“I’m a 27-Year-Old Korean”: Namjoon, the 27 Club, and the Myth of the Idol’s First Death
On Art, Grief, and the Ghosts That Make Us
"When I was a kid, I was convinced that I was destined for the 27 Club."
With that line, in his collaboration with Tablo on Stop the Rain, Kim Namjoon (RM of BTS) pressed his fingerprint onto one of pop culture's most haunted myths. The 27 Club. A phrase synonymous with artistic brilliance extinguished too soon. Hendrix. Joplin. Cobain. Winehouse. Jonghyun. The mythos is seductive and brutal: if you're too bright, too feeling, too revolutionary, you won't survive. You won't be allowed to.
Namjoon's lyric isn't a flourish. It's a confession. A timestamp. A moment where he allows us to see what he once feared he wouldn't survive. Not metaphorically, literally.
This essay isn’t about whether he meant it. It’s about what it means.
RM as Myth: Idol, Leader, Mirror
Namjoon has never simply been a rapper, or a leader, or even just a member of BTS. He is a myth. A site of projection. A metaphor in motion. As I wrote in BTS by ARMY, RM is not just the antithesis of human Namjoon, but the synthesis. The embodiment of what it means to be both seen and unseen, worshipped and watched, crushed beneath symbolism and lifted by it.
In Idol Limerence, I theorised that our love for BTS isn’t passive obsession—it’s participation in a mythic world where the idol is not just a person but an archetype. A feeling. A mirror. We as fans don’t simply follow; we reflect. We project. And RM, with his intellect and fragility, has always drawn the kind of fans who see the world in layers.
So when he invokes the 27 Club, he isn’t just referencing a cursed age. He’s referencing a long lineage of artists who were both lionised and broken. And he is asking: what if I was supposed to be one of them?
The Age of 27: A Milestone and a Mirror
Namjoon turned 27 in 2021. It was the year BTS released Butter, the height of their global domination. It was also the year the world was still reeling from pandemic isolation, deferred grief, and widespread existential drift. For artists, 27 is more than a number. It's a cultural checkpoint, a siren.
And yet, in that year, Namjoon wrote lyrics like "Even the scars from your mistakes become your constellations" and told the world that "Life Goes On."
In my chapter "Only Human," I reflected on what it meant for him to say: "I’m a 27-year-old Korean. I’m just a human." There was nothing simple about that statement. It was radical. It was weary. It was a reminder that even someone at the apex of global fame could still wonder who he was without the applause.
What may have died at 27 wasn't Namjoon. But perhaps it was the part of him that thought he had to die to be real. To be remembered… To be loved.
The Death of RM, The Becoming of Namjoon
What is the cost of leading the most beloved band on Earth? Of being the voice of a generation? RM is the architect of BTS' philosophy, the one who stood before the UN and said, "Speak yourself." But who was he when the camera turned off?
In Stop the Rain, he gives us a glimpse: bathtub gin, silence, ghosts. It's a portrait of an artist in survival mode.
There is a concept I return to in Idol Limerence: the idea of the first death. In art, it's when inspiration fades. In myth, it's when the hero descends into the underworld. For Namjoon, the first death may have been the moment he stopped believing the mask of RM could hold everything. That it could hold him.
He once said, "If I take away BTS, there is nothing left in my life." That is a line filled with devotion and despair. What happens when the work becomes the self? When the applause is the oxygen?
Fandom as Resurrection
If Namjoon feared death at 27, then we must ask: what kept him alive?
The answer may be unsettling: us. The fans. The limerent gaze. The letters. The screams. The silence in between. But more than anything, the witnessing. We saw him. Not just the leader, the thinker, the beautiful man. We saw the trembling. And he let us.
In Idol Limerence, I wrote that devotion is a form of knowledge. That to love an idol is to participate in a sacred text. If that’s true, then Namjoon’s lyric is a verse we must not look away from.
He didn’t die. He wrote. He rapped. He survived. And in doing so, he broke the curse. Not just for himself. For all of us who thought beauty must burn in order to be real.
After the Threshold
Namjoon crossed the threshold. And then he wrote about it. Which means he didn’t just live. He lived to tell.
The 27 Club worships the spectacle of collapse. It turns artists into altars, then wonders why they burn.
But Namjoon didn’t burn. He didn’t fold himself into legend. He stayed. He aged. He got angry. He wrote songs about bathtubs and ghosts instead of giving us a beautiful corpse.
And some of us should ask why that disappoints us.
Because maybe we don’t just want our idols to feel. Maybe we want them to bleed, but only photogenically. Maybe we mistake vulnerability for performance and resilience for betrayal.
He survived. Not for us. In spite of us.
The myth is that immortality comes through suffering. But Namjoon rewrote that verse.
I remember him talking about No 2, the closing song of Indigo, evoking the myth of Orpheus, who comes out of the underworld and shouldn’t look back. Also, when he said he used to look at the painting by Yun that hangs on his living room wall and think about the possibility of turning sorrow and suffering into beauty and art, inspired be hardships his favourite painter went through. Namjoon is constantly turning his raw feelings and sorrows into art, into beauty. Thank you, Wallea, for your beautiful, sensitive text. I really appreciate your perspective towards BTS, especially Namjoon. This essay was a gift.
This is so beautiful omg