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btsrabbithole · 6 years

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The latest album from the masters of the K-pop formula is a slick, loosely thematic album about love and loss, with a stronger focus on rapping than ever before.

K-pop has long been poised for a breakthrough in the U.S., and the stars have aligned for the Korean boy band BTS. It doesn’t hurt that it is easier now than ever to be a K-pop fan on this side of the world, with the genre being tailor-made for our current algorithm-fed content chain. BTS has seized the opportunity, building a ravenous fanbase, not just at home and stateside but in South America and Europe as well. Bangtan Boys (their full name, Bangtan Sonyeondan, translates to “bulletproof boy scouts” in English), are designed for this moment, highly curated, aesthetically optimized for Western consumption.

BTS have been presented as the art-house alternative to K-pop’s manic energy: a modish, dilettantish, act whose music is a vehicle for larger artistic choices and statements. After debuting as a swag rap outfit, they evolved from rap-sung mashups to posh electro-pop pageantry. The concept for their 2016 album, Wings, was inspired by Hermann Hesse’s 1919 book Demian. The visuals for one of the best BTS songs, “Blood Sweat & Tears,” were picturesque stills framed in a pop-up museum featuring “The Fall of the Rebel Angels,” Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” and Nietzsche quotes etched in stone, which all produced dramatic fan readings of the video’s symbolism. The members co-write and co-produce their songs, some of which delve into mental wellness and social responsibility, a process that has led many to dub their songs more “personal,” a word sometimes used as a dog whistle for music appealing to be taken more seriously. Their tactics have been emulated by boy bands who have followed, but in many ways, BTS are simply the K-pop model maximized for efficiency.

Love Yourself: 轉 ‘Tear’, which follows the 2017 mini album Love Yourself: ‘Her’ and the Japanese full-length Face Yourself released earlier this year, is a kaleidoscopic mark of that efficiency, observing the finely tuned formula BTS have been perfecting since 2015. ‘Tear’, like ‘Her’, is a concept album of sorts. Roughly half the songs adhere to the album’s subhead. If ‘Her’ was an assortment of heart-professing love songs, then ‘Tear’ is the inverse. It deals primarily, though not exclusively, with the cycle of grief that lingers through a separation. But all of the songs generally find their way back around to self-love at some point. The album’s opener, “Intro: Singularity,” provides its thesis. “Even in my momentary dreams/The illusions that torture me are still the same,” V sings. “Did I lose myself, or did I gain you?”

Written and arranged with longtime producer and frequent collaborator Pdogg and Big Hit label CEO Hitman Bang along with a team of collaborators (Steve Aoki, MNEK, Chainsmokers co-producer DJ Swivel), ‘Tear’ aims for cohesion and produces fun, prismatic songs in the process. There is some level of thematic consistency on ‘Tear’ with at least a semblance of an emotional arc being teased out across the 11 tracks: navigating a dream world and the real one in search of a personal paradise (which at times reads like an analog for being a pop star, especially on “Airplane Pt. 2”), losing love and facing the requisite anxieties and loneliness. These all come to a head on the foreboding lead single “Fake Love,” characterized in full by a lyric that roughly translates to: “I grew a flower that couldn’t bloom/In a dream that can’t come true.”

K-pop is often experimental in form and function, which produces full-lengths that can be spasmodic in tone and quality. BTS aren’t immune to this, but the rappers—RM (or Rap Monster), J-Hope, and Suga—anchor the group, not only keeping it moored to a unified aesthetic amid constant stylistic shifts but dictating much of what happens in the music. On the bruising, all-rap closer “Outro: Tear,” the three take turns ripping through the track with punchy cadences, at times suddenly swapping places. The group’s vocalists trade off short, sweet passages that revolve around and often pivot off of rapped verses. Where rap verses are often stopgaps for other K-pop groups, obligatory aspects of pop roleplaying, they are essential to structure and composition here. Whispered, breathy raps slingshot into the supple hook on the flute-powered “134340.” On “Love Maze,” RM balances elastic syllabics with singsong musings while Suga dashes into a tightly twisting flow. Between them, the other members let loose mellow, honeyed coos. The sequencing of the vocal routines is as carefully synchronized as the choreography in their videos.

