Firebrand Masterclass: The BTS Phenom!
(NOTE: BTS’s hit Boy with Love video has 636 million views as of December 2019. That’s brand genius!!)
In 2012, Rolling Stone published a list of the 10 K-pop bands most likely to make it big in the US. Achieving significant US fame was a newly attainable, if still distant, milestone for South Korean pop groups thanks to the 2000s’ tremendous exporting of South Korean culture overseas — a trend known as Hallyu, the Korean Wave. Rolling Stone’s list, which appeared two months before Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” included groups like Big Bang, Girls’ Generation, and 2NE1 — the greatest bands of what’s generally thought of as the “second generation” of pop groups to emerge during K-pop’s rise to international prominence.
It didn’t, however, include a group of teenage boys, then-recently assembled through a studio audition process, who were being meticulously polished and prepped for their debut. On December 22, 2012, the group released a number of Soundcloud clips featuring its seven members rapping in Korean and English — including a rap cover of Wham’s “Last Christmas.”
It was hardly the stuff of attention-getting Korean hip-hop. But the band in question — Bangtan Boys, later officially known as BTS — would go on to completely transform the image of all-male boy bands in South Korean music and shatter conceptions of what breakout success looked like for South Korean bands overseas.
BTS’s US prominence has expanded rapidly over the last two years, when the band began to smash one success metric after another, from spending multiple weeks on US charts to making a landmark appearance at the American Music Awards to collaborating with the Chainsmokers on their song “Best of Me,” as well as with Steve Aoki on their December 2017 single remix “Mic Drop.”
BTS is now celebrating a truly unprecedented rise, coming off a truly huge year of milestone accomplishments. In 2018, they became the first South Korean band in history to debut an album at No. 1 on the US Billboard 200 chart, as well as the first to have a single land at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. The band’s world tour promptly sold out. They followed up their earlier collaborations with Aoki and the Chainsmokers by collaborating with Nicki Minaj. They made a landmark appearance before the UN and performed in Times Square on Good Morning America. They even snagged a couple of Guinness World Records for their incredibly engaged fanbase.
Their popularity in the US shows no sign of stopping: In February 2019, BTS scored their first Grammy nomination, for Best Album Package, and presented an award at the ceremony. On Saturday, April 13, the band notched another historic first, by becoming the first Korean band to perform on Saturday Night Live.
The SNL appearance coincided with the April 12 release of their new album, Map of the Soul: Persona, featuring Ed Sheeran on a song called “Make It Right” and a collaboration with Halsey on their new single, “Boy With Luv.” That same week, the band appeared in the annual Time 100, along with winning the magazine’s reader poll for the second year in a row. Their profile in the piece was appropriately written by Halsey, who noted:
Outwardly, they are polished and professional, but hours of laughter, secret handshakes and gifts exchanged show those around them that underneath this showstopping, neatly groomed movement are just some guys who love music, one another and their fans.
HOW DID BTS BREAK through the culture barrier overseaS?
The answer lies in a combination of factors, and most of them are about change: the changing nature of K-pop’s studio culture and the way “idols” are produced; changing depictions of masculinity in South Korea; changing ranges of acceptable expression in K-pop; and, above all, the approach BTS has taken to building its fan base and interacting with its fans.
But to understand all this change, we have to back up a few years to understand how K-pop became the regimented industry it is today — and how BTS subverts that regimen.
BTS is the product of an industry insider who wanted to create a new kind of idol
K-pop began on April 11, 1992, when a hip-hop trio called Seo Taiji and Boys performed in a talent show on a national South Korean network. Seo Taiji and Boys were innovators who challenged norms around musical styles, song topics, fashion, and censorship, which was unprecedented for a culture whose musical production had spent the past few decades subjected to strict government oversight. But it wouldn’t last.
