How BTS Became One of the Most Popular Bands in History

 

How BTS Became One of the Most Popular Bands in History

 

In an age of despair and division, a boy band from South Korea remixed the rules of pop and created a fandom bigger than Beatlemania.

 

By E. Tommy Kim

The New Yorker, June 21, 2022

 

 

 

I've long been hesitant to write about BTS. When reporting on South Korea, I resisted the expected topics: Korean skin care, plastic surgery, dogmeat, and, yes, K-pop. I absorbed Western critiques of K-pop’s girl and boy bands: that they’re fluffy, manufactured, and exploitative of their members—as if the same weren’t true of New Kids on the Block. But, earlier this year, BTS became inescapable. The group was everywhere, and everyone seemed to be into them. To continue ignoring the BTS phenomenon was to risk missing something bigger than Beatlemania.

 

I first glimpsed the swell of hallyu, the Korean wave, a decade ago. In the winter of 2012, I was writing a story about Latina day laborers in Brooklyn who cleaned Hasidic homes before the Sabbath—when women’s work accumulated to the point where outsourcing became necessary. I had heard that many employers paid low wages or didn’t pay at all; some workers reported verbal abuse and sexual harassment. Standing among the women on a street corner in a black puffy coat, I tried to make conversation in my terrible Spanish. One morning, a worker approached me and asked, apropos of nothing, if I was Korean—not “Chinese or Japanese?” This precision was new. When I said yes, she beamed. “My daughter—she loves Korea,” she said. “She loves K-pop.”

 

Behind the Story

E. Tammy Kim discusses her reporting on BTS.

 

The woman took out her phone and had me speak with her daughter, Karina, a young mother and deli worker in New York. Karina wanted to learn Korean so she could better understand the lyrics of boy bands such as Super Junior and SHINee. I agreed to teach her, and, in exchange, she agreed to be my interpreter. We established a semiweekly routine: meet in the morning to interview day laborers, then study Hangul at a nearby library. Karina practiced writing the alphabet, ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ . . ., and pronouncing basic phrases. She read Bruce Cumings’s “Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History,” and composed a report that gushed about King Sejong and his invention of the Korean script. “I myself find it to be a beautiful language,” she wrote. “When you hear the words being spoken, it sounds as if it’s a melody.”

 

Three years later, a friend on Long Island told me that teen-age twins who she’d met in town were obsessed with all things Korean. Like Karina, they were the daughters of Latino immigrants and bilingual in English and Spanish, but it was Korean that they wanted to know. They’d taught themselves the basics, and began texting with me in short bursts of Hangul, with emojis and exclamation points. When I invited them over for a home-cooked Korean meal, they brought along a friend, another Latino Koreaphile, and a Korean cake garlanded in candied fruits.

 

A few years after that, my parents and I were on a ferry in Greece, during a trip to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary, when a young Greek man in shorts came up to us, smiling broadly. “Are you Korean?” he asked. “I love your culture. K-pop!” He asked us to speak Korean, as though he might inhale the sounds along with the salty sea air. Korea was trendy. It had successfully hawked its cultural wares in the global marketplace. Still, I knew nothing of its best-selling product: BangTanSonyeondan, a.k.a. BTS.

 

A friend warned, at the start of my BTS journey, “This is the hardest story you’ve ever done.” What he meant was that there was so much material (nine years of music, dancing, articles, and tweets) and so much potential to get things wrong (a staggeringly rich subculture and legions of fervent, fact-checking fans). In April, BTS was performing in Las Vegas, as part of a short international tour—the band’s first live shows since before the pandemic. I bought an overpriced resale ticket and started to cram.

 

Acquaintances who proudly identify as members of BTS’s ARMY—which stands for “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth” and describes both individual fans and its fandom worldwide—delighted in making recommendations. They sent links to music videos, concerts, and the band’s self-produced variety show, “Run BTS,” of which there are more than a hundred and fifty episodes. I tried out fan-made choreography tutorials (embarrassing but fun) and watched mini-lectures to learn the seven members’ names. I scrolled through Twitter fan accounts, read BTS monographs, and listened to a podcast called “BTS AF.” On the last day of May, Asian American heritage month, the boys appeared at the White House for a careful mix of politics lite and P.R., condemning “anti-Asian hate crimes” (in Korean) and making finger hearts with President Biden in the Oval Office.

