BTS’s 2017 hit “Spring Day” is a reflective, passionate tune about love, loss, and yearning for the past—although the song is unspecific about what exactly the yearning is for.
However, the cover art as well as the music video alludes, with water imagery, to a tragedy in recent South Korean history—the April 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry. In Esquire’s Winter cover story, Dave Holmes asks the members of BTS if “Spring Day” is about a specific event. “It is about a sad event, as you said, but it is also about longing,” Jin, the oldest member of the group, 28, told Esquire. He also said that “Spring Day” really represents him personally. “I like to look to the past and be lost in it.”
“Spring Day” came out three years after the sinking of the Sewol ferry, a disaster in which an improperly inspected, overloaded, and unbalanced ferry capsized on an overnight journey. The ship had been loaded with twice the legal limit of cargo on its decks, and the ship’s crew had lied about the boat’s total weight. 304 passengers, the majority of them high school students on the way to a sight-seeing field trip, drowned, as they had been ordered to stay in their cabins until it was too late. Only 172 passengers survived the wreck.
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The disaster angered and traumatized the nation, but according to some reports, the South Korean government tried to silence entertainers who spoke out against it. The Korean Ministry of Education even banned the disaster’s commemorative yellow ribbons in schools. Later, the president at the time of the disaster, Park Geun-hye, who was widely criticized for her government’s failure to prevent it, was impeached on charges of corruption.
But the nostalgic, longing tone of BTS’s “Spring Day” subtly helped keep the memory of the disaster alive in the minds of young Koreans and the media in the years after the tragedy.