‘Tear’ isn’t as ambitious or stunning or tragic as Wings, which gave each of the seven members a solo turn ranging from lounge-ready piano balladry and symphonic, single-spotlight melodrama to brooding alt-rap with “Blood Sweat & Tears” as its ideological and aesthetic centerpiece. But there are moments here when BTS seem more poised and more in sync than ever. The Aoki-produced “The Truth Untold” is an epic misdirection; instead of leaning into their EDM-flavored pop or the blitzing trap of Aoki’s “Mic Drop” remix, they opt for a seamless piano serenade wherein the group’s four singers weave in and out of each stanza. “Paradise” is largely propelled by graceful exchanges from Jungkook, V, and Jimin, who surface and retreat gently. Across Love Yourself: 轉 ‘Tear’, BTS are at their best when they feel for and support one another.

Sheldon Pearce x Pitchfork

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makingscipub · 6 years

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Genome editing: Invisible mending

Last week I had a few days in Oxford to visit old haunts, such as the Ashmolean, the Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum. I also went to a little exhibition in the basement of the Museum of the History of Science. The exhibition by Anna Dumitriu was entitled BioArt and Bacteria. It dealt with two topics I am really interested in, namely synthetic biology/genome editing and antibiotics.

On the way down to Oxford I had read a few articles about a new advance in genome editing, namely a first attempt at genome editing inside the human body. This had been reported in newspapers and on social media on 15th November.

When walking through the BioArt exhibition, my eye was drawn to one exhibit, namely that of a toy sewing machine (see photo at the end of the post). This central piece of the exhibition was entitled ‘Make do and mend’.

This reminded me of a phrase I had read in some of the ‘gene editing in the human body’ articles, namely that of ‘invisible mending’. Dr Sandy Macrae, president of Sngamo Therpeutic, the California company which is testing the new genome editing technique, had used this metaphor in an interview. She said: “We cut your DNA, open it up, insert a gene, stitch it back up. Invisible mending…It becomes part of your DNA and is there for the rest of your life.”

She had created the invisible mending metaphor in the following context: “A treatment where genome editing takes place inside the patient’s body is being trialled in California to combat the metabolic disorder Hunter syndrome. The patient, Brian Madeux, was given an infusion containing billions of DNA copies of the gene that codes for an enzyme he lacks, as well as a type of genome editing machinery called zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs). Previous genome editing treatments have involved altering extracted blood or skin cells in the lab, and then returning the treated cells to the patient.”

Almost all the news outlets reporting on the new genome editing advance repeated the ‘invisible mending’ quote. As a metaphor hunter, I picked up that metaphor and pinned it down as a collectible. I also asked myself whether anybody had used it before and how it fitted in with similar metaphors of repairing, stitching, sewing and tinkering. (By the way, ‘tinkering’ as a molecular metaphor, is 40 years old; François Jacob coined it in 1977).

Stitching metaphors in synbio and gene editing

I first became aware of ‘small’ metaphors, such as ‘stitching’ or ‘tinkering’, when researching the metaphorical framing of synthetic biology (Hellsten and Nerlich 2011). I was surprised to find such metaphors used alongside ‘grander’ metaphors, such as ‘deciphering the book of life’, ‘revealing the building blocks of life’ and such like. When digging a bit deeper, I discovered something that will not be surprising to working scientists, namely that such metaphors have been around for quite some time, probably at least since the time of recombinant DNA in the 1970s.

As one blog post says: “By the mid 1970s, scientists had discovered DNA-snipping molecular scissors known as restriction enzymes, and DNA-stitching enzymes called ligases. It became possible to cut and splice the genetic code, stitching components from different organisms to create recombinant DNA.”

Around 2008 the stitching metaphor was revived in the context of early advances in synthetic biology, especially the man-made creation of the genome for the pathogenic bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium by Hamilton Smith and his colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland. Philip Ball announced this breakthrough in Nature under the title “Genome stitched together by hand”, and the caption underneath the image accompanying this article said, humorously: “Stitched up: more than 500,000 bits of DNA have been assembled in the lab, creating the instructions for a bacterium.”

The stitching metaphor was also used in 2010, when Craig Venter announced the creation of a first synthetic cell, and in 2014, when xeno DNA was created. That’s probably only the tip of the stitching iceberg.