 

Then, on June 14th, just days after releasing a new album, BTS made a shocking, if not unexpected, announcement. In a video to celebrate their ninth anniversary, the members sat around a long, lavishly appointed dinner table, in the style of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” All was festive—wine and crab legs and laughter—until minute twenty-one. SUGA, one of the band’s rappers, said, “I guess we should explain why we’re in an off period right now.” A sober go-around followed: the members were tired; they wanted to try new things, each on his own. They cried. Many ARMYs concluded that BTS was going on hiatus, and some feared a breakup. Hours later, after the stock price of the band’s parent company fell by nearly thirty per cent, the band member RM issued a statement of reassurance. The members were simply taking a break to pursue solo projects. “This is not the end for us,” he said.

 

Débuting in 2013, BTS was the creation of the producer and songwriter Bang Si-Hyuk and his K-pop label, Big Hit Entertainment. Bang, who studied aesthetics at South Korea’s prestigious Seoul National University, started his career at J.Y.P. Entertainment, one of the “big three” corporations that built K-pop into a five-billion-dollar industry, with generous government support. During the Asian financial crisis of the late nineties, President Kim Dae-jung, whose inauguration was attended by Michael Jackson, had taken a cue from Hollywood and J-pop (Japan’s popular-music industry) to invest heavily in culture. The spending paid off, and K-pop, K-dramas, and Korean genre films became a source of Korean soft power.

 

When Bang left J.Y.P. to start Big Hit, in 2005, he set out to make a different kind of K-pop. His recruits would still come through auditions and undergo months, even years, of training in song and dance. They would still learn English and Japanese (and Korean, if they were coming from somewhere else) and cultivate a pale, dewy complexion. And they would still be expected to practice total romantic discretion, if not chastity. But, unlike at the Korean big three, Bang would allow his idols to express themselves, both by writing their own music and by interacting directly with their fans. This relative freedom would make BTS the most popular band in the world and turn Bang into a billionaire.

 

Bang initially envisioned BTS as a smaller hip-hop group. He began with Kim Namjoon, a.k.a. RM (formerly Rap Monster), a preternaturally confident m.c. and fluent English speaker. Then came Min Yoongi, or SUGA, who’d gained renown for making beats in his provincial home town, and Jung Hoseok, or j-hope, a hip-hop dancer who would lean into his sunny moniker. From this three-member rap line, Bang kept growing the band, adding singers and visuals, meaning lookers. Kim Seokjin, or Jin, the oldest member, born in 1992, had perfect lips and thespian ambitions. Jeon Jung Kook, the youngest, or maknae, had proved his all-around talent on the show “Superstar K.” Kim Taehyung, or V, had a tender voice and sultry eyes, while Park Jimin was a competitive dancer of implacable sweetness.

 

It was unusual for a K-pop group to start from a base of rap and hip-hop. It was even more unusual for a group to speak and sing openly of the struggles of youth. The members vlogged their adolescent musings and posted variety-show episodes to the video-streaming service V Live. On the app Weverse, they offered pay-for-play content to supplement what was already on YouTube. Every day, there was something new to consume, and watching the members rehearse intricate dance moves, eat takeout, play video games, and gently bicker felt like eavesdropping on an endless slumber party. As the ethnomusicologist Kim Youngdae has observed, BTS mastered the craft of storytelling across platforms—what contemporary scholars call “transmedia” and what Heidegger called the “total work of art,” or Gesamtkunstwerk. The band’s prolific, consistent production relays an impression of authenticity. BTS fans experience a deep attachment to the boys and call them by nicknames—“Oh, Hobi,” “Oh, Tae”—as real in their daily lives as friends and family. When I asked fans, “Why are you so devoted to BTS?,” they would respond, nearly identically, “Because they do so much for us.” The boys habitually extend affirmations of self-love and gratitude to their fans. Jung Kook has “ARMY” and a purple heart tattooed on his right hand.

