BTS Made the Cover of Time. How Did a Korean Boy Band Get This Much Influence?

BTS has no backing from one of Korea's three big entertainment companies, and its success may have something to do with that.

For more than a year now, the Korean boy band Bangtan Sonyeondan (BTS) has kept turning up in the news for making history.

In May 2017, BTS beat Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande to the Billboard Music Award for Top Social Media Artist, ending Bieber's six-year hold on the prize. In May this year, the album Love Yourself: Tear became the first K-pop record to enter the Billboard 200 at No. 1; three months later, Love Yourself: Her became the second K-pop record to top that chart.

The group's influence reaches past entertainment. Its seven members — Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V and Jung Kook, all in their early twenties — last month became the first Korean act to speak at the United Nations. Last week BTS made the cover of Time, under the line "The Next Generation of Leaders."

Time wrote: like the Beatles and One Direction before it, BTS offers a warm look and hooks you can hum, and it carries on the dance lineage of New Kids on the Block and *NSYNC. But BTS has also broken through boundaries: it is the first Korean group to sell out a stadium show in the United States, and it got there without pandering to Western listeners.

BTS is not the first Korean act to travel the world. BigBang, EXO and Wonder Girls had already carried the sound of K-pop abroad. But BTS has eclipsed those predecessors, and the way it got there is stranger.

BTS has no backing from Korea's three big entertainment companies. A small company built it instead. That unlucky start shaped the path in some ways: more freedom to write, heavy use of social media, music willing to cross lines, and the fiercely loyal fans known as ARMY.

How Did a Small Company Turn the Tables?

SM, YG and JYP, the three giants, have controlled who speaks for the Korean entertainment industry for years. They packaged heavyweight idol groups: TVXQ, Super Junior, EXO, Wonder Girls, BigBang. Next to them, BTS's agency, Big Hit Entertainment, was a nobody. Bloomberg reported that Big Hit's revenue in 2016 was $30 million. SM's revenue that year was about $300 million.

Big Hit was founded in 2005 by the music producer Bang Si-hyuk. Before that, Bang was a producer at JYP, where he helped make a run of hits for artists such as g.o.d and Rain.

In Korea's idol culture, the big companies make hard demands of their artists — over the songs, over the packaging, even over daily life. Good looks and lavish stage shows are standard for boy bands and girl groups, but that glory on stage is bought at a high price. Reports of companies exploiting their artists are common, and the slave contracts signed between company and artist have caused one controversy after another.

Big Hit chose differently. It gave BTS a bigger share of the money and more freedom to create; the group's rappers write lyrics alongside the company's in-house writing team. That RM can release a mixtape under his own name is another sign of it.

RM was the first BTS member Bang Si-hyuk found. He was 16 then, a newcomer in the underground rap scene. Bang, won over, signed the young rapper — who had a real shot at Korea's SKY schools, shorthand for Seoul National University, Korea University and Yonsei University — under the name Rap Monster. In BTS's early days the hip-hop in the music was obvious. Besides RM, Suga and J-Hope can both rap.

Western listeners already know K-pop, in large part because K-pop absorbed Western pop, rock, hip-hop and electronic music as it grew. But in Western eyes it is arguable whether Korean hip-hop counts as hip-hop at all: some find it shallow, and some read the blackface that turns up on Korean entertainment shows as a piece of the racist tradition.

Style alone was not enough, then. BTS had to go further to prove it meant hip-hop seriously. The group opened an account on SoundCloud, a platform favored by electronic and hip-hop listeners, and set out to rap about something. In 2014 the members flew to the United States to learn from the hip-hop veterans Coolio and Warren G.

"By early 2015, BTS had already put in more effort, earlier than its peers, courting Western K-pop fans," Jakob Dorof, a journalist who covers K-pop, told Fader.

Dorof's version looks like a contradiction of Time's. But after that first stretch of feeling its way, BTS did show more and more of itself, and more willingness to cross lines. Having used familiar elements to open the market early, it was the unfamiliar side of BTS that people noticed afterward.

Slick music videos and live shows that carry a room are a K-pop tradition, absorbing enough to pull in an audience that speaks no Korean. BTS kept that tradition in both sound and image. This year it became the first Korean act to play Citi Field, home of the New York Mets; the tickets sold out 10 minutes after they went on sale.

The New York Times wrote of the show: the albums show how hard it is to handle the increasingly mottled and complicated sounds BTS takes on, from Chainsmokers-style electropop to 1990s R&B and hip-hop. As singers and rappers the members are gifted; as dancers and performers they are quick and fluid. On the evidence of this show, they make the execution look relaxed.

The songs are what separate BTS from its predecessors, and to some degree what carried the group out of the K-pop niche and into international influence. Say K-pop and people think of love songs and song-and-dance. Korea supports its music industry strongly — it put money into reviving pop music in 2009 — and its artists often appear at government events, yet political subjects and political material almost never show up in K-pop. BTS's work broke through on depth: it took on the struggle of growing up, which is rare here, and it did not avoid politics either.

The group's first single, "No More Dream," urged kids to break the grip of society's ideas about education. "Blood Sweat & Tears" took its inspiration from Demian, by the German writer and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse. The video for this year's single "Spring Day" was inspired by "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," the Hugo Award-winning short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, which describes a utopian city whose beautiful illusion is paid for by a group of imprisoned children. Most people look the other way; a few choose to leave Omelas. BTS's song has been read as a memorial to the victims of the Sewol ferry disaster.

"Take my favorite, 'Spring Day' — it sings exactly the doubts about life I've had since I was six or seven. It turns out I'm not alone," one Finnish BTS fan said.

