On December 2, 2022, South Korean Rapper RM’s solo debut album Indigo was released. The album serves as a tribute to his twenties, focusing on the emotions and experiences that have shaped his life thus far (Okwodu). “Closer”, the fifth track on the album, features artists Paul Blanco and Mahalia and centers around being content with the now of a relationship despite signs of its temporariness.
Temporality and possibility are defining aspects of the concept of queer utopia offered by José Muñoz in Cruising Utopia. When queering utopia, Muñoz argues that the “here and now” is just as important to focus on as the future when building utopia (Feeling Utopia, 10). The present provides hope for the future. Its fleeting nature is what makes the “then and there” crucial to the construction of a utopia (Muñoz 1).
The present encompasses the past and the future all at once. To not consider the present when constructing utopia is to deny possibility and reality. That is where queerness and the ability “to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” that it grants people comes in (Muñoz 1). Queerness centers itself in the present to imagine the future and to build utopia.
The last two verses of “Closer” home in on these ideas of time. Blanco, who sings the penultimate verse, and RM, who sings the final one, accept that the current situation in which the relationship finds itself in will have to do. The present offered by the relationship is preferred over the future that it lacks.
“Stay where you are” is repeated a total of seven times in the final verse of the song. The desire to remain in the moment, to acknowledge only the present of the relationship and not the future stems from the differences both partners recognize in each other. The queer utopia in RM’s “Closer” occurs in the present for the couple, something that Muñoz hints at as a possibility.
At the beginning of the song, the inability to “get close enough” to the other person in the relationship is mentioned. Both individuals involved are aware of the difficulty of connecting at the level at which they want to. Given that the song was written based on RM’s experiences in his 20s, the difficulty of connecting could come from his experience of stardom. Under the guise of queering utopia, however, the differences can be boiled down to issues of self and identity.
While the lack of faith in the future of a relationship normally implies the lack of faith in the relationship altogether, “Closer” defies this assumption. The unavoidable end does not stem from the lack of love in the relationship but from circumstance. This fuels the attachment to the present the couple has as it’s a representation of the love between them.
The hope for the future that the present in RM’s “Closer” creates as part of its queer utopia is comfort for the end. Both individuals understand that their efforts in the relationship were intended for the present and not for sustaining the future. Their queer utopia takes form in knowing that the end results are no fault of their own as their process was what mattered the most.
Bibliography
Kang, Myungseok. “RM Paves the Way.” Weverse Magazine. 14 December 2022. https://magazine.weverse.io/article/view/600?lang=en&artist=BTS.
Muñoz, José Esteban. “Introduction: Feeling Utopia.” Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York University Press, 2009, pp. 1-18.
RM (Ft. Mahalia & Paul Blanco) – Closer. genius.com, https://genius.com/Rm-closer-lyrics. Accessed 28 Apr. 2024.
Okwodu, Janelle. “RM on Artistry, Collaboration, and His First Solo Album.” Vogue. 2 December 2022. https://www.vogue.com/article/rm-bts-indigo-interview.