Spaghetti, schadenfreude and ‘the smallest spark’: on brilliant readings of basic works
Today was my first new music release from a BTS member since I became baby ARMY. Exciting. Even more exciting that it’s J-Hope. Well technically it’s a Le Sserafim song with a J-Hope feature (they’re a K-pop girl group). In the past 2 months I’ve gone deep on BTS but not really broadened my cultural exploration to other K-pop artists. Maybe there’ll be time once I get through 13 years of BTS content...
Tiktok has served me a lot of StrayKids, TXT, Enhyphen and CORTIS, but I really only know their 15 second viral snippets. I haven’t discovered any girl groups other than Rosé’s APT and the fictional band HUNTR/X, both of which my kids are very into (along with the rest of the world).
I’ve reached a point where I’m comfortable saying I’m a BTS fan but know I still have a long way to go when it comes to K-pop in general. There is so much to learn. Sub-culture after sub-culture. In-fighting. Antis. Shipping. Sasaengs. It’s kind of like starting a new fantasy novel in the sense you have to relax a little into the unknowing and wait for the world to build itself around you.
K-pop fandoms are super organised and results-driven. They mobilise when a new song is released to push it up the charts. They have threads about chart mathematics in the streaming era, how to ‘cheat’ the system on YouTube. It’s very similar to the Swiftie fandom in that respect. What the artist values, the fandom values, and it’s clear that K-pop artists (and their agencies) value streams, chart results, nominations and awards. So I was fascinated to see the Le Sserafim fans (called FEARNOTS) and ARMY unite to get behind this new single, called Spaghetti.
This feels like the most K-pop song to ever K-pop. Relentlessly upbeat, sassy, with English and Korean lyrics smashed together in unexpected ways. The verse, pre-chorus and chorus feel like 3 different songs entirely.
I love it.
J-Hope’s appearance in the music video is everything I wanted it to be. His aura is unmatched. BUT, the YouTube English translation of the lyrics in his verse is kind of bewildering.
This song is essentially about the genre of fans called antis, who engage just to hate. It’s like the fan equivalent of schadenfreude—people who derive joy from witnessing the failure of idols. Hate-watchers. I’ve only been a hate-watcher once (with Emily in Paris Season 2). The moment I realised that’s what I was doing I turned it off. Who enjoys getting mad for no good reason? There’s enough to be justifiably mad about in this world without fabricating beef.
Le Sserafim are still a relatively new group, they debuted 3 years ago and enjoyed early success, even booking a slot at Coachella in 2024. That peak moment ended up being a double-edged sword for them, as their 10-song performance received a lot of backlash due to the quality of their live vocals and reliance on backing tracks. For a young group, they have a lot of noisy and extremely online antis. Spaghetti is a slapback. The message is: ‘you say you hate me but you’re still listening.’ It’s like the K-pop version of Taylor Swift’s new song “Actually Romantic”, except where Taylor comes across as bitchy, arrogant and cringe, Spaghetti is all chaotic fun and sass.
Giving the middle finger to haters seems to be a common narrative thread in K-pop, and something that’s central to BTS’ journey as well. I guess the polish and visibility of idols naturally leads to people wanting to bring them down. When this happens, fans jump to digital battlestations, a war of words ensues, and more songs like this are written. It’s a fairly vacuous narrative loop, but all stories need their plot drivers.
J-Hope is well versed in feeding this storyline—not so much in his solo work—but certainly through BTS tracks. He’s a clever lyricist in his native tongue, so I immediately wanted to understand his verse from a Korean perspective. I felt the English translation in the video was probably too literal. I’ve mentioned before that metaphor and allegory seem to be much more commonly used in Korean than in English. We are so basic. Luckily ARMY can be relied upon for this kind of information. Diving into the linguistic nuance of BTS lyrics is one of my favourite things about my new fixation.
I’m reading an incredible book at the moment called Question 7 by Australian author Richard Flanagan. It’s part memoir, part fiction, part history lesson, and breathtaking in both concept and execution. I keep having to take photos of passages to refer back to. Like this one:
“… good readers are as rare as good writers, perhaps even rarer, and most books in consequence find only poor readers. Writers rail against misunderstanding, but poor writers prosper by being misunderstood, some even accidentally elevated into the pantheon of greatness in consequence, the bad clay of their work forever glazed by the good fortune of brilliant readings.
In a similar way my father blessed every court report and obituary notice with the weight of a remarkable life, finding unexpected depths and breadths in the thinnest journalese and the kitschiest sentiment, the words nothing, the drift of them everything. His kitchen filled daily with insights that belonged to an order other than that of the rags he read. He told one of my brothers that a single In Memoriam column could contain purer feeling than a book of poetry. He didn’t need literature to essay the universe. His mind only needed the smallest spark.”
I felt that. I thought, “is this why I love pop music?” It’s not that I don’t realise there are more subtle and objectively ‘worthy’ artistic works out there that explore the very aspects of human experience that fascinate me, it’s just that I don’t need them to go on my little pseudo-intellectual adventures. I consider myself lucky to be able to be absorbed, entertained and inspired by almost anything.
I recently watched a slightly unhinged Swiftie video of an English teacher tying herself in knots trying to explain how Taylor’s misreading of Hamlet in The Fate of Ophelia is intentional — reflecting the unrealistic expectations the world places on female celebrities. I think that was an example of a ‘brilliant’ reading of an average work of art (catchy pop song, though).
But a well-translated analysis of J-Hope’s verse in the very silly (and catchy) song Spaghetti? That’s a brilliant reading of a fun, irreverant piece of art that only serves to strengthen my bias. I look forward to seeing the dance challenge unfold on TikTok in the weeks to come. Maybe I’ll take this mid-life crisis to a new level and try to learn it?