#happy 20th debut anniversary arashi!

[marengogo]

5: Marengo & The Rainbow Avengers

Take Two - by BTS  

[Music is a very big part of my life and I’m MOSTLY INCAPABLE of writing without music, so I just thought I'd share what I am listening to while writing this]

–🐺–🐺–🐺–

I meant to post this yesterday, in honour of their birthday, but, 24 hours never seem to be quite enough do they? So, here it is, the SUPER-LONG-DETAIL story of how Marengo was unexpectedly saved by 7 Rainbow Avengers, also known as BTS.

CHAPTER 1: MY HEART WAS BROKEN

The date was January 27; 2019. ARASHI japanese boy band that debuted in 1999 got together and in front of a well organised, and somewhat serene, press setting, televised to their fans all over the world including myself, announced that they would go on an indefinite hiatus starting January 1, 2021. Not sure why I wasn't expecting this. This was the first time they every did something like this, and the tell-tell signs had been plenty, but still, had I been ready, it still would have hit as hard as it did.

I remember silently crying, as Ohno their leader and my bias, who is the one in the middle of the above picture spoke and told us how, basically. he was tired and just wanted to spend his time on his boat fishing his days away. Fishing had always been his passion, but he also always dreamed of becoming the captain of his own ship Monkey D. Luffy watch out!. ARASHI had quite a few of their own shows and in one of them (Arashi Ni Shiayagare) we the fans, and the other members, got to cheer him on as he studied to get a licence to drive a boat. He succeeded, got his boat and for the rest of that year’s show he’d take us on adventures with his boat, fishing with famous Japanese celebrities as guests it was still a show after all. Every time he was on his boat he looked so fucking happy. So when he finally made the announcement, yes, I was shocked, yes, I was distraught, but ultimately I was happy for him. Just a whole STORM arashi means storm of emotions really. 

You need to understand, at that point, I had been their fan since 2009. If my Japanese is at the level it is right now, 1/10 of it is definitely thanks to them, since I used to regularly translate all their songs, dramas, shows, etc. To imagine I only started listening to them as a fun way to help me study Japanese … Anyways, back on track … their announcement happened on my 10 year anniversary (their 20th) and I remember the following day coming back from work, with their music in my ears, stopping at a traffic light wanting to cry as I kept thinking about them and right in that moment, I looked up at the big screen and so the following ad:

That evening was the first time I actually EVER seen the boys. Before that evening I had only  heard about them, A LOT,  and now in hindsight I know why. The first time had been some time in 2017, while I was looking for japanese articles to translate, I happened upon one that was about ARASHI, obviously, I got super excited and decided to read it. Only to find out how this journalist was basically describing why according to him ARASHI stood no comparison against this 7 boy band sensation “called BTS”. I was so irritated by that article I didn’t even bother to read their country of origin and for the longest time I decided they were Chinese 🤡. Mind you, I never once thought of BTS even after reading that article, my mind was ARASHI ARASHI ARASHI FOR DREAM! but that evening when I saw that ad I hated them. So I walked away, sad and angry O THE DRAMA! 🤡 but just like the first time I heard of them, I never thought of them again.

2020 rolled in, and just right before COVID, I started exploring new things on the internet amongst which I discovered a certain at the time budding actor and become a big fan not about to give myself out, so I won’t tell you who 😜, Let's call them X. What does a fan with extensive editing knowledge do? Why fan-edits of course! So I started making edits of X, and one day, as I was helping make X trend on Twitter for an event they were attending, on my timeline a particular video kept reappearing. So I clicked:

CHAPTER 2: I WAS LITERALLY SPEECHLESS AND MESMERIZED

Within ARASHI, only Ohno could actually dance, but these boys ... these boys could ALL dance and apparently they also sang, some holding one hell of a tune, and that beat, ooh the entire production…: JUST WOW. I must have watched the video another 10 times at least and all the while it never got old, in fact it only got better with every listen; so I then ended up adding ON to my playlist.

