

We fear being questioned, ridiculed, brought down a notch and hit with a million reality checks. But Yoongi never shied away from exposing that tender and raw part of himself. His compulsion to dream enormous dreams, his compulsion to be an artist. The act of dreaming is a recurrent theme in his music, and even in his most recent album, he touches on the topic in the aforementioned “Snooze,” a song where he compels future musicians coming after him to “dream” despite the hardships that choosing the artist’s path brings. I’m not a musician, but I am deeply affected by that song.

The reason is that I hold a tender secret: I too, feel the compulsion to create. It is a secret that clashes with reality: I’m an older woman, a mother, an immigrant,  how dare I think myself a writer? How dare I, as I often do, give in to the euphoria of beauty on weekday mornings? How dare I think that my quest for art equates in any way to that of great artists, musicians, and writers? How dare I desire it? I feel embarrased for craving it. The fact is that I not only want to write but that I want to find transcendence through it. To desire beauty and art when you are supposed to be worried about making a living, taking care of your family, and being a good mom, is to be very lonely. It also bordes on the selfish and self-indulgent.

And yet, if you were to tell me that one day I would not feel my outsized emotions in front of a work of art, I would not be able to conceive my existence. If you were to tell me I can no longer write, you may as well cut my heart out of my chest. I’ve been there, in the deepest valleys of depression, when laughter and feeling seem strange, foreign concepts. 

The question is, where does the compulsion for art and the euphoria of beauty come from? We are born alone, and we die alone. To understand the self is already a challenge, but isn’t understanding the other a relentless, impossible search as well? To understand and feel understood, to see and feel seen; this impulse is there in all of us. 

I think that sometimes, in rare and fleeting moments, a genuine connection is established between an audience and an artist’s soul. Suddenly, any confusion or physical barriers disappear, and an artist’s intent becomes transparent. As if in a dream, a language we don’t speak becomes intelligible. The personal becomes universal. A moment of communion occurs.

Last night during the concert, Yoongi’s’ story so far, over 13 years in the making, reached its conclusion. And then, in a communal space and for a few shared moments, thousands of us understood one single, bruised, beautiful human soul. Transcendental and unrepeatable, through his intense demonstration of vulnerability, Yoongi gave us one of the greatest gifts an artist can give: an actual moment of recognition of the other. And it was not easy. It was painful, and scary. It was a mirror in which we all saw not only his sorrows, triumphs, and dreams but our own as well.

Min Yoongi held the “Agust D The Final” tour on August 6, 2023, in Seoul.