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PREMIUM
The Korean Beatles: how BTS are changing language of kpop
Adam White
7 AUGUST 2019 8:44 PM
'Bring the Soul: The Movie', is out in 300+ UK cinemas Wednesdayfor one night only.
This article has an estimated read time of nine minutes
Call BTS the new John, Paul, George and Ringo and they will be polite if dismissive. “It is a bit of a burden to be calledThe Beatlesof the 21st century,” 26-year-old band member Suga told journalists at a pre-concert press conference this weekend. “We want to be the BTS of the 21st century.” But the parallels are certainly valid.
Not only the most successful boy band in the world but the recipients of previously unthinkable international admiration akin to four boys from Liverpool unexpectedly becoming world-famous icons, BTS are a South Korean pop group of singers, dancers, lyricists and record producers, all in their early to mid-twenties and as surreally handsome as they are quick-footed on stage.
This weekend they became the first Korean act to sell outtwo nights at Wembley Stadium– putting them into an exclusive bracket that tends to, at the bare minimum, be occupied by acts who sing in English, or at least those who have already become household names.
A seven-man hit factory with a mobilised, internet-driven fanbase known asthe Army, BTS occupy a powerful position in modern pop, reflective of a progressive new era of music that crosses borders, genres and language, something all the more striking considering the eagerness with which nations are building walls. But in truth, little embodies the awe-inspiring power BTS possess than in moments when they’re not even there.
Their power lies in the sweaty anguish that punctures the air as soon as the group venture backstage mid-concert, or the chants of “B-T-S! B-T-S!” that fill thegaps that appear whenever the beat drops, as if on command. And it’s in the nervous tension backstage, where publicists appear even more anxious than they normally do. Anyone who has been in the near vicinity of a celebrity wrangler will recognise the sight – all frayed nerves, hands clutching phones and eyes darting from left to right. But BTS, imminently due to arrive for a press conference, have created an altogether different energy, which has somehow increased the temperature in the room tenfold.
The band have their own Korean publicists, for one, who are stern as opposed to frazzled and who wield an omniscientawareness of their client’s movements that their British counterparts could never begin to compete with. The language barrier only adds to the confusion. There will be a translator, the press is told. Questions about the band’s mental health may not please the Korean PR, so they may need to be reworked. BTS themselves will walk around the room during the junket, mingling with the press. Or maybe they won’t, another publicist counters.Everyone appears to be comedically on edge.
But in the middle of the gathered journalists, some from British publications and others having been flown in from Korea, is a little girl of around eight or nine, brought along as a plus one by a man who is presumably her father. And by the looks of things, she’s the one shining beacon of genuine giddiness in the room, the only one not tainted by press fatigue, nor drained by the heat. And all of those frantic PRs are mere blurs to her, the girl’s eyes instead locked on both entryways to the backstage conference room, knowing that seven young men within minutes will enter and bless her with an anecdote that will make her the most popular girl in school next week, and rescue her from awkward silences for years to come. For BTS are to her generation of youngsters what Duran Duran, the Spice Girls and One Direction were to those in the decades that came before her.
When BTS finally appear, it is this girl who proves to have had the right attitude all along. In person, BTS are remarkably calm and collected, with hair immaculately tousled and each dressed in matching Thom Browne suits that feel more “X Factor hopeful singing Iris for their spot in the final” than the streetwear or chalky pastel shirts the band regularly sport on stage.
'BTS is about charging people’s batteries'CREDIT: BIG HIT ENTERTAINMENT
Their ease is apparent in the resulting Q&A. There are cheesy lines about malfunctioning microphones, snatches of what appear to be private in-jokes, and a palpable sense of camaraderie and chemistry between each vocalist. And that question about mental health, or rather the importance of speaking openly about self-doubt or insecurity through lyrics and interviews, ends up not being awkwardly evaded in the way some in the room had presumed it would.
“We didn’t have this attitude like we were gonna change the industry or change the world or influence millions of people,” answers RM, the group’s only fluent English speaker and subsequently their de facto leader when overseas. “We just knew to tell our stories and to express them through performance. As time has gone by, fans have started to tell us that our message and performances have changed their lives and inspired them, and it’s what makes us keep going, through the hardships and ironies of this industry… BTS is about charging people’s batteries. [But] it’s like we’re charging each other.”