This day was February 25, 2020 and this is the date I unknowingly became ARMY and also the day I celebrate my anniversary on. Now you need to understand, my COVID days were mostly making edits of X, supporting X, trending for X on twitter so at this point I didn’t have the thoughts of wanting to find more about BTS. In my head, I found a song I liked, and thought "cool, I guess I don't necessesarily have to hate them ..." I quickly looked up JUNGKOOK because you don't belt a not like that and act like it didn't happened and kept it moving. 

Couple of days later, I’d start working on my first edit of X which blow up. This edit was was made using this one song I heard on a compilation which was circulating on twitter, it had a “certain dancer named Jimin” doing high kicks. The background song they used was named; UGH!. Sure, the dancer was hella skilled … but that song, I couldn’t stop playing the clip and though it was probably because of Jimin, my brain decided that it was the song can’t believe I found the exact edit!!! 👇🏾

Did I realise that UGH! which took me forever to find as I didn’t understand it was the name of the song at first 😂😂😂 was sung by BTS; as in THE SAME BTS I apparently didn’t hate so much anymore? NOPE. It didn’t even occurred to me because THAT BTS was a 7 member boy band not a hardcore 3 member rap group 😬😬😬. Anyways, I became obsessed with UGH! And as one does when in confinement, I started looking for people who would share my same enthusiasm, and since I had already fallen into the world of reactions on youtube for TV series THANKS A LOT COVID 🙃I thought I’d look to see if there was anyone who would react to songs, in this case, UGH! By the rapper group named BTS still to this point I had NO CLUE that they were the same people… I had to download an mp4 version from the internet in order to do the edit, so I didn't even know if it came from an album or where else and what I found was:

They were hella excited and I really could relate with that because that song always made me wanna turn the fuck up, but most of all, they were black people interested in something asian, and that for me was something I could heavily appreciated. Everyday I kept coming back to watch that reaction because it just made me so happy, and gave me so much energy, so I decided to see if they had any more songs from this rapper group. The first video that came up was their reaction to ON KINETIC MANIFESTO. THE AMOUNT OF DOTS THAT STARTED CONNECTING IN MY HEAD WERE SO MANY YOU’D THINK I DISCOVERED THE THREE LAWS OF EINSTEIN!

You should have seen my face when I discovered that UGH! was on the same album as ON: 🤡. This also made me want to look up the one member whose features really appealed to me the most, not gonna lie to y'all, it was love at first sight: RM. Wanting to know who he was I went on wikipedia, typed BTS and kept clicking every members name until I found him wikipedia has them ordered by age. I started reading about him and chuckled when I found out he was the leader what can I say, i seem to have had a type! aaaand he thought himself english and that made him even sexier in my eyes. When I tell you I spent a couple of days being obsessed with Namjoon 😬😬😬 ...

Anyways, I think a part of me wanted to start being invested, thus, before continuing watching more reactions with FoSquad I decided I wanted to listen to MOTS7, in its entirety, by myself and aside from ON and UGH! The only other song that I absolutely adored was Filter. AND SO began my search for the uncredited female singer that sang Filter, whom I couldn't find anywhere, NOT A SINGLE GOOGLE PAGE HAD THE NAME OF THE FEMALE SINGER THAT SANG FILTER ON ONE OF THE BIGGEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR. For a couple of days this is what my google search looked like “What is the name of the female singer that sings Filter with BTS”. … 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

CHAPTER 3: A THREE MONTHS BLINK

Not finding an answer with regards to the mysterious Filter Singer and also concluding that the internet was still so lacking on proper representation of Asian artists, rather than me being the one who was dumb AF, I went continued my supporting X life, while constantly listening to ON, UGH! and Filter. Eventually, it was time to make another X edit, meaning I needed to search for new songs and since X was obsessed with BlackPink I decided to give them a chance and at the time the most recent song was SOUR CANDY feat. Lady Gaga. It was very Gagaish I just so happen to really like Gaga and the beat was perfect for editing, so I used it. On top of that, I joined X's I don't remember how many days countdown to the premiere of “How You Like That”. As I said, X was obsessed with BlackPink, hence, I became a Blink for 3 months.

