How B.I. Transformed His Pain Into Poetry

Just like a waterfall, B.I. (birth name Hanbin) begins his story with a fall.

“My name’s monster / My name’s sinner / My name’s hypocrite” Hanbin raps in the opening lines of “Waterfall”, the title track of his first album following a turbulent time in the former idol’s life. “I got a lot of pain,” he reminds us.

In June 2019, Hanbin’s life was turned upside down by drug allegations, which he eventually tested negative for in 2020. When the drug allegations first hit, Hanbin left iKon, the hugely popular idol group he was the leader of, and disappeared.

“Waterfall”, released in June 2021, was the first full body of work the rapper released since the allegations that nearly tore apart his career. Hanbin is explicit about the shame and humiliation he experienced in the previous two years. “I should accept it all, what excuses / I try to become like water and live with the flow”, he muses in the second verse.

“I was a person/ painted over a face full of memories,” he remembers in “Numb”. My face that used to pretend everything is okay is now distorted.” The idol had fallen. But how did he get back up?

Perhaps Hanbin was never meant to be an idol.

Idols are seen as commodities. Their images are printed onto photocards which fans trade and sell, with a popular member’s price soaring high over the less loved. Serious stans buys hundreds of albums (often for group orders, but ocassionally for the gamble) to gain access to a fan sign or video call with their biased idol, which can result in an awkward exchange. Merchandise is sold with the idol’s face and member specific jewel case albums are released, which feeds into a collection frenzy for K-Pop fans.

This isn't inherently a bad thing, however I worry sometimes if an idol can feel dehumanized in this process.

Hanbin landed in this strange world of fan service and commodification because he wanted to be a rapper. Growing up, his parents were hiphop heads who encouraged the student to follow his dream. He dropped out of school and pursued a career that allowed him to turn his poetry into music.

“I don’t exactly regret [the decision to drop out],” he said in his first solo interview. “But as time goes by I wish I could experience going to school for just a month. I don’t have many memories about school or having friends.”

Instead, Hanbin trained at YG Entertainment, one of the biggest and most well-respected K-Pop companies. “I was so young,” he remembered, attributing his overall mindset to being dazed. “I was more fascinated than nervous.” The other trainees made him nervous and intimidated him. “I’ve never been a people person,” he said as an aside.

He was chosen as the leader of iKon when they debuted in 2015, which too felt strange for the rapper. Hanbin was nineteen years old. The role of a leader can be demanding, especially for a quiet young boy with little experience dealing with others. The responsibility of speaking up for the group and keeping the others in line would fall to Hanbin. “That wasn’t always my personality,” he said. “I’ve always been alone.”

I can only imagine how strange and overwhelming the life of an idol was for the teenager with it’s demands for fan service and non-stop schedules. “I’m very shy,” he explained. “I don’t really like creating [new] relationships with people, and I find it difficult. I don’t believe in spending much time with someone unless I really want to become close to him or her. I don’t like being with a lot of people or being around people I don’t know.”

Despite these challenges, Hanbin was able to work with artists he respected, like Epik High, the hip-hop group who are legends in Korea, and write lyrics for iKon. YG’s iconic boy group BIGBANG were also mentors for the iKon members, often encouraging the boys to be wilder and loosen up on stage. Hanbin had people in his corner, including a core group of fans who found his lyrics to be profound. He was lucky.

But four years later the allegations hit, and his future suddenly felt extremely unclear.

The recovery from such a profoundly life-changing event was hard. But Hanbin found some peace in his fascination with the beauty of beaches. He wondered secrets and memories their sand and waves could. In particular, he was inspired by a line from the poet Seo Yun-hoo, “There’s a beach at the end of your sleeve.” This line appeared in Seo’s poem “Candy and the Taste of the Beach” and it inspired Hanbin’s first single “해변 (illa illa)” [해변 means “beach”]. This line would open the song and unwind a story of Hanbin releasing his loneliness to the soft crush of waves that filled his emotionally anemic heart.

The video adds to this concept. “해변 (illa illa)” opens with a shot of waves that fill the camera. Hanbin emerges, in a suit, from the whirl of the water. He’s a man lost at sea. The water deposits him on land, fish out of water. The storm is over, we are led to think, and recovery will follow. As he runs down the beach with a smile on his face and eventually lands in a new city, we are led to believe that he’s found hope or at least a new beginning.

“Longing is what I do best,” he admits in the song. “Loneliness is the most comfortable home for me.”

“I wrote the song wishing that it could provide comfort to those that listen to it. Everyone has their own struggles whether it be with relationships, work, family, loneliness,” Hanbin wrote in a press release for the song. “As much as it can seem difficult at the time, there is a beach in the distance. To remember that every chapter that closes just means that a new chapter is about to begin.” The refrain “illa, illa”, Hanbin said, represented the sound he heard as the waves softly crashed onto a beach.

The first time I read Seo’s poem that inspired “해변 (illa illa)” , I was struck by the beautiful opening stanza.

Of all the things abandoned on the beach, I was the most useful

Abandoned people return for what they lost

In a world of picking up abandoned people

which was our capital

A span of parasol provides shade and we

Left as a lost item

form a tourist attraction

“Learn to swim without drying out,” Seo writes in the closing lines.

I see this journey of recovery in Hanbin’s work. Throughout “Waterfall”, the rapper explores the transformative and healing power of water. It can be as destructive as it is restorative. “해변 (illa illa)” is the first song the rapper wrote “after being left alone in the world.” It feels right.

I had just graduated from college the last time I visited the beach. I was with my family who I frequently left to wander down the beach at sunset. Like Hanbin, even though I took this trip with my family, emotionally, I was alone. Throughout our week there, I would notice the families who brought friends for their vacations, which only contrasted in the distorted mirror of my own broken family; the one that I wouldn’t bring anyone into. My bipolar mother who was prone to running away to shop for hours; my father who couldn’t deal with her and retreated to be alone to escape her mania. The beauty and vastness of a beach couldn’t hide that reality.

I always felt a twinge of jealousy when I’d see friends together at cafes overlooking the beach or on condo patios. I was mad that my family was too weird, too complicated to bring someone into without a lot of warnings and apologies. I will never know what some of these experiences feel like, I thought to myself. I had spent years learning how to survive on my own, without the help of my family, so I grew accustomed to experiencing life on my own. I resembled the seashells I’d find hidden in the sand. I was a cracked shell of a boy who had spent the last four years of art school excavating a lot of demons, none of which were healed.

Yet, there was a beach on my sleeve too.

In “Midnight Blue”, the first single that Hanbin released before this album, the rapper set what I see as a prelude to his stay on the beach. “Though I know it will crumble / I’ll probably build a sandcastle again,” he tells himself. Loneliness collides with the ocean waves and the sandcastles that crumble. But the rapper is resilient. Abandoned at the beach, Hanbin searches for the most valuable thing: Himself.

Again, he gathers the sand, which slips just as easily through his fingertips. It won’t look like what it did before, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t try. Life is wild and wicked, it ripples through and knocks us to the ground. No matter. Though he knows this is fragile, Hanbin slowly rebuilds his sandcastle, illa. illa.

SOURCES

Press release, courtesy of NME

Soompi article about the “Waterfall” comeback

B.I.’s first solo interview

‘Candy And The Taste Of The Beach’ (사탕과 해변의 맛) by poet Seo Yoon-hoo

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