In the ’90s, three powerhouse music studios began cultivating what would become known as idol groups. Assembled through auditions and years of grooming within an intense studio culture — the highly regimented system of idol group production in Korean and Japanese music studios — idol groups are polished to perfection, designed to present the very highest standards of beauty, dance, and musicality. Children who enter these studios spend most of their lives enduring rigorous training to become part of an idol group. If they’re chosen, the studio exerts a huge amount of control, not only over the songs they sing and the way their band is marketed but also over their daily lives.
Idol groups have come to dominate the Korean music industry, but there are well-known toxic and abusive elements of studio culture — as revealed by the recent death by suicide of Shinee artist Kim Jong-hyun. Studios systematically ironed out most of the personal expression and socially conscious music that Seo Taiji was originally known for — after all, it’s hard to express yourself when you’re contractually forbidden to have a personal life. Typically, idols only feel free to open up about their struggles after their studio careers end.
It was within this environment that a man named Bang Si-hyuk began to quietly build a different kind of studio, and to cultivate the band that would become BTS. A successful songwriter and music producer, Bang was nicknamed “Hitman” for writing a string of popular songs, from g.o.d.’s “One Candle” in 1999 to T-ara’s “Like the First Time” a decade later. He worked as an arranger and producer with the studio JYP until 2005, when he left to form his own Big Hit Entertainment.
But Bang also struggled with his position within the industry. As a studio owner, he confessed to insecurity about his work and said he admired singers who could express their personalities in their music. This combination of ideas — the honest musical expression of one’s creative anxieties — would become a crucial element of BTS.
In 2010, Bang began to assemble a group of teens for a group he called the Bulletproof Boy Scouts. This would go on to become Bangtan Boys, then BTS, but the ingredients of their success were inherent in the original name. Bang intended “bulletproof” to function as a celebration of the kids’ toughness and ability to withstand the pressures of the world. But he also wanted the band to be able to be sincere and genuine — not immaculate idols groomed amid studio culture, but real boys who shared their authentic personalities and talents with the world.
This approach is quite different from the normal studio approach to idoldom, wherein idols are trained to be pleasant but mild — to be blank slates upon which viewers can project their fantasies. By contrast, Bang wanted BTS to be full of figures that audiences could relate to. In a 2018 interview with the South Korean newspaper JoongAng, he described how he originally thought of BTS as consisting of gentle, sympathetic idols who could mentor their fans:
To create that band, Bang had to shake up the established precedents for how idol groups are treated. BTS wouldn’t have strict contracts and curfews, and they’d be allowed to discuss the pressures of stardom. Their lyrics would be open about the cultural pressure placed on Korean teens to excel and do well and to repress their anxieties. In short, they would be frank, honest, and natural.
A conscious style combined with socially conscious messaging
BTS launched the “Love Myself” campaign to end violence against kids with Unicef in 2017. Love Myself
“We came together with a common dream to write, dance and produce music that reflects our musical backgrounds as well as our life values of acceptance, vulnerability and being successful,” said BTS’s leader, RM, in a 2017 interview with Time. There are six main ways BTS breaks with established precedent for K-pop boy bands to carry out this mission:
They frequently write their own songs and lyrics.
Their lyrics are socially conscious and especially attuned to describing the pressures of modern teen life in South Korea.
They create and manage most of their own social media presence.
They aren’t signed to “slave contracts,” nor do their contracts have the grueling restrictions of other idol groups.
They tend to focus on marketing entire albums rather than individual singles.
They talk openly about the struggles and anxieties of their career instead of presenting an extremely polished image at all times.
It should be noted that most of these elements have been present in numerous other recent K-pop groups — most notably Big Bang, which probably influenced BTS more than any other K-pop group. What Big Hit Entertainment did, however, was to systematize these elements in BTS, and market them hard.
In the earliest videos of the band, from the months before their 2013 debut, the members were styled as young and sweetly innocent, maintaining the common “schoolboy” concept of male K-pop idol groups. When the group officially launched in June 2013, however, it was with a hard style paying homage to old-school gangster rap. Their first single, “No More Dream,” was an ode to teen apathy, a rebellious rejection of Korean traditionalism.
