Jeanne recommends “Converse High” by BTS
My relationship with music almost died in 2021. In January, a scant three weeks into a year that just had to be better than 2020, I lost the ability to hear with my left ear. I still don’t have a definitive cause, but the rarity of my diagnosis made me really popular with the otolaryngologists and audiologists at our local teaching hospital. In those early weeks, everything I heard with my hearing ear reverberated in my brain to the point that I could barely tolerate any sound at all – even my own voice. Music reduced me to frustrated tears, and I feared I’d never enjoy it again.
Neuroplasticity is a hell of a thing, though, and by late spring I was listening tentatively to music again after months of near-total abstinence. The smooth-yet-energetic strains of K-pop were a particular balm to my tired brain and remaining hearing ear, and I latched on to the genre’s supreme megastars, BTS. While it was their English-language songs like “Dynamite,” “Butter,” and “Permission to Dance” that drew me in, I buried myself in their back catalog because I couldn’t get enough of their music. I even started studying Korean.
I have yet to find a BTS song that I don’t enjoy, but the one I return to over and over is “Converse High,” from their 2015 release The Most Beautiful Moment In Life, Pt. 1. The track is a sassy little mid-tempo valentine to girls who wear Converse high top sneakers. Suga is the only member of the septet who doesn’t like them on his girl, but, as he raps toward the end of the song, that’s only because it’s too difficult to take them off of her.
As someone who owns multiple pairs of Converse (my husband and I even wore them in our wedding) I fell in love with the song the first time I heard it. My affection deepened after I read an English translation of the lyrics, and every subsequent listen returns me to summer afternoons at the mall in the suburb where I grew up – sipping Orange Julius, browsing teen magazines and the latest music releases, daydreaming about my crush, and trying on prom dresses I had no intention of buying.
My ennui-drunk twenty-something self in her beat-up Converse would probably recoil in horror if she knew her mid-40s iteration was a K-pop stan, but these enchanting young men from South Korea brought music back into my life in delicious, lighthearted fashion after months of anxiety, uncertainty, and heartbreak. I never would have guessed that the antidote to my trauma was a three-minute track about sneakers in a language I don’t speak, but I’ve learned that you don’t always have to understand the magic to know that it’s working.
Jeanne Sharp (she/her) is a writer who has done everything but write for most of her adult life. She lives in the desert and can be found on IG at @that_jeanne or on Twitter at @sharpwritings
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