This post was written by Leslie Day

Welcome to Ask AP529 where YOU get to utilize OUR brain wrinkles to find answers to your most burning BTS questions. This question comes from Doc of the AP529 Admin team. She asks: 

Did Namjoon get his, “Life is a soup and I’m a fork,” quote from Yoongi?

Answer: No. But he didn’t come up with it either.

Namjoon went LIVE on Weverse on August 12, 2023, telling ARMY he was checking in to say “Hi” and to give us some news. He also watched a fan-made tribute song and thanked the creators. In the last couple minutes of this live, one commenter asked Namjoon togive some advice for a “high school graduate.” He replied with a faint smile and said, “Life is a soup, and I’m a fork.”

Taehyung found it so amusing, he went LIVE later that same day and talked about it—saying Namjoon “is good with words.” (He begins talking about it around the 7 minute mark in the LIVE.) Eventually, Tae concludes that Namjoon “left another wise saying” for us.

But I remember it differently. I saw a video of Yoongi saying that exact same phrase, didn’t I? 

Doc and I, both curious about this, decided we needed to know for sure. So, we went down a rabbit hole.

The first thing we did was find the Tweet that attributed it to SUGA. We felt vindicated. I’d been saying this for almost a year because I’d seen versions of this Tweet on other social media platforms. But was this good enough evidence? Doc and I decided we needed to dig deeper—we had to find the LIVE, and we needed the time stamp so we could gloat.

Off we both went in search of a particular LIVE—one in which Yoongi was in a hotel room, wearing a red Supreme headband and a black shirt. I found it on Weverse and Doc found it on YouTube. Sometimes the translations vary between platforms and we wanted to compare them if they were. The LIVE in question was from February 16, 2019. It’s thirty two minutes and twenty four seconds of Yoongi being sassily appalled by the thought that some ARMYs are so too young to know what a cassette tape is. (Further proving that he is for the older fans!) Not once did this “life is soup” quote scroll across the subtitles in English. We know, because both of us watched them TWICE. We needed to be sure. FOR SCIENCE. Turns out, the origin of the phrase being attributed to Yoongi was a screenshot from that LIVE that someone altered the captions on and posted on Twitter/X (see below).

But that sent us down another rabbit hole. we began this search on May 11, 2024—two weeks before the release of RM’s new album, Right Place Wrong Person. He’d been teasing us about it for almost a year, and our minds were searching for clues in everything. We were thirsty for any sort of information that would help us predict what was to come on his new album.

I searched “X” for any other mention of the phrase. The earliest mention of it came from an account called Pakulo Papito on April 25, 2018. That didn’t lead anywhere. I could not find any connection between Pakalu Papito and Namjoon.

Meanwhile, Doc was searching YouTube. She found this campy instrumental by SEEZEE and the retro video that accompanies it. It was uploaded on March 29, 2018 and it predates Pakalu’s “X” post by a month. 

I did a quick internet search and found a Danish short film WITH THE SAME NAME that had been released at a film festival on May 11, 2023–just a few months before his Weverse LIVE. 

That was interesting. But there is no information on the plot, or any pictures whatsoever.

At this point, we had seen some of the artwork for Namjoon’s new album and I thought maybe it could be linked. So I enlisted the help of a few others in our AP529 community. We wanted to know if any of the actors or directors from the short film also worked on Namjoon’s project. According to the movie poster I’d found, it was a “musical short film”, and we know that Namjoon’s tastes are off the beaten path—something many of us admire about him. 

Alas, no matter how hard they searched, none of my helpers were able to find any connections. At the same time, Doc continued to search on YouTube. She found a song titled ”Life is Soup and I’m A Fork” by Shius. The caption for it read: “A song about depression lol” and it’s lyrics are rapped over a harsh, driving electric guitar. There’s even a version on Soundcloud, a platform which RM used to release his first two mix tapes. 

Shius’s song was uploaded in November of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, so it’s depressing overtones make sense, but I was still baffled by Pakalu’s Tweet on “X”. I was still searching for a song that released before 2018. I came across another track with the same name uploaded December 21, 2017 by Nathan Lev Music. It’s nothing big or viral—just a dude in a basement playing a guitar with the tagline, “a jokey little ditty”. Could Namjoon have heard this one? I began to feel like we were too far down the rabbit hole, just chasing endless speculation by this point, having lost the thread of the original question.

“Namjoon, what are you up to?” we wondered. The search continued!

This is when I tripped over a 1998 song (on YouTube) by Caesar’s Palace called “(I’m Gonna) Kick You Out”. The second line of this song is “A man with a fork in a world of soup.” It sounded like someone had cheated on this man, and he was in his feels. (Which is kind of what it sounds like, to me, might have happened in RPWP’s “Nuts”—hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo!). The MV was uploaded in 2015 and I have to say, it’s very… interesting. I’ll come back to that.

So what’s the answer?

No, Namjoon did not “steal” this saying from his hyung. But what was he up to? I have no idea.

We know Yoongi didn’t say it first. Doc and I were confronted again with the egregious practice of people putting fake translations on K-Pop Idol videos. There are a lot of parody accounts on YouTube who change the subtitles on BTS videos and LIVEs for comedic purpose, but they are clearly labeled as such. However, there are also a lot of people who mistranslate and/or put fake captions on things, but try to pass them off as real. This is dangerous, it put words into artists’ mouths that they never said, and it has the potential to cause harm. Luckily, this particular quote is innocuous, but that’s not always the case.

And what does all of this have to do with Namjoon? 

Why did we continue this search through indie movies and obscure songs? We didn’t know then. We were speculating and clue hunting—we were hyper-fixated. But now, a few months later, I’ve had some time to listen to RPWP on a loop (until Muse came out, and now it’s a mixture).

Can we just look at an image from the video for “(I’m Gonna) Kick You out” and compare it to the M/V for “LOST!”?

They are both very…1970s-ish. If you watch both M/Vs, these are the stoic characters. All the songs I’ve listed have chaotic, asynchronous beats, atonal harmonies  and/or satirical lyrics. RPWP has those same elements. I know that Namjoon doesn’t have a song with these words in the lyrics, but the sentiments in many of them are very, very close. 

The video from SEEZEE reminds me of RM’s concept photos where he’s sitting with an eclectic group of people at a dinner party. The chaotic sounds of the Shius song as well as the harsh lyrics, and visuals of Caesar’s Palace link to Namjoon’s project in my opinion. I wish I could ask him a thousand questions. Alas, he’s been busy playing the saxophone at various festivals lately.

Points to remember from this DEEP rabbit hole:

• Not all questions have answers, but the search can be very interesting.

• Don’t believe every video you find just because it has subtitles.

• Yoongi really appreciates his older fans. (Go watch that LIVE!)

• Namjoon did say “Life is a soup and I’m a fork” (and Taehyung was impressed) but he didn’t coin the phrase, nor did he claim to have. We know Namjoon is always reading.

What BTS lore is tickling your brain? Ask us! Keep our brain wrinkles busy!

Go to the contact page on the AP529 website to submit your own question.

CREDITS

YouTube/Web: @hobiatia, @V Live, @pakalupapitow, IMDb, @SEEZEE, @Nathan Lev Music, jiosaavn.com, @warnersweden