It is a good answer – vague but still satisfying, one that can be interpreted as saying both everything and nothing at the same time. BTS are very good at that kind of thing, and it results in a press conference that is charming if largely inconsequential. They’re all very excited to play at Wembley Stadium, they explain; Suga, who moonlights as a producer for BTS and other K-pop artists, recalls watching clips of Live Aid with his brother and dreaming of one day performing there; Coldplay are at the top of their dream British collaborations list.
If you weren’t a BTS fan, there wouldn’t appear to be much separating the group from their boy band predecessors. But there has always been something intriguingly revolutionary about BTS, their lyrics often rooted in themes of self-acceptance, social progress and mental health, with the band’s members each possessing a degree of creative freedom that has been relatively new for the famously regimented and rule-driven K-pop industry.
And it’s impressive even before listeners spot the brilliantly maddening lyrical nods to everything from Jungian philosophy and Herman Hesse to Albert Camus, causing BTS albums to resemble complex mythologies with expansive subplots for the Army to puzzle over.
Imagine Taylor Swift’s obsession with “Easter eggs”, only with loftier end goals than photographs of her cat. Case in point: the prominent use of porcelain masks and cult-like robes in the video for 2018 single Fake Love, which has led to vibrant discussions onBTS fan forumsabout its relation toStanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and what the parallels could be saying about pop star personas, double lives and fandom itself.
Truthfully speaking, BTS are far trickier and interesting than a stadium-filling boy band at all need to be, accommodating the creative ambitions of their membersand a fanbase that is appealingly diverse and eager to be challenged. As withOne Directionbefore them, there is a tendency in mainstream press circles to underestimate BTS because of their young and female admirers, a cultural cliché that renders anything particularly loved by young women somehow inferior or inconsequential – and it runs far deeper than pop music. But it also does a disservice to BTS’s widespread appeal.
At the first of the band’s two nights at Wembley Stadium this weekend, a large proportion of the gathered crowd of 60,000 were undeniably young women, a mixture of colours and ethnicities and all clutching orb-like glow sticks known as Army Bombs and screaming like the natural descendants of Directioners and the teenage girls who sparked Beatlemania.
But there were others, too. Young boys could be seen haphazardly mimicking the group’s high-energy dance routines. Pride flags wer swaying in the air. A significant number of adults, both with and without children in tow (it should also be noted that there were far more parents having fun than there were parents desperately eyeing the exits).
Whereas boy bands that came before them more often than not had clearly defined audiences, from the decision to push One Direction explicitly to young girls via pseudo self-esteem anthems like What Makes You Beautiful to the early Take That output that was exhaustingly marketed to gay men, there is an atypical universality to BTS’s appeal.It is of a kind that means few will be able to resist.
It helps that so much of their material hops effortlessly between typically disparate genres, transitioning from slinky Weeknd-style R&B to bright Carly Rae Jepsen pop and, in weirder moments, nu metal that wouldn’t be entirely out of place on a Limp Bizkit album.
And it could be argued that it’s all savvy marketing. BTS records are cannily shaped to warrant appearances on as many different Spotify playlists as possible. There is an undeniable air of Western trend-chasing to their most recent album, April’s Map of the Soul: Persona, with itsEd Sheeranco-writes and collaborations with Halsey. But it also speaks to how each member of BTS has managed to carve out their own niche within the band’s much larger infrastructure, and how easily the band have made what could be quite baffling sonic detours feel organic.
In the Western press at least, this separate-but-together arrangement, most obvious on stage by the seven solo performances that decorate the setlist, hasn’t always been written about kindly. In fact, few outlets will have avoided at least one sensationalist piece of conjecture describing K-pop band members as if they are prison inmates, trapped in vaguely abusive relationships with managers, agents and publicists that they could never hope to escape from.
In fairness, there arecertainly verified horror stories out there, from the punishing K-pop boot camps in which aspiring stars (many as young as 10) are forced to compete against one another in classes dedicated to singing, dancing and modelling, to tales of pop stars being contractually forced into extreme diets and plastic surgery to achieve a desirable look.