More recently, we have had another surge in such metaphors, as scientists thought that they could now do this snipping and stitching more easily and precisely using a new technique called CRISPR Cas9.

However, more recently still, some doubts have been raised about this promise of precision, for example in an article published in Nature: “The Cas9 enzyme breaks DNA strands, and cells can attempt to repair the damage by haphazardly stitching the genome together, often resulting in missing or extra DNA letters.” Scientists hope that an even newer technique, namely base editing, will revive the old promise of precision and overcome the haphazard stitching problem.

Invisible mending

Let us now turn our attention to ‘invisible mending’. As far as I can make out, this metaphor has not been used in genetic/genomic discourse before 15 November 2017. It’s a new creation by Sandy Macrae, but it is, of course, embedded in older metaphors of stitching and repairing. Let’s just recall what she said: “We cut your DNA, open it up, insert a gene, stitch it back up. Invisible mending…It becomes part of your DNA and is there for the rest of your life.”

The metaphor was first made public in an Associated Press exclusive by Marilynn Marchione on 15 November at 10:02 pm (according to the news database Lexis Nexis). After that it was picked up by numerous English speaking articles published in traditional and social media (about 30). Macrae’s quote was used mostly after a paragraph saying: “This time, the gene tinkering is happening in a precise way inside the body. It’s like sending a mini surgeon along to place the new gene in exactly the right location. That also means there’s no going back, no way to erase any mistakes the editing might cause.” The miniature surgeon metaphor has, of course, its own long history, reaching back to Richard Feynman’s 1959 speech “There’s plenty of room at the bottom”.

Some articles led up to the invisible mending quote in a different way, focusing on the type of ‘scissor’ involved in this intervention, scissors that are a bit more old-fashioned than CRISPR Cas9: “Through an IV, Mr Madeux received billions of copies of a corrective gene and genetic tools to cut his DNA in a precise spot. They travel to the liver, where cells use the instructions to make molecular scissors – called zinc finger nucleases – and prepare the corrective gene. The fingers cut the DNA, allowing the new gene to slip in. The new gene then directs the cell to make the enzyme the patient lacked.”

The role of the mending metaphor in the BioArt exhibition

So what is invisible mending? Wikipedia tells us the following: “Invisible mending is a sophisticated weaving method consisting in rebuilding the fabric of a damaged garment or upholstery, following damage caused for example by a snag, burn, or accidental scissor cut.”

In our case neither sewing needles nor a sewing machine were used, but a “GPS like recognition system” (see video at 1.13; a metaphor that I briefly mentioned in my blog post on public uses of metaphors relating to genome editing) combined with something called (metaphorically) ‘zink finger nucleases’ (the ‘scissors’)

All this is literally and metaphorically rather complex, something that is reflected in the BioArt exhibition (click on the link for pictures and video), to which I will now briefly turn. At the exhibition I saw what one might call many different patchworks or quilts of MRSA or TB, as well as a dress onto which the letters G, T, C, and A were projected and much more. All the exhibits (and all the metaphors used) together told a story, which, to be frivolous, the viewer had to ‘stitch’ together in order to make sense of both science and its social and ethical implications. As one reviewer of the show, Annick Bureaud, said (and as I can’t say it any better, I’ll quote her at length):

“Anna Dumitriu is using craft techniques, often connoted as feminine, in her artworks while working with the latest biotechnologies to address crucial contemporary issues […] Each technique acts as a metaphor to the other to deploy the embodied enmeshed stories. In this respect, the homologous recombination technique can be compared to patching and the whole process of gene editing to craft with its meticulous steps and endless pipetting and ‘cooking’ procedures. Moreover, the clichés of ‘male-science’ and ‘female-craft’ are put upside down: science is craft.”

“The mending metaphor is even more powerful and the sewing machine the real key element of the piece for bringing to the forefront the ethical issues that the work carries: it is a toy which is the exact replica of the real machine. Are we like kids playing with matches when thinking or ‘repairing’ faulty genomes or our own past medical and scientific mistakes?”

These are good questions to ask around the fast accelerating genome editing project, which some frame as scientists playing God, while others may see it as scientists just playing… What really happens probably lies somewhere in between.

Image: Mending jeans (got it!?) (from Pixabay)

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