Here’s a lyric breakdown of Agust D’s ‘Strange’ featuring RM because I don’t think we talk about this song enough.

The song starts with: “Someone please tell me if life is pain. If there’s a God, please tell me if life is happiness”

We’re always struggling to understand and accept that life isn’t made of only happiness or sadness, that neither state is absolute +

and humanity often turns to divine entities to try to understand our ever changing feelings, but that’s just the start of this song’s message.

Then Agust D verse starts: “A big system that is called the world. They insert conflicts, wars or survivals, life you can’t reject.”

Here, Agust D is telling us we are living in a society that forces us to be what they want us to be. We are born into war, into capitalism, into this system that wants those who are on top to stay there and those who aren’t to continue to suffer. It’s a life you can’t reject.

The next lyric is my favorite: “Capital injects morphine called hope with dream as collateral.”

In sociology, we learn of a theory called The New Morphology of Labour, that basically says that we’re going through the precarisation of the workforce on a global scale +

and that includes dead labour, informality and immateriality. We work with goals, we need qualifications, intellectuality. Capitalism asks too much of the working class without offering nothing but false hope and the unrealistic dream that one day you’ll be part of the 1%.

I love the way Yoongi put that into a lyric. He calls it morphine, because it’s injected into our brains as we are born and we just accept it as the way things are. It makes us working machines; capitalism infects us to believe this is the only way up.

“Wealth creates wealth and tests our greed. The rich get greedy even for poverty, covetously.”

Here Agust D goes even deeper into how the capitalistic system we live in work. The working class doesn’t gain the money they work for. That goes to their bosses, to the big guys.

For example: the people who make your iphones more often than not can’t afford to buy them. They make it, but they don’t have the money necessary to own it. Simpler than that, the people making your meal at a fancy restaurant? They can’t afford to buy that same meal.

And the rich, the REAL rich, the billionaires exploiting the labor of millions of people around the globe only get richer. They do not give a fuck. This pandemic is proof of that. While the working class lost their jobs, they only added $$$ to their bank accounts.

The poorer we are, the better for them. They want us to need them, and sadly, in the system we live in, we do. We’re all chained to this life; like Yoongi said, we can’t reject it.

The next lyric is a personal assumption of mine of what he means:

“In the world, it’s only the two, black and white, that exist. In the endless zero-sum game, the end is entertaining to watch.”

I think he means the working class x the 1%, and how it’s a popcorn party to the rich to watch the rest of the world fight for the bare minimum.

“Polarization, the ugliest flower in the world,” he says next, once again talking about the division between the rich and the poor. “It’s been a long while since truth got eaten away by lies.”

And then Yoongi brings out the most crucial point of it all, to me:

“Who would it be that benefits the most? Who would it be that gets harmed the most?”

The 1% eats away all of the working class’ willpower to live, to continue to work, to walk this endless road towards an impossible dream. In the end, they’re the only winners.

“The one who isn’t sick in the world that is sick gets treated as a mutant. Isn’t it strange?”

It is, Yoongi. It is very strange. If you fight against the system, they’ll try to crush you like a bug.

“The one who has his eyes open in the world that has its eyes closed–

now they make him blind, isn’t it strange?”

This is one of the saddest lyrics for me because like I said, if you fight against the system, they will try to crush you, and sometimes, in order to keep living, people give up. They give in to the system.

“The one who wants peace, the one who wants a fight, each taking each end of the ideology, isn’t it strange?”

Agust D once again talking about the world’s polarization, but I think this time it’s not as simple as “poor vs rich” and more as political ideologies.

“They say ‘have a dream’ when no one has a dream. There’s no correct answer, isn’t it strange?”

I think he means that we are conditioned to want the things we want (RM talks about this on his verse), so how do we know what we actually want? How do we figure that out?

RM’s verse is hard hitting from the beginning: “You think you got taste? Oh baby, how do you know? I mean, for God’s sake, everything’s under control”

Like Yoongi questions in the end of his verse, how the fuck do you know if you actually like what you like when you +

have been conditioned to believe that way since you were a child? We have do deconstruct so many prejudicial and toxic mindsets when we grow up, specially our generation now is fighting to breakdown centuries of fucked up ideologies.

But still... “We’re giving multiple choices and our taste is controlled by the capital”

I believe he means that we are fighting for a better world, but we still only got so many options. A lot of times we vote for the “less worse” candidate, don’t we?

And then Namjoon talks about what I personally believe to be the middle class: “People talk, my [social media] feed explains me. However much money one has, everyone is a slave to the system”

You can be rich, but you’re not the 1%.

You don’t hold the power, you’re not in control. You don’t make this world spin the way it does.

However, differently from the working class I was talking about before, people with money (and this is a personal take) should do what they can to help this uneven world we live in.

“People are busy boasting about their dog collars and dog houses, fighting all day about whose shines”

I love this line because it’s a mirror to what our society is today. We have quite literally forgotten who the enemy is, it’s really sad.

“At this point, even you wouldn’t know, oh baby, what’s your name?”

Do you even know who you are anymore, who and what you’re fighting against? Think about it.

“Polarization, a flower that is already in full bloom”, I absolutely LOVE Namjoon replying to Yoongi’s lyric, saying that this is already in course, we already live in a divided world, and the wordplay they both use... amen.

“A round nail that’s been hammered into a square hole,” he says and our friend doolset has placed as a note in their translation that he probably means the Instagram logo, once again talking about how we are controlled by social media and how people perceive us.

“But still, life goes on, somehow, just like this. Everyone, in their own chicken coop, says they’re okay.”

We keep going. We’re sedated into this life, each of us looking our for ourselves and the ones we care about (mostly).

And then comes the absolute best part of the song: Namjoon directly replying to Yoongi’s question.

“The one who isn’t sick in the world that is sick, treating them as a mutant isn’t more strange for me.”

“The one who has his eyes open in the world that has its eyes closed, that he has his eyes open alone is so much more strange for me”

Namjoon’s saying that more strange than making him blind, it is that he’s seeing alone.

And RM continues to answer Agust D: “The one who wants peace, the one who wants a fight. The word games that change easily like flipping palms.”

The ones in power use us like toys, always changing what they want and not giving a fuck on what that’ll do to the rest of us.

And then, he ends it with: “In the world where a dream has become an option, there’s no correct answer, that’s the answer.”

It feels hopeless and maybe it is. Maybe that was their intention. I feel hopeless, too, most of the time. Specially now.

How do we find a dream? Should we even try? Does it account for anything? Will it change anything? They say it perfectly: everything’s in dust, do you see?

Do you? Do you fully realize it, how everything is ashes? They lit us on fire and ask us to clean it up.

We live in a fucked up world and to me, this song wants us to wonder when exactly did we agree to this. When did we just accept it as our reality. When exactly did we stop questioning: isn’t that strange?

reminder that this is MY interpretation of the lyrics. i used doolset’s translation of it to make this thread. https://www.google.com/amp/s/doolsetbangtan.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/strange-feat-rm/amp/