Hope World — a deep dive

an ode to blurring the lines between fantasy and reality

The story of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the sea revolves around the lives of Professor Pierre Aronnax, master harpooner Ned Land, and of course, the Nautilus’s commander, Captain Nemo.

While Aronnax was drawn to Nemo’s traits, he also feared him — his hatred for land and for those he wanted redemption against, terrified him. Arronax was more than ready to escape the inescapable Nautilus, while nothing could pull Captain Nemo away from the deep waters of the sea.

A reverse spin on this analogy is where Jung Hoseok begins spinning a tale dedicated to his very existence through his mixtape, Hope World. Through the seven songs, Hoseok introduces himself to the world as a person, as a son, as a performer, and as a distinct identity out of the millions in this world, starting with himself, moving towards his purpose as an artist and a friend, a son, someone who can help the world, and then finally circles back to himself with the beautiful outro, Blue Side, for which we were gifted a full version on the mixtape’s third-year anniversary.

The whole mixtape is arranged in a circle — first focusing on who Jung Hoseok is and his purpose, then celebrating his success as J-Hope, then intersecting both these identities to conclude by exploring what he wants from his life next.

What’s more, each song is skillfully layered with mind blowing references and wordplays. Here’s my go at what they can be interpreted as. (I personally recommend listening to the mixtape while you read this.)

Introducing: Jung Hoseok

Jung Hoseok exists in a world of his own, a world he built out of his aspirations, his purpose, passions and the people he loves. Each line of the first song, Hope World introduces a certain aspect of him — from his stage name (“..My name is my life, a hopeful vibe..”) to his purpose (“..My father mother, I resemble their blood, a baton handed over me..”), the song explores it all.

What makes the song absolutely phenomenal, however, is Hoseok’s analogy of Captain Nemo and Arronax.

함께 해보자 여긴 잠수함
Let’s do it together, here we’re in a submarine

모두 아로낙스 난 네모함장
Everyone is an Arronax, I’m Captain Nemo

Nemo was the obsessed-with-the-sea madman, and Arronax was the professor who never understood his madness. Taking this for a spin, Hoseok portrays himself as the Nemo of his environment, the very world he’s created with his work, while the rest of the world is his Arronax — those who don’t understand him, or are not as passionate as he is. Jung Hoseok’s ability to turn a Vernian-novel’s madman into an apt set of lyrics about how he lives is what makes this his best song for me. The world is his ocean, his submarine is his work, his name, taking him around the seas, uniting him with people who are just like him.

Living in this world has given him purpose and lessons about life, and those he shares in the next track, P.O.P pt. 1, short for Piece of Peace.

Like the name suggests, after having dreamt a dream of this life, and realizing it, Hoseok knows how tough this path is, and how challenging life can become. After having reached this success, he would love to help people face the toughest days of their lives, knowing that he is there to support them, with his music — an actual piece of peace in people’s hectic lives.

While he uses the first verse and chorus to explain this purpose, he uses the second verse to dig deeper into the practicality of his purpose.

Unemployment plagues every economy, some harder than the others. Taking this into consideration, Hoseok dedicates the next verse to the job seekers — those stuck in a loop of economic issues and limits that they cannot avoid. The reason he sings to give hope is not to give a solution to this “unavoidable war”, but to give people the courage to face this problem anyway, only because he too was like them, full of passion but nowhere to give it to.

나 도울래 그들 같은 나였기에 열정 있는 자였기에
I’ll help them because I was like them
because I was someone who had a passion

꿈들은 밝게, 없애주는 Nightmare
May your dreams be bright with your nightmare erased

평화는 Be right there
May the peace be right there

나 도울래 그들 같은 나였기에 패기 있는 자였기에
I’ll help them because I was like them
because I had spirit

A dream realized is what led Hoseok to his purpose of helping people. While some dreams build a life, some help us escape it, and that is what the next track, Daydream is about.

While many look at daydreaming as a sign of wasted time, or a manipulation of reality leading to escapism, Hoseok looks at daydreams as a powerful way to imagine all the things he wants in his life, but cannot have them, despite having so much.

With a magical music video, filled with the brightest colors and built with a vivid imagination, Daydream brings home the beauty of escaping our life to imagine another one, even if for a little while. Despite the entire song being about just tipping over to the edge of fantasy to escape, it ends at a lightly-whispered “wake up”, followed by an alarm beeping, an indication how fast reality can slip away from us if we daydream for too long; we actually start dreaming, only to be woken up by reality, harshly.