And it wasn’t exactly popular: Early audience reactions included a lot of eye-rolling at what was viewed as a superimposed gangster image that the band hadn’t earned. And while the band was clearly leaning on the confessional lyrical apathy of Seo Taiji and his early successors, it all seemed contrived rather than real.
A K-pop commentator who goes by the mononym Stephen ran a weekly podcast, This Week in K-Pop, from 2013 to 2017, which chronicled new releases in K-pop and inevitably documented the rise of BTS. But Stephen and his co-hosts were initially skeptical of the band. “Now K-pop has faux hip-hop undertones everywhere,” he said. “But in 2013 there wasn’t really that much, other than Big Bang. So when [BTS] came out with this very in-your-face, ‘We’re hip-hop’ image, it felt a little silly.”
Stephen pointed out that K-pop in general suffers from this problem. “K-pop really likes the look and attitude of hip-hop, but not too much. It’s very surface-level: hip-hop as a culture rather than as a musical genre.”
BTS’s climb to success, then, involved the band finding a way to communicate that this confessional image was real. They did this by mixing their openness on social media with blunt and honest lyrics — and owning their status as an underdog group battling to succeed against other bands who came from established studios with larger budgets. They spoke openly of the influence of Big Bang, a hip-hop group that’s also known for its socially conscious messaging. And they covered Seo Taiji’s ”Come Back Home”:
In essence, they found a way to imbue their musical style with substance. This led to well-reviewed, pointedly personal works like their three-album series The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, which deftly mixed “theater [and] autobiography.”
Their two most successful singles from this period managed to neatly encompass this new direction. “I Need U” was a refreshing, personalizing step away from hip-hop toward an R&B sound, while “Dope” openly celebrated the endless grind of their lives: “Over half of the day, we drown in work / Even if our youth rots in the studio / Thanks to that, we’re closer to success.”
“Dope” also drew attention to the band’s talent in a major way: It was the moment South Korea realized that these boys could dance.
The BTS ARMY is real, and it is mighty
BTS’s fans — who collectively gained the nickname ARMY for their well-organized and loyal response to the group — responded to that confessional strategy so well that by 2015, tickets for the band’s sold-out limited US tour were reportedly being scalped for more than $10,000. Tickets for their current sold-out tour are in high demand, with an average price of $452, the most expensive of the summer.
BTS’s international fandom was also hard at work making sure the band had a chance to break through. Throughout 2017, fans systematically bombarded North American retailers like Walmart, Target, and Amazon with pleas to stock BTS’s new albums — and then promptly pushed the albums up the sales charts. The ARMY was so mighty that by the time BTS made their US television debut at the American Music Awards in 2017, the audience was treated to a time-honored K-pop spectacle: an auditorium ringing with fan chants.
The international BTS fandom has worked to mainstream K-pop as few other factors have. On Tumblr, the internet’s unofficial home for fandom communities, BTS and its members reign supreme, recalling the vast reach of One Direction in its heyday. In April 2018, Tumblr decided to stop breaking out K-pop as a separate category in its popular weekly Fandom Metrics, an official Tumblr product that measures the popularity of fandoms and related subtopics across the site. By merging K-pop with English-language groups, the account could more accurately reflect the relative popularity of K-pop bands to their Western counterparts.
A lot of this may be hype, but it’s important for K-pop’s legacy
Then again, not everything about BTS is a phenomenon. Understanding its rise to the top also means acknowledging that it’s not alone in its class: It’s succeeded and grown alongside other bands that are also innovating and reaching new levels of international success. Collectively, this K-pop generation is rapidly changing the conversation and pushing the limits of what K-pop is allowed to be.
Talk about a paradigm shifter, K-pop style!
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Source:
https://www.vox.com/culture - BTS, the band that changed K-pop, explained (The key to BTS’s success: emotional resonance, sincerity, and an ARMY of fans). By Aja Romano)
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