The day How You Like That dropped I was just as excited as X and at the time I was staying with my directors at their place and they became my "covid bubble". The 3 of us were trying to save our company during COVID inactivity, which meant that during the mornings it was an incessant string of calls with lawyers, with rightfully desperate landlords chasing for money we didn’t have, third parties also needed money we didn't have ... basically, just a whole lot of heavy grinding. But in the evening, we'd cook dinner and we’d all watch a movie once we had quickly gone through the most recent Queer Eye season, even Queer Eye in Japan! and after they’d go to bed, I’d step up, talking with my X Twitter GC, while watching other shows and right before going to bed I'd watch How You Like That to get my spirits ready for the next day.

This was my routine at their house, every day from the release of that song, for a good 2 months. When August rolled around I decided to go back home, as the situation with the company seemed at least a bit stable. So it was back to self-distancing by myself and to my own surprise I didn’t feel the urge to listen to BlackPink at all. X was all that really mattered after all, and they had stopped talking about them, for the time being. So one early ass morning on August 21, 2020 I just so happened to be awake and twitter was buzzing with people waiting for a new BTS song to drop. As I was already awake and had another hour waiting for X to appear at their interview event, I decided to silently wait with ARMY; I did like ON after all. Thus, came Dynamite

CHAPTER 4: LIKE AN ECHO IN THE FOREST

It was nothing like ON. So at first I was a bit confused and didn't know what to think, as it was clear that I hadn't understood their genre. Yet, somehow, that boy winking at me at the end of the MV kept making me want to replay the song and before I knew it I was “shining through the city with a little funk and so-oul!”. Eventually, I looked him up and found out that the cute boxy smile boy with the light blue outfit’s name was V. Just as easy a name to remember as RM. By all means, he wasn’t RM, but that smile just was the cheekiest thing I had seen in a while.

But there was another person that was also FINALLY "introduced" to me through this video, the one who was my mysterious female voice and "UGH! dancer": JIMIN. Not sure why it didn’t connect with ON but the second I heard his voice in Dynamite DOTS WERE CONNECTING LEFT AND RIGHT, AND IT WAS FINALLY CLEAR IN MY MIND THAT SHE WAS ACTUALLY A HE, WHO WAS PRETTIER THAN A SHE AND SANG & DANCED LIKE AN ANGEL 🤯🤯🤯. ... Basically Dynamite introduced me to VMIN. 

It goes without saying, my queer-senses were all over the place with Jimin. So, as i usually do, not at all knowledgeable of the South Korean culture, I dove into the internet to ask and see if JM was part of the community: nothing came up. In fact, it was full of people going to a great length to explain why there was NO WAY IN HELL THAT JM WAS QUEER. Funnily enough, as I kept trying to look for connections between JM and the community, all that came up with connections between RM and V and the community (as they had made posts and connected with queer people, music, etc). The strong denying of any sort of connection between JM and Rainbow nation did discourage me a little, NGL. I had spent a year trying to not fall for queerbaiting and I didn’t want it to happen again. However, as I didn’t want to jump the gun since I didn’t quite know them at all, I decided that even though he wasn't a Fred Mercury he perhaps was a Bowie or a Prince. I was okay with that and decided to close that rainbow chapter at that AT THE TIME, BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW WHERE I STAND NOW 🤡. 

The weeks following Dynamite things around X’s management start to look very dodgy and fishy. As a fan you want to be positive, hope for the best, but as more and more evidence was brought forth I had to start to at least dissociate X from their company. This really made me and my X-friends incredibly sad and pretty disenchanted I will admit. Day by day we tried to look at the bright side but, it kept looking rather grim and right about that time somehow I was exposed to STAY GOLD and LIFE GOES ON. Thought Stay Gold wss the one in Japanese, the one that stuck with me was Life Goes On. I remember walking around the still empty studio we hadn’t been able to reinstated none of my colleagues with Life Goes On playing rather loudly. The comfort that song provided me in that moment I will never be able to explain. Is probably the same feeling older ARMY have with Spring Day. Life Goes On came to me in a moment when I really needed to hear those words, gently and promising, like an echo in the forest. 