 

 

But BTS has done more than soothe and entertain. Its first three albums, the school trilogy, reflected the concerns of teen-agers and young adults trying to survive South Korea’s high-pressure education system. In the glossy photo book that accompanies the third in the series, “Skool Luv Affair,” the baby-faced seven, eyes lined in black, wear tousled school uniforms and exhort rebellion. After a ferry capsized off the southwestern coast of South Korea in April of 2014, killing hundreds of teen-agers on a school trip and becoming a symbol of state corruption, BTS released what’s thought to be a tribute ballad, “Spring Day.”

 

ARMY culture spread from Korea to the rest of East Asia, the U.S., Southeast Asia, South America, and beyond. A recent census of BTS’s fandom found ARMYs in more than a hundred countries and territories. Ajla Hrelja Bralić, a fan and mother of two fans in Zagreb, Croatia, told me that BTS opened her up to “Korea, Japan, China, all those countries we don’t know much about.” In 2014, BTS was billed as one of many acts at KCON, a showcase of Korean culture, in Los Angeles. By the fourth KCON, in 2016, BTS was the main draw. The band continued to produce high-concept, multi-album releases, but layered more pop, E.D.M., and world beats onto its rap and R. & B. The youth trilogy, comprising three albums titled “The Most Beautiful Moment in Life” (or “화양연화”), emphasized the band’s vocals. The four-part series “Love Yourself” alluded to a Sino-Korean storytelling structure (기승전결: introduction, development, turn, conclusion) and doubled down on the theme of self-acceptance. More recently, BTS has sharpened its therapeutic tack by invoking Jungian psychoanalysis. The albums “Map of the Soul: Persona” and “Map of the Soul: 7” refer to Murray Stein’s 1998 book, “Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction.” As Stein told the K-pop journalist Tamar Herman, BTS’s music addresses the gap we all face “between ourselves and the social world around us.”

 

In 2017, BTS performed its high-energy song “DNA” at the American Music Awards, the moment many ARMYs in the U.S. cite as their introduction to the boys. (The music video for “DNA” has 1.5 billion views on YouTube.) The band became beloved repeat guests of Ellen DeGeneres, James Corden, and Jimmy Fallon, and clocked wins at the A.M.A.s, the MTV Video Music Awards, and the Billboard Music Awards. Their collaborators have included, among others, Nicki Minaj, Halsey, Steve Aoki, and the choreographer Keone Madrid. Meanwhile, individual members of BTS have produced and composed their own rap mixtapes, music videos, and singles, including for the Korean hip-hop group Epik High and for popular K-dramas such as “Itaewon Class” and “Our Blues.” Next month, j-hope will perform solo at Lollapalooza. The boys have also lent their imprimatur to sell vast numbers of cars, phones, face creams, and even novels: RM, the designated “literature idol,” has been known to read such varied books as Plato’s Phaedrus, Han Kang’s “Human Acts,” and Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.”

But none of these bare facts completely explains the intense passion of the BTS fandom. BTS is arguably the most popular band ever, with the most dedicated following. As BTS’s ARMY has grown, it has developed increasingly elaborate practices. Fans confess their “biases” (favorite members) and “bias wreckers” (the members who threaten the primacy of those favorites), and abide by rules of conduct, such as a prohibition against accosting or identifying a member who’s on vacation with his family. Of their own accord, ARMYs have organized to maximize BTS’s streaming numbers, raise funds for charity, and agitate against movements perceived to oppose the values of BTS. In one famous example, from 2020, ARMYs registered en masse for a Trump rally in Tulsa, with no intention of attending, causing the then President an embarrassingly low turnout. Earlier this year, fans in the Philippines mobilized widely, though unsuccessfully, to prevent Ferdinand (Bongbong) Marcos, Jr., the son and namesake of the country’s notorious dictator, from being elected President.

ARMY’s devotion to textual analysis is astonishing. A Korean lawyer and mother of two in Singapore, who tweets as @BeautifulSoulB7, told me that she spends a chunk of every morning translating BTS articles, videos, and social-media posts from English to Korean. Aneesa Mahboob, a video editor in California, created the YouTube documentary series “The Rise of Bangtan,” which includes twenty-one half-hour installments. On V Live, most episodes of “Run BTS” can be watched in more than a dozen languages, including Azerbaijani and Bahasa Indonesia, thanks to the contributions of multilingual fans. None of this work is done for pay.

