Blood Sweat & Tears, Fire, Save ME, DNA, MIC Drop, Fake Love, Boy With Luv
In no universe circa 2010 would any lay pop fan have predicted that 2019 would see the coronation of a Korean septet who finally pushed that country’s style of hyperkinetic pop music to a world who didn’t know they wanted it. Or who had only had Gangnam Style.
With One Direction splintering and solo acts cheaper to run, only a few major-label acts like Why Don’t We and Brockhampton were able to bring a cool edge to the boyband market with their own smouldering starlets. Over in Korea, market penetration was dominated by familiar faces like Bigbang and Girls’ Generation, whose music will be discussed in a future essay; like One Direction, however, the key factor in BTS’s success seemed to be intense fan engagement.
I read a review of the 2018 London show where my eyes lingered on the cost of some plastic Bluetooth-enabled torches. These were savvy businessmen selling a product that no Westerner see without hopping on a plane and going to East Asia. Someone is writing a book on boybands and the Korean interpretation of the art form will certainly form a key part.
In June 2019, while browsing HMV’s dedicated section for the band, I met some European fans who had come to London to see one of the two gigs at Wembley Stadium. At 31, I told them, I was too old to understand it but they seemed attracted to their cuteness and their web presence. In those two London shows, and around the world, BTS gathered the next generation of tweens and teens to sing or rap along to Korean love songs. Their big US moment was a sustained campaign in spring 2019 where they popped up on Saturday Night Live and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. For the latter performance they played the exact room The Beatles had played in 1964 when millions of lives were changed and a thousand rock bands were born.
It was testament to the modern era that many viewers would already be familiar with seven boys all described by Colbert as ‘The Cute One’. RM, the rapper who had learned English by watching Friends, was the band’s spokesman when they did the talk-show circuit; member Jimin excitably told Jimmy Fallon that their names sounded similar. It endeared him to me – I see what the girls I’d chatted to were on about.
Aside from being cute, no boyband had ever danced so hard in the US. One Direction famously didn’t dance at all, while the 1990s boybands like New Kids on the Block, Blackstreet and *NSYNC were by turns cute and gangsta. None of their dance moves looked like hard work, though, as BTS’s did. Impressively, RM and Suga of BTS were rappers who, by the rules of K-Pop, had to take part in the dance lines, while the singers – V, Jimin, Jungkook, J-Hope and Jin – also had to rap. What with all the TV appearances, including on their dedicated V-Live channel, they had to act, too.
Put through their paces by choreographers while living together – all in one room in their early days – Bangtan Boys aka BTS put out a steady stream of product from their TV debut, which came a year after formation, in 2014. They used online marketing to their advantage, dropping ‘bombs’ onto social media and staying in touch with their fans, christened BTS ARMY. These bombs mixed behind-the-scenes footage and dance routines, proving that K-Pop is far more than the recorded song but a journey.
Their initial goal was to win one of the many talent shows on Korean television, which was a tough sell when they were products of the independent Big Hit group rather than one of the three big groups with all the money to develop and market top acts. As they made more TV appearances, the seven-piece connected with their audience, stopped off in Austrasia, Europe and South America and, significantly, pushed a lot of recorded output onto their rabid fanbase.
Three EPs packed with intros, skits and outros did well in Korea and Japan, as well as anyone clued into the K-Pop scene in the diaspora. Unlike One Direction’s debut album, the two main rappers and singer J-Hope (a tremendously talented dancer) had credits on Dark & Wild, which gave them enough material to play concerts in Korean arenas and crank out music videos which have impressive viewing figures on Youtube.
Fire and Save ME were from another EP, this time from 2016. Like The Beatles in the 1960s, fans were not starved of new songs but, this being the 2010s, they could instantly become part of the band’s journey by watching videos and sharing them on various social networks. Fire (612m views as of October 2019) is a perfect song for a sync opportunity, with the chorus repeating the song’s title four times and a pre-chorus of la-las before Suga and RM rap about being fearless. In the video a car drops to its demise in a warehouse while the guys do their dancing then jump around and pose like a hiphop posse, hopefully satisfying the rappers’ artistic ambitions. K-Pop is truly visual music and every new video is an event; we will definitely see this in the West more often in the 2020s.