As it started to become clearer that X was just as cowardly as their company I took a break from my Twitter page, which also just so happened to fall around Xmas time, so I got to actually have a real break with my sibling away from all that nonsense and into a different more secure looking world.

CHAPTER 5: WHO IS BTS?

I spent a good deal of my xmas break watching people's reaction to BTS, their story, their struggles, their MV. Through these reactors and “BTS experts” I was introduced to SOPE. In my baby ARMY experience they came as a set, Ying&Yang, one the opposite of the other, at least this was how majority of the old BTS edits and explaining videos would portray them luckily we now have many updated and more extensive videos out there. While watching all these compilations I also eventually learned all their names and started watching RUN BTS from episode 1 when I figured out tha utmost of the edits were from there I thought “Let’s go straight to the source, if I want to learn really what they are like”. 

The first thing that became pretty clear to me was that for example HOBI and YOONGI weren’t quite exactly like the compilations had been describing them all of them in fact. And it wasn’t like all the boys tried to act reserved or hide certain parts of themselves, they seemed so open that if people paid even just the smallest amount of attention they would know. So for the first time in a long time I found a group that wasn’t giving me doubts, worries … I really didn’t have to think too much but at the same time I knew that if I ever fell back into being depressed from my post-COVIDic environment, they’d also be able to find me down there, because they didn’t seem to shy away from those situations either. 

Going back to RUN BTS real quick, the one thing that it did for me, was introducing me to none other than KIM SEOKJIN. Before I knew it I always found myself following jin on the screen, waiting for him to talk and say a pun or dad joke, or just wanted to see and hear him laugh … I developed a crush for Jin and a small pointy edge every time someone would leave comments on youtube like “why is jin even in this band”, “ there is a reason why Jin dances in the back”. “Jin is not even handsome”. GURL/BOI/ENBY. Taking a break from X meant I would stay well away from Twitter, so I had no idea about BTS proper solos, antis, etc and like a moth to a flame, I’d fall for any troll and start defending Jin against the world. MFers … how dare they disrespected him like that! AND IN FRONT OF ME!

That being said a person called me a Jin-solo in a comment and the second that happened I was about to reply that "Yes I love Jin-" the implications of being a solo, COMPLETELY lost on my Baby ARMY ass but the second i started typing I immediately thought of Namjoon, and then Jungkook, and Jimin ... eventually I thought of all members and realised that I liked each member for different reasons and I couldn't choose one. Further research would eventually teach me that meant I was 0T7.

On my way back from my Xmas break I decided that I would stop associating with X and just move on with life. On my journey back home we were told we had to be Lockdown again, which really depressed me, but as if it was second nature, I played Life Goes On and tried to think of any positive thing. So I got back home wanting to watch more BTS reactions, while listening to BTS and wondering what Jin was doing. And from that moment on for a good month I’d go into my still empty office but this time knowing we could start calling back at least 2 of my colleagues, which made me so ecstatic sit down with my coffee and say “Alexa, play BTS” and Alexa would reply “Shuffling songs from BTS” and ALWAYS the playlist would start with a familiar whistle …

And the rest is history 😜.

So who is BTS? They are the 7 boys that came to my rescue when I felt heartbroken. The 7 boys that had so much skill and love to share with the world and wanted for me to join and not be left out. They are the boys that never pressured me into needing to like them, but somehow were always there when I unknowingly needed them. They are the 7 boys who reminded me that it was okay to not be okay and just go with the flow of things, even if it is against the flow of all. They are the 7 boys that keep trusting us with their everything and all they ask in return, if possible, is to be there, at end of this gigantic rainbow. And that is exactly where I plan to be. I am so grateful for all 7 of you and words could never describe how much I love you.

HAPPY 10TH ANNIVERSARY MY RAINBOW AVENGERS.

Always incredible respectfully yours,

Marengo. 

[gentlyours]

Arashi’s first Instagram Live | 03.11.19

Arashi’s SNS debut on their 20th debut anniversary 💙❤💚💛💜

[hp-amnos]

—  1999 // 2019 

“Let's stir up a storm around the world, together!”

Happy 20th Anniversary, Arashi! And congrats on your digital debut!