 

Professor Candace Epps-Robertson, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has described BTS fans as an army of librarians. Their methods, she wrote in the journal Rhetoric Review, “include tracking and documenting Twitter hashtags, participatory archives of materials related to research and teaching, blogs to archive translations of songs, and an emerging archive of fans narrating their personal experiences of survival and growth.” Epps-Robertson has her own growth narrative: In 2019, she began taking care of her mother, who was dying of A.L.S. “I started to play BTS on my way home because I couldn’t stand to be in silence with the many emotions I felt,” she wrote in a blog post. She is especially attached to “Mikrokosmos” (no relation to the Bartók), a synth-y, up-tempo track that affirms the “starlight” in every soul.

 

In July, Epps-Robertson, whose Twitter name includes a superscript “7” in tribute to the band, will fly to Seoul to attend the third convening of BTS: A Global Interdisciplinary Conference. (One of the keynote speakers is the New Age novelist Paulo Coelho.) Her teen-age daughter, Phoenix, the original ARMY of the family, will accompany her. Before BTS, neither mother nor daughter had much interest in Asia. Now, Epps-Robertson told me, Phoenix attends a Korean-language school one night a week, plus two hours of private tutoring. “I was so in awe of her getting up early to watch Korean news, to research Korean history,” she said. “I was, like, how can I capture that in my own classes—that excitement, that desire to learn more?”

The concert I attended in Vegas, in April, was the finale of the band’s “Permission to Dance” tour. After two years of the pandemic, fans were desperate for a chance to see the group live, and continued uncertainty over if and when the older members would have to perform compulsory eighteen-month stints in the South Korean military added to the frenzy. Still, none of us imagined that the tour might be BTS’s last, at least for a while. An ARMY from New York, who’d flown to Los Angeles for one of the shows, advised me to “dress to the nines.” At the concert in L.A., she said, many fans wore clothes modelled after the members’ slick, gender-bending outfits in music videos and had their hair dyed in homage to BTS’s multicolored coifs. The fan, whose own hair is shaded a pleasing soft pink, giggled at the memory of one concertgoer who came dressed as a tangerine, a reference to SUGA’s love of the fruit.

 

Before Las Vegas, I did not know that BTS had a favorite color. But perhaps V—who coined the phrase “Borahae,” a composite of “purple” and “I love you” in Korean—was smiling upon me. I happened to pack purple sunglasses, a purplish-pink fanny pack, a violet handkerchief, and a silver slip dress whose lavender sheen I would discover under the desert sun. When I landed at the Las Vegas airport, ARMYs revealed themselves by way of BTS keychains, luggage tags, and T-shirts that read “TAEHYUNG” or “JIMIN.”

 

That morning, in my hotel lobby, I met a young woman named MK Jourdain, who was carrying an armful of BTS merch and looked out of breath. A Haitian American who wore her hair in braided pigtails and a headband ornamented with two plush SHOOKY baubles, she had flown in from Florida, where she attends college and works at a bank. (SHOOKY is the cartoon character that represents her bias, SUGA, in the universe of BT21, a BTS merchandise line.) She’d joined a queue outside Allegiant Stadium at five-thirty that morning, hoping to have her pick of BTS souvenirs. But, by the time she reached the front of the line, the Permission to Dance blankets and T-shirts were sold out. She did manage, however, to snag some photo cards and a plastic fan decorated with the members’ faces. Jourdain had been drawn to K-pop after getting into Japanese anime, whose fandom overlaps with BTS’s ARMY and shares similar customs of language-learning and translation. Jourdain was studying Korean, and explained that what drew her to BTS, aside from SUGA’s “cute, adorable” rapping and dancing, were the values that the group projected. “I feel more of the Korean and the Haitian culture. It’s very together. There’s a lot of warmth,” she said. In the U.S., by contrast, “It’s, like, O.K., I’m just by myself. No one’s really gonna care.”

