TABLO and RM are the leaders of the most iconic K-Pop/K-rap groups, Epik High and BTS, respectively. K-Pop groups tend to have specific roles, such as rapper, vocalist, visual, maknae, to which members are assigned. The position of leader is perhaps one of the hardest because, besides having to moderate any internal conflict, they are their respective groups’ public face. As such, the responsibilities connected to this position can be overwhelming at times. In their lyrics and interviews, TABLO and RM have insinuated this; TABLO more directly than his younger counterpart.

Weighed down by his position as the public face and spokesperson for BTS and the unwarranted criticism that has often accompanied it, RM has struggled integrating his personal identity with that of the group. While mandatory military service has offered a break from these tensions, it would be wrong to ignore the unique stresses that such an enforced hiatus brings, especially in the lead-up to it. As TABLO has disclosed in recent promotional materials and interviews, Stop The Rain was completed before RM entered the military, but was not released due to TABLO’s mindfulness of the raw honesty of the lyrics and the possible fallout, with RM not able to counter it as he still has a month left to serve.

During what should have been a joyful period in his life, with TABLO getting married and the birth of his first child, he was subject to online harassment and abuse. An early victim of our disinformation era, TABLO was accused by netizens of lying about his education, specifically that he completed his BA and MA from Stanford in three and a half years. A naver Café – Taijinyo (We Demand the Truth from TABLO), which consisted of approximately 200,000 members, was created to circulate false information about him. Not only did online abuse turn into offline abuse, but TABLO’s pain was compounded by the death of his father. RM has also suffered at the hands of netizens and the online and offline press, being criticized for racism and sexism, with anti-fans bringing up incidents from the past and ignoring the discourse of social equity expressed through lyrics and the spoken word. For both musicians, their art has become a mechanism of working through personal pain and trauma. While TABLO has been forthright about the damage that being in the public eye has done to his mental health, RM has been less direct, his position as the leader of the most globally popular K-pop group constraining and containing his freedom of speech.  

This is the second time the two have collaborated. The first time was on All Day, a track on  Indigo, RM’s second solo album (2022), a song which mediates on the cruelty of the world, while addressing the ‘haters’. Its “sequel”,  Stop The Rain, also concerns personal and public pain, from the past and in the present, using ‘rain’ as a metaphor for suffering and the concomitant sorrow which accompanies it. Stopping the rain, therefore, is to stop the pain: “Two seconds from fallin’ into nothing / Can’t run away from the pain / I’m tryna stop the rain”. TABLO’s verse explores deep-seated childhood trauma: “Since I was a young’un, I was called names and bossed around / Back to the wall so long, call me pain’s poster child / Religious home, times were different / They told me I was gifted / But to unwrap my mind was wicked.” Here, being intellectually gifted is transformed from a positive attribute to a negative one.  Indeed, the other commonality between the two artists is that they are extremely empathetic, a trait linked to cognitive intelligence, with both scoring highly on IQ tests.

However, according to Ernest Hemingway: “happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing …” (The Garden of Eden: 1986). If we look at the opening stanza of RM’s verse: “When I was a kid / I was convinced that I was destined for the 27 club / I’m twenty nine, sinkin’ in the bathtub, sippin’ gin, lookin’ for another club”, the self-doubt and self-criticality that often accompanies emotional and cognitive intelligence is apparent.

The 27 club is a reference to those artists who did not live beyond 27 years, such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse, and Kim Jong-hyun (a member of Shinee). Such self-doubt is a common feature of RM’s solo work, both in his mix-tapes and solo albums. Indeed, his single Forever Rain off his second mixtape, Mono (2018), echoes similar sentiments, except in this track, RM desires for perpetual rain so that he can be lost in the crowd. This can be understood in Baudelairean terms whereby the anonymity of the urban crowd promises escape from the spotlight and dictates of the public persona: “I wish it rains all day / ‘Cause I’d like someone to cry for me, yeah / I wish it rains all day / ‘Cause then people wouldn’t stare at me, yeah” (2018). Yet the promise of the rain is contradictory, for while it allows the individual to disappear into the crowd, it also signifies a desire for connectedness, or “being-in-the-world”, a belongingness which allows the individual to navigate uncertainty through shared humanity. Interestingly, there is only one Korean phrase in the track, found in RM’s verse, utilized as repetition with difference: “Stray after stable, 다시 덫 뒤에 덫 (Trap after trap)”. Trap after trap has multiple meanings, it can refer to a device in which one gets caught, literally or figuratively; a music genre – trap music; or indeed a mouth as in “keep your trap shut”. RM’s translanguaging, which allows him to switch seamlessly between languages, plays on linguistic uncertainty.  

Stop The Rain is a hauntingly beautiful track, leaving mnemonic traces in the listener’s mind. Tonally, the voices and rapping styles of TABLO and RM complement each other, and the interweaving and layering of vocals give a sonic depth to the track. The accompanying music video, or animated visualiser to be more precise, functions to heighten the despair embedded in the lyrics, especially through the repeated image of the falling man. In the dream-work, the latent meaning of the manifest image – the falling man – can be interpreted as a fear of loss of control and the concomitant helplessness that it implies. In these terms, stopping the rain can be understood as a desire to wake up, to stop time, and/or take a break. Perhaps it is best expressed by the lines: “Gotta turn off my phone tonight”. It may be that despair, sometimes turning into suicidal ideation, is the malaise at the heart of contemporary life, where human connections are being transformed through technology into automated disconnections. According to the WHO, suicide is the third most common cause of death in 15-29 years old with more than 720,000 people dying a year (2024), or, according to recent statistics, accounting for “one death every 43 seconds” (IHME: 2025). South Korea’s suicide rates are the highest in Asia, with 25.8 suicides per 100,000 people in 2021, the fourth highest globally.

The importance of art as a mechanism for healing should not be understated. Music can give shape to our deepest thoughts and allows us a form of catharsis, leading to improved mental health and wellbeing. While our experiences might be different, the connection with the feelings emoted by the lyrics and the music can make us feel that we’re not alone and that we belong to a shared humanity. Between being and nothingness, the existential despair at the heart of the track, functions to remind us that life is worth living after all, the joy outweighing the pain in the final analysis.

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Written by Dr Colette Balmain

Featured image courtesy of Ours Co

_{View of the Arts is an online publication dedicated to films, music, and arts, with a strong focus on the Asian entertainment industry. With rich content already available to our readers, we aim to expand our reach and grow alongside our audience by delving deeper into emerging platforms such as K-pop and Asian music more broadly. At the same time, we remain committed to exploring the vibrant and ever-evolving global landscape of film, music, and the arts, celebrating the immense talent and creativity that define these industries worldwide.}