The trilogy of success

Following the realization of dreams into success, Hoseok uses the next three songs to talk about what makes him so proud of all that he’s achieved — his standards of success and his friends — the rest of BTS.

A base line, by definition, can imply a line used as a point of reference, measurement and navigation ahead. Hoseok uses this song to explore how it’s his very basis of measurement of success that differentiates him from the rest of the artists. It’s like this — if even my standards of success are higher than yours, how will you be as successful as I am?

Hoseok calls the base line the very root of his success, and lists down his life’s journey as the reason this base exists. However, he isn’t alone on this journey of success.

Hansang, literally translating to “always”; always on the grind, always together. The song is a celebration of the fame and success that he has received as a part of, and with the rest of BTS. He also dedicates the song to the artistic freedom he enjoys along with his fame, which a lot of his peers might not be able to relate to (“..Only the ripe things in this bitter industry..”), as a result of which he is able to overcome ignorance and step out of his comfort zone to achieve unparalleled success, referencing the story of the frog in the well to imply this (“..Only the right and correct things, look outside the well, and only the good things..”).

He uses the last verse of this song to put forward his, and the group’s legacy and how they aim to achieve success.

우린 떳떳하게 앞 봐
We look straight ahead fair and square

이룬 기록, 상과
With our achievements and awards,

그들을 밟아
we step on them

With ma Label 발판
With ma label, our stepping stone

With ma Fan 감사
With ma fan, thank you

With ma team

항상
Always

Almost approaching the end of the mixtape, we come to a song that intersects between Jung Hoseok and J-Hope.

Flying is an extraordinary feeling, especially when done metaphorically — away from everything that’s held you down and towards your dreams, and he uses Airplane to remind himself how he, Jung Hoseok, looked to the sky to be able to fly (metaphorically), till he flew literally, as J-Hope. This flying, referenced throughout the song, could imply flying all over the world for work and tours and flying towards fame from Gwangju to all over the world.

He also explicitly mentions that the thrill of flying in an airplane is one of the reasons that led him to pursue his dreams harder (“..the excitement that I felt on my first trip to Japan, I still think of it, because that’s what flew my dream, because that’s what made what I am now..”).

An interesting thing to notice — while Hoseok began the mixtape with an analogy of a submarine’s captain (who detested land) and being “twenty thousand leagues under the sea”, he ended the mixtape with the analogy of what it feels like to fly away from land and into the pursuit of dreams. The mixtape makes one thing very clear — Jung Hoseok and J-Hope, both want to build a fantastical life, a life so good, so full of every dream achieved that those who don’t know him, almost don’t believe it can happen.

With this mixtape, Hoseok mixes in the perfect blend of reality and fantasy, showing us exactly how much he blurred the lines between the two to achieve the life he has now.

Outro: back to the beginning

Circling back to the identity of Gwangju’s Jung Hoseok, the outro, Blue Side, takes a nostalgic drive back to what it was like to for Hoseok to be a young human with dreams left to be fulfilled, and a whole life ahead of him.

While its initial version was short, three years later, remarking in his note that he felt ready at a level of skills and maturity to complete the song, he released a full version. The song explores multiple meanings to the color blue. To list some —

1. “With everything between us changed, I shout out alone, Blue,” here blue indicates a state of solitude and loneliness.
2. “Spring, summer, fall, and winter, always in that same feeling, Blue,” here blue indicates the perpetual need to go back to who he was, revisit his old self despite moving ahead so far in life.
3. “but now, I just wish to die, burnt in blue,” Here, he wishes to burn his past self away in the blues of a flame, which is the purest and the hottest part of it. He wants to erase his past self to move ahead, since he finds it hard to balance the calm his nostalgia brings and the fire of his passion.

Where the lines blur between reality and fantasy, lies a blue area of nostalgia, a craving to feel what it was like when Hoseok was ready to face the whole world fearlessly, not knowing how much he would have to rely on fantasy and nostalgia to face his hardest days. Many of us often fight or hate this craving to return to the old days, but Hoseok chooses nostalgia as a resting place; a way to wind down and smile to himself when the day’s been hard, and harder days might lie ahead.

Hope World, apart from being a dive into what it’s like to be Jung Hoseok and J-Hope, is a lesson in handling some of the strongest forces to drive human emotion — fantasy, reality, and nostalgia.

To chat more about this phenomenal set of songs, you can find me on Twitter. All credits of lyrics translations go to Doolset.

Thank you.