In 2017, RM of BTS re-introduced himself. In the early days of the band, the artist born Kim Namjoon was referred to as Rap Monster, a stage moniker that let audiences know what to expect from his position within the team. But a few years in, the name didn’t feel right to him, especially as BTS’s music was entering a chapter dedicated to the trials and joys of coming of age. He shed that first skin and reintroduced himself just as RM, which he said could also be interpreted as “real me.” With his new solo project, Right Place, Wrong Person, he now attempts to shed that identity, too.
In his 2022 debut solo album, Indigo, RM used the song “Wild Flower” (with youjeen) to dig into his complicated feelings about fame in a time when BTS were fresh off a string of wildly successful English-language singles but preparing for mandatory enlistment periods in the South Korean military. “When your feet don’t touch the ground/ When your own heart underestimates you/ When your dreams devour you/ When you feel you’re not yourself,” he laments.
Grappling with identity is a thread that runs squarely through Indigo — “What a stranger, I don’t know this fool,” he sings on “Change pt. 2” in reference to Wiki pages filled with information about him. “I wanna be a human, before I do some art,” is his desperate wish on “Yun” (with Erykah Badu). Prior to that, when he fell into the writing of Carl Jung as inspiration for BTS’s Map of the Soul: 7, he kicked off the album with a solo track titled “Persona.” “Who the hell am I?” he asked. “I just wanna go/ I just wanna fly.”
If Right Place, Wrong Person confirms anything right off the bat, it’s that in the time following the release of Indigo in 2022 and before his enlistment departure in December of 2023, those feelings weren’t assuaged at all. They grew and grew, until RM decided to dedicate an entire project to The Midnight Library fantasy, the It’s a Wonderful Life dream so many have — what if I was someone else, or never here at all? What would my life be like if I’d made a different decision? How would I fill my days if I wasn’t RM of BTS?
Right Place, Wrong Person is a fascinating experiment conceptually. Here, it feels incorrect to call him RM, because this is not the RM of Indigo, mono., or even of BTS. He succeeded in stepping into an entirely different space — one that’s confrontational, dissonant, and unnerving. He worked closely with San Yawn, creative director of South Korean artist collective Balming Tiger, who are known for their boundary-pushing visuals and playfully askew sonic creations.
This energy bleeds through to almost every corner of Right Place, Wrong Person — RM fights against rhythms like a fish swimming upstream. There’s often a lack of recognizable chord progressions and plenty of intentionally atonal designs. Around every corner is a fresh reminder that the sun-dappled and remarkably cohesive world of Indigo is gone; this is a land of hostility. For a rapper and creator who has built a reputation specifically as an intricate, observant, and often referential writer, he commits large swaths of songs to repeating the same phrases.