Save ME is a softer song where the non-rappers can shine. Over a triplet-y rhythm and sultry chords, there’s a mix of Korean and English: ‘I need your love before I fall’ goes the chorus, which is followed by a squelchy sound and an increase in the tempo. This is a great piece of pop music in the contemporary style. No wonder BTS were doing well on those TV competitions.
The 2016 album Wings came in four packages containing different photos in each one. It was a concept album influenced by Herman Hesse and dealt with weighty themes: adult love, personal growth, good and evil. The lead single, with another glossy video, was Blood Sweat & Tears, which opens with a choir and strings before a catchy chorus with huge production comes in. You can make out the word ‘chocolate’ in English as they sing of love and stuff in Korean.
DNA and MIC Drop both come from the 2017 EP Love Yourself: Her, part of a trilogy of EPs. These broke them to an American audience. DNA boasts the band’s most-viewed video with 848m watchers; there are only 51m people living in South Korea. The song itself opens with a whistling hook before adding some One Direction-type guitar lines and beats over which the band rap about love and stuff. The production is as good as any Western dance track.
MIC Drop, one of two tunes BTS performed on Saturday Night Live in 2019, was remixed by renowned DJ Steve Aoki, himself of Asian descent, who added a flute-type synth line. The beats thudded as the boys dropped in some English words (‘Billboard…worldwide…How you dare’, ‘Haters gonna hate, players gonna play’ and indeed the title of the song) in a diss track, showing their awareness of the hiphop genre. The song’s video is irresistible (570m views and counting), with the boys never keeping still and dancing around various indoor and outdoor settings.
All three of the above tracks were collected onto an album for the Japanese market called Face Yourself, with all tracks sung in Japanese. In Korea, they were winning Best Group awards while their fan ARMY started hashtags on social media. The boys, who spoke of the pressures of being in the band, also partnered with UNICEF to campaign to stop violence against young people. By this stage they lived in three rooms between them.
The song Fake Love made such a dent in the UK that one contestant performed it on The X Factor on primetime TV. I often think how jealous Simon Cowell must be of the Korean production line for talent, while his own Syco line offers acts with diminishing returns. Fake Love, a hopelessly devoted love song, has an enormous, direct chorus over minimal production, along with ‘love you so bad’ in English.
Love Yourself: Tear (rhymes with ‘beer’, from which Fake Love was taken) was a number one album in America, meaning BTS could no longer be just a cult favourite of teenagers. Even a CBS reporter who visited Seoul in April 2019 acknowledged to an imagined audience of parents: ‘These phenoms may not be familiar.’ Their fans are ‘enthusiastic consumers’, as American viewers witness plush toys and Barbie dolls (‘$20 a pop’) dedicated to each member.
Fans put up subway signs to commemorate the members’ birthdays; someone alert fans of Harry Styles. Sombrely the CBS interview notes the mandatory military service that will interrupt the momentum of the band, as when Elvis became a GI soldier. Harry Styles has not had this problem.
Fans around the world seem to understand the lyrics (that’s a wise use of Internet surfing) and are able to chant along phonetically if they have not learned Korean,. Meanwhile Western acts are keen to jump on the bandwagon. Lil Nas X released Seoul Town Road with RM, while Halsey sang the hook on BTS’s song Boy With Luv, the single to promote Map of the Soul: Purpose, their 2019 EP.
That song is packed with hooks like the best Western pop song, contains raps from both RM and Suga and breaks down to a sweet rapping bit from some of the singers. In a novel twist, the Westerner is reduced to being a featured artist, finessing the indelible ‘ooh-muh-muh-mai’ hook and having some fun while extending her own personal brand in the Far East (Halsey’s new album comes out in January 2020). The video to Boy With Luv has had 580m Youtube views in six months; it’s full of colour and dancing and sexy looks, and is the pinnacle of the six-year rise in plain sight of the biggest vocal harmony group in the world.
And, in case you’re wondering, BTS are so much better than Gangnam Style.