 

Later, standing in line for the BTS “Immersive Journey,” a series of photo-ready rooms that blared recent songs such as “Butter,” I met a bubbly Indian woman in a bright-yellow shirt. Akshata was a recent, work-from-home convert to BTS who’d come from Bangalore, on vacation from her job as an investment banker. She told me that her husband was working in Salt Lake City, and that the band’s message of self-love had helped her become more independent while he was away. When I gave her my business card, which includes my name written in Hangul, she read the Korean aloud. She’d been learning the language in part by bingeing on Korean drama series on Netflix. (She sent me a list of fifty-three and counting.) A few hours after we talked, she got a tattoo of the flower line drawing from the cover of BTS’s first “Love Yourself” album.

 

BTS as self-care was a theme I heard from many fans. Christina Johnson (bias: RM) came to Las Vegas from Houston, where she works part-time at Kohl’s and homeschools four of her five children. She told me that she was a fan of ’NSync in the past, but in the gloom of the early pandemic, when she was furloughed for several months and stuck at home, she found refuge in BTS. She made a Spotify playlist of nearly two hundred BTS songs and decorated her desk at home with BTS portraits. She hung a floating shelf to display her CDs and little figurines of each of the members, a kind of secular altar. Johnson grew up in foster care; her mother, who is half Japanese, was adopted. She said that BTS had inspired her to look into her Japanese heritage and had given her a stronger sense of being Asian American. When she needs a break from work or from the kids, she puts on her headphones and listens to “Magic Shop” or the “Love Yourself” albums. The band was like “mental-health counselling,” she told me. (When BTS later announced its break, Johnson said in an e-mail that she was having “a bit of a sob fest.” She acknowledged that “they deserve time to themselves, to stretch their wings,” but felt sad because they “have been a comfort to so many for so long.”)

 

That evening, at Allegiant Stadium, the mood was blissful. The gleaming, two-billion-dollar venue is the new home of the Las Vegas Raiders, but I saw none of the alcoholic rowdiness of a football game or the “Yeah, but have you heard X” competitiveness of a rock or jazz show. Nor was the audience dominated by hysterical teen-age girls. In line outside the stadium, a group of Black men in purple outfits laughed and danced. A young Asian woman, yelling “freebies,” gave me a handmade BTS bookmark and a felted lavender heart. A Latino dad wearing a hat that read “땡” (a rap track by RM, SUGA, and j-hope) was accompanied by his wife and teen-age daughters. He told people nearby that their tickets had cost forty-eight hundred dollars. Inside the stadium, I took a photo for two ARMYs from Spain. One had made a sign that read “Bang PD marry me!,” a reference to the producer who started it all. From my seat in the nosebleeds, I watched the two girls next to me scroll BTS content on Instagram and take pouty duck-face selfies. In the row ahead of us, a couple who spoke only Japanese nibbled on a cookie stamped with BTS’s logo. Nearly all of the stadium’s sixty-five thousand seats were filled, and additional chairs had been set up on the ground. The Jumbotrons played an anti-plastics (but pro-Samsung) environmental P.S.A. starring BTS and an assortment of the band’s music videos to prime the crowd. When the boys finally appeared on stage, unveiled by the lifting of a giant mechanized box, the screaming began. Thousands of ARMYs waved Bluetooth lightsticks (cost: fifty-nine dollars) that synched into undulating fields of color. The audience called out the members’ names in routinized “fan chants.” It was as massive a spectacle as the Super Bowl or World Cup, except that all the fans were cheering for the same team.

 

 

Before I knew BTS’s music, I knew of the members as envoys of well-being. In 2017—the same year that Kim Jonghyun, a singer in the K-pop group SHINee, died by suicide—BTS launched a campaign with UNICEF to combat violence against children and teens. The following year, RM represented the band in a speech about self-acceptance at the United Nations, and last year all seven members offered encouragement to young people during the pandemic in the meeting hall of the U.N.’s General Assembly. A music video the boys shot there—singing one of their hits in demure black suits, starting at the green marble rostrum reserved for world leaders, then skipping through the main chamber and onto the grassy edge of the East River—has been viewed some sixty-eight million times.

