July 14, 2023. My high school friends and I were twiddling our thumbs in the public library, computers open to nothing important, with no better things to do the summer after senior year. Somehow, we ended up on YouTube watching a new music video that had dropped at midnight the night before: “Seven” by Jungkook, BTS’s youngest member, featuring Latto. Despite being the avid BTS fan in my friend group, I hadn’t listened to the song yet, and I was curious to hear what it was about. There are seven members of BTS, I had thought when I first saw the title. Maybe it would be a sentimental song about him and the other six guys?
“Seven days a week, every hour, every minute, every second,” Jungkook crooned. In the video, he’s lovesick and boyish, persistently trailing his crush. He dangles outside her train car just to serenade her through the window. “You know night after niiiight, I’ll be loving you riiiight…”
“Oh wait, there’s an explicit version?” Ryan asked, one eyebrow raised. A few clicks later, and there the lyrics were. “You know night after night, I’ll be fucking you right,” Ryan read, deadpan.
Oh dear.
Though my mom had also become a fan of BTS after listening to their songs in the car with me, I avoided mentioning “Seven” to her and hoped she had forgotten what I’d said to her about a new song coming out soon. I spent the rest of the evening doodling in my room, trying and failing not to think too hard about it.
First, let’s get a few things out of the way. Stalking your crush, as in quite literally following them around everywhere until they’re tired of you? Creepy. On top of that, promising that you’ll love them right, which can itself be an innuendo? Creepy. Replacing that with a very direct and vaguely aggressive reference to sex? Yikes.
But hey, Jungkook isn’t a native English speaker, so maybe the tone of “fucking you right” got lost in translation. And there I was, some teenager embarrassed to listen to such a thing, in public, even though I had earbuds. Maybe I was being unfair, or maybe I was just being a weirdo about it.
But before you call me an absolute prude, allow me to explain. I first became a BTS fan at the beginning of high school, via the great “I just want to learn their names” rabbit hole that I fell into sometime between coming out as bisexual to my parents in December 2019 and lockdown becoming real with my parents buying way too much canned soup and toilet paper. I wasn’t much of a texter and missed my friends during lockdown, and I had fallen out with one of my closest friends right before school shut down, too. It was embarrassingly easy to soothe that ache with the storylines in BTS’s music videos, like “Run,” “Spring Day,” and “Euphoria.” I spent many afternoons that summer sitting in my room alone, watching the members portray angsty, caring friendships like characters straight out of a coming-of-age movie.
In a strange way, perhaps one that can only happen when you’re chronically online, the members also became guides in my exploration of queerness. Once, I had a nightmare in which I was forced to marry some guy I’d never met, a tight, lacy white dress chosen for me by my soon-to-be mother-in-law. As I walked around an eerie house in that suffocating dress, I came across Yoongi at a white piano. He locked eyes with me, almost glaring, and began to play an arrangement of what I slowly recognized as “girls” by girl in red. But outside the depths of my subconscious, the members, especially Jungkook, figured into my exploration; several of my attempts at finding my own style were inspired by BTS. I still remember the buzz I felt when Jungkook said in an interview that he prefers “genderless” clothing, and in “Euphoria,” I loved his fluffy bangs, daffodil yellow jacket, and little silver hoops. Around the time of the release of “Seven,” Jungkook had just started a Calvin Klein campaign, and his accessorizing of a black crop top and dark denim with a wavy chin-length bob, lip ring, and smoky eyeshadow made me consider growing my hair out again from the pixie I had at the time.
I guess my discomfort with “Seven,” especially the explicit version, must have come from once seeing a bit too much of myself in Jungkook, or at least seeing parts of him that I wanted to be parts of me. But, as for heavy-handed allusions to needing “seven different sheets,” as Latto raps in the bridge of the song? Not my kind of thing.
Despite everything, the song has since grown on me a bit. In the music video, the entire bridge section takes place at Jungkook’s funeral, after he attempts to chase his crush through a storm and a strong gust of wind violently sends him off-screen. The abrupt cut from Jungkook flying off into the distance and a close-up of him in the casket, arms crossed over his chest, is gloriously absurd. My favorite part of the song is at the end of Latto’s feature, where Jungkook sings, “Seven days a weeeeeeek!” in a wonderfully smooth falsetto; in the video, he sings this while he gleefully opens the casket from the inside, alive and well and apparently very pleased that his crush is in attendance. The vocal run continues with his eyes closed and his arms back over his chest, and his lips are slightly quirked as he sings, as if he’s trying to hold back a smile. It’s a silly moment in a freakily hyperbolic song, and maybe it’s a reminder to take everything—“Seven,” fandom, life—a little less seriously. These days, it gets a laugh out of me every time.
