A street is a means by which we move to different locations. The traces of your movement as you change coordinates form a street. Plenty takes place not just at your departure point and destination but while on the street between them too. In art, streets symbolize many different things. The street is a very familiar metaphor—one whose subject matter can take many different forms. Not surprisingly, the street in j-hope’s new single, “on the street” (with J. Cole), symbolizes many things as well. The street is the stage he got his start on with street dance, the transitional phase between the work he’s done up to 2023 as a part of BTS and as a solo artist and his entrance into the military, a mutual understanding between himself and fans ARMY, and his continued life journey as an artist.

As many people know, j-hope got his start in the world of music through dance. As he mentions in the lyrics to “Chicken Noodle Soup” (feat. Becky G), he grew up dancing on Choong-jang Street. In his second year of middle school he became the youngest member of local dance crew NEURON and went on to scoop up awards at several dance competitions. He was already considered a dance maverick in the area long before he ever became an adult. As revealed in the track “Hip Hop Phile” off BTS’s first studio album, DARK & WILD, j-hope was listening to old-school hip hop and other pre-2000s music from the time he was dancing boogaloo and King Tut. But it’s an understatement to say he was simply listening. He necessarily listens to everything in the music—from the beat to the lyrics—very thoroughly, and it’s fair to say at this point that he’s soaked up the music so completely that it’s embedded itself into every corner of his mind and every inch of his body. He also started rapping once he began training as a singer. It was at that time that he discovered J. Cole. j-hope shows his love for the rapper in “Hip Hop Phile,” where he dedicates more than two lines to him.

j-hope has also given “on the street” to ARMY as a present before he goes to the military. The artist applied for the termination of his enlistment postponement in February and revealed he will soon enlist. As j-hope walks carefree down the same street in New York that J. Cole does in the music video for “Simba,” a song off his 2007 debut mixtape, he sings, “For the path I’m on to become one of hope,” and, “To repay you even from afar, just like a butterfly.”

His butterfly metaphor harkens to similar imagery he’s used involving fish (“Daydream,” “MORE”), submarines (“Hope World”) and airplanes (“Airplane”). They all float about serenely, changing their positions in three-dimensional space, carving out their own paths in the water or in the sky—perfect analogies for j-hope’s stage presence. Perfected through years of practice, he seems to move with such ease as to defy gravity. Dance is an art form expressed through the body in three dimensions. The more skilled a dancer is, the better they are able to determine the exact positions in space they must reach in order to achieve their desired effect. The fact that the titles of his mixtape and album specifically suggest something spatial would seem to reflect how the artist is deeply engaged with his relationship with the physical space we all inhabit. Although I wrote that he appears to defy gravity, he must have worked to fully grasp his own movements and the space he moves through before that could have happened. Although he sings of a life of going with the flow in the song “Future” off Jack In The Box when he raps that he “can’t be the salmon swimming against the current,” to look at his interviews or his documentary, it seems safe to say that j-hope is the type of person who’s always ready to put in the necessary effort and has reached the point where he can make what he does look easy.

The lyrics to “on the street” make it clear right from the beginning that the street is paved with ARMY’s love and belief in j-hope and that he wants to repay them by leading them as a beacon of hope as they walk together. j-hope is the captivating fairy tale character in BTS’s song “Pied Piper,” leading them with a whistle and movements that make him seem light as a butterfly; he talks about how free and happy he is to the sounds of CB Mass’ “Whistle”; and he leaves an afterimage that keeps people missing him, leaving the street in Kim Kwang Seok’s song “Where the Wind Rises” as he suddenly says, “While walking down whistling I think of you.”

I was curious how j-hope, who got his start as a dancer, came to like J. Cole, himself famous for his lyrics. But seeing how even today j-hope uses an old-school sound and writes introspective lyrics, I think it’s perhaps not so surprising after all. J. Cole is a jack of all the music trades. Originally a producer, he then wrote lyrics chock-full of rhymes, poetry and spiritual reflection and put them over his own beats. j-hope has said how much he respects J. Cole and is quickly becoming as well-rounded as the artist he looks up to. j-hope was already dancing at a professional level, but he’s since polished his rapping, songwriting and production skills through “self-learning for 11 years,” as he sang in “MORE” (meaning 12 years now). He said in an interview with GQ Korea that he imagines himself on stage and writing around that right from when he starts making a song. He may have started as a dancer in Gwangju but he shows his versatility as an artist as he continues to draw from that experience.

The undisputed high point of the “on the street” music video is J. Cole’s 32-bar rap and j-hope’s accompanying dance. j-hope’s physical expression of J. Cole’s rap is perfectly timed to the beat as J. Cole flows perfectly in his style. The lyrics reveal a lot of the early days of J. Cole’s career that j-hope has admired from the time he was young. Through his lyrics in the song, J. Cole revisits his past and how hard he had to work to make money off his music, but also asks himself if it isn’t time to let it all go. Yet somehow it seems as though his artistic ambition hasn’t yet died down. Both the part where he takes a Christian view by talking about the universe, volcanoes, birds and nerves in the human body, and where he compares letting go of music to a father letting his daughter go at her wedding, show how emotional and lyrical the artist can be.

J. Cole has periodically hinted at his own retirement, citing a writer’s block he hasn’t been able to overcome since 2018. That year, he released a song called “1985” and gave it a subtitle: “Intro to The Fall Off.” This has led some to speculate that his final album will in fact be called The Fall Off. In a song called “Adonis Interlude (The Montage)” that J. Cole wrote (sampling Dr. Dre) for the Creed III soundtrack—a movie that came out the same day as “on the street”—he again mentions The Fall Off, asking listeners if they’re curious whether or not it’s the end of a chapter and saying he bets this will be the year he ends his hip hop reign. It almost feels like the shadow of, or evil twin to, his verse in “on the street.”

Although j-hope was positioned as a rapper when he debuted, he had never been a rapper in any meaningful capacity prior to that. But that has actually given him unbridled ambition and clarity to be free with his musical pursuits. As I wrote in a column for SisaIN in 2018, j-hope doesn’t really owe the Korean hip hop scene much because it isn’t where he got his start. He has since said with confidence that his musical roots are the 1980s and ’90s hip hop that he grew up dancing to. Jack In The Box and “on the street” back up his claim. “MORE,” released in advance of Jack In The Box, expresses his thirst for achievement, and the album’s closer, “Arson,” shows he wants to keep trying new things even though he’s aware of how dangerous ambition can be. J. Cole’s lyrics in “on the street” are a look back that leads him to feel “a strange type of hunger” and they overlap interestingly with j-hope’s musical ambitions to use Jack In The Box as a way to let others know who he is and what just what kind of music he makes. j-hope is underground as he dances in the music video and makes his way all the way up to the top of a building where he finally meets J. Cole, and seeing them collaborate for “on the street” proves they share something in common. In the end, they both want to create music that’s worthy of praise and they love music to the point of obsession.

In the documentary j-hope IN THE BOX, j-hope describes the promotions behind Jack In The Box, like his appearance on IU’s Palette, the album’s listening party and his performance at Lollapalooza as scoops of ice cream that finally became a cone. We can glean a lot about who j-hope is as an artist just by looking at how he goes through his process step by step and how much importance he places on things like practicing and rehearsals. A street is more than simply a path from one point in space to the next. Time passes and people grow on the street. j-hope’s street still stretches out further into the distance—a street full of things he has yet to do and parts of himself he still wants to improve upon. I’ll be waiting eagerly for him to come back and take his place on the street.