 

Fans love the members for expressing empathy for minority groups and talking candidly about their own insecurities, struggles, and mistakes. This may explain how BTS has outlasted the “seven-year curse” of most K-pop bands. Early on, after facing criticism for the misogynistic tenor of the song “War of Hormone” (“Imma give it to you girl right now,” “Perfect from the front, perfect from the back,” etc.), RM reportedly committed to a feminist reading list. RM and Suga have said in interviews that queer people should be able to love whomever they want—no minor gesture in South Korea, where it’s still difficult to be out. An ARMY named Wang in Chengdu, China, who identifies as gay, though not publicly, told me, “There’s a big queer component of BTS. The fandom feels really welcoming.” (Contrast this with the K-pop group Big Bang, whose singers have been convicted of sex trafficking, gambling, and drug crimes.) At the same time, BTS has refrained from wading into public policy. No member has commented on the situation of queer people in South Korea, let alone backed the anti-discrimination bill that L.G.B.T.Q. activists there have been pursuing for more than a decade.

 

The band’s cautious approach to politics has so far saved it from major controversy. But there have been kerfuffles. Members have had run-ins with Japanese and Chinese fans, based on symbolic quarrels over East Asian history. And, in 2019, j-hope was taken to task for styling his hair into dreadlock-like “gel twists” in the music video for “Chicken Noodle Soup,” a remake of the song by DJ Webstar and Young B. Some ARMYs circulated a post in English and Korean that criticized this choice as cultural appropriation; others condemned the critics. More recently, an intra-ARMY clash broke out after BTS teased the tracklist for “Proof,” a new three-CD compilation album that features a song written in part by Jung Bobby, a K-pop composer who has pleaded guilty to sexual assault. Though Jung’s conduct did not come to light until after the song was first released, some ARMYs asked why the band would reissue the track at all. When Juwon Park, a journalist with the Associated Press in Seoul and a onetime dancer for K-pop singer PSY, raised the question on Twitter, global ARMYs bombarded her with virulent responses. I ran into a similar, if less hostile, defensiveness during my interviews with BTS fans. Many ARMYs feel that the band, and K-pop in general, have been disrespected by the mainstream media, especially in the West. I tried to reassure my sources that I was not writing a hit piece. “I wouldn’t want to say anything that would hurt the boys,” more than one person told me.

 

At the concert, from my vertiginous perch, I watched seven dots leap balletically on the stage. I could see their creamy faces and kohl-limned eyes only on the giant screens. They sang and danced for nearly two hours, stopping only for costume changes. I recognized most of the songs, including two of my favorites—“Black Swan” and “IDOL”—but didn’t know many of the lyrics. Everyone else, it seemed, could sing along to every word. If I were the pre-teen protagonist of an Asian American coming-of-age movie, this is when I would cry: hearing my parents’ language, once a source of embarrassment in my white-bread American home town, now being sung in joyful unison by all the peoples of the earth. The concert closed with “Permission to Dance,” the title track of the tour. It’s an irresistible, high-pitched song in E major, as sweet and flossy as cotton candy. The lyrics, in English, put the pandemic at a wishful remove: “I wanna dance, the music’s got me going / Ain’t nothing that can stop how we move.” After BTS faded out, in a swirl of confetti, a date flashed on the Jumbotrons that broke major news: “Proof” would drop on June 10th.

 

Exiting into the parking lot, toward the floodlit artifice of the strip, I tried to retain the ecstatic mood that had filled the stadium. But earlier that day, not far from where we were, I had seen a man in a ragged shirt and jeans lumbering alongside peppy sightseers, carrying an extra pair of shoes—with duct tape in place of its sole. I thought of a line from Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” another novel that RM endorsed to fans. In a brief tangent on totalitarian aesthetics, Kundera describes kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit.” Was this what we’d felt in the stadium: a happy but empty denialism? At the start of my BTS journey, I might have said yes. I might have dismissed the band’s music and accompanying œuvre as a sentimental detour from our macabre shared reality. But I have found that BTS ARMYs do not live in a fantasy. They live where everyone else does: in a world of depression, mass death, and ecological ruin. Over the past nine years, ARMYs have not looked to the seven for escape. They have looked to them for joy.

 

 

 

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                                          E. Tammy Kim is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.