BTS performing at Wembley
So rife are urban legends of K-pop exploitation that, up close with BTS, you can’t help but search the band’s eyes for signs of secret trauma. “Is Suga’s slightly blank expression a product of an unbearable workload foisted on him by nefarious management types?” you find yourself asking – before recognising how quickly you have decided to project your own narrative onto young men entirely able to articulate their own feelings. “I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about performing at Wembley,” Suga eventually says, allaying any fears. He just needed a good nap.
It is not an enormous reach to suggest that the mainstream media’s endless regurgitation of “the dark side” of K-pop is a means to “other” a culture that is visually different than our own. Particularly when there’s truly not much of a difference between the abuses that occur in the Korean music industry and within the halls of Western labels and recording studios.
Wasn’t the Mickey Mouse Club, the Disney-backed birthplace of Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, more or lessAmerica’s version of a pre-teen K-pop boot camp? With an equal amount of unnecessary risk when it came to producing stars who would go on to shape pop culture as much as they were broken by it?
BTS in New York
And even outside of the more overt cautionary tales of pre-teen pop stars struggling as adults are similar tales of ritualistic training methods and terrifying stage parents determined to turn their tiny, preternaturally talented offspring into icons. Beyoncé may not have, at least publicly, experienced the personal struggles of some of her late-Nineties peers, but her childhood certainly wasn’t much different from those raised for fame in South Korea, the star forced into vigorous and arguably heavy-handed pop star training when her age was still in single digits. Who can forgetthat infamous rumourof she and her Destiny’s Child bandmates training their supersized voices by running full-speed on treadmills while simultaneously belting out R&B classics?
BTS, for what it’s worth, have a remarkably clean track record for endlessly trailed superstars, with a spotless rap sheet that make S Club 7’s early-Noughties dalliance with marijuana look comparatively dangerous. But they’ve also achieved a level of success that has made them slightly fearless in other ways, particularly when it comes to their corporate overlords.
Map of the Soul: Persona is full of references to the band’s disinterest in weightless pop (“Born as a K-pop idol and reborn as an artist,” Suga raps in album closer Dionysus), and their awareness of putting clear boundaries between the personas presented to the public and those that exist behind closed doors (In Intro: Persona, RM sings, “The ‘me’ that I want myself to be, the ‘me’ that people want me to be… the ‘me’ that’s smiling, the ‘me’ that’s sometimes in tears.”)
And during their pre-concert press conference, RM spoke of the band’s psychological dependence on their stage names (he is actually Kim Nam Joon, J-Hope is Jung Ho Seok, and so forth). With a characteristic blend of philosophy-student existentialism and legitimate insight, he spoke of the importance they hold in terms of survival.
“When you grow up and when the night comes and the sun is down, a man’s shadow becomes longer,” he began. “So if my height gets higher, the shadow becomes longer. Sometimes it is too much and too hard and too big for us, but to live and survive as an artist and a human and a person who trusts and loves themselves, we need to be friends with the shadows. Our new album is called Persona. I have my persona, RM, and I have my other persona, Kim Nam Joon, a normal 25 year old in Korea, and we have to keep those two personas and two names alive.”
'Sometimes it is too much and too hard and too big for us': BTS
Whether you’re inclined to embrace such wisdom or roll your eyes, it is a statement that speaks to a thoughtfulness that goes beyond the traditional expectations of pop stardom, something further reflected in the energy BTS bring to their concerts, the elaborate mythologies of their output, and the empathy and introspection that has made them directly attuned to the wants and needs of pop fans today.
So often negatively framed as a niche act, or a bubblegum hit factory propped up by a vaguely sinister faraway entertainment corporation, BTS have evolved into a quietly radical industry all their own, breaking down barriers, rules and everything we thought we knew about international pop stardom, with little but streaks of tears and the echoes of screaming fans left behind in their wake. It feels like the right time to brush up on your Korean.
Telegraph Media Group Limited 2019
Macam mana acik blh termiss write up ni . Dah penah share ke kat sini?
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Post time 12-11-2019 03:59 PM
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"BTS fans focus their energy into making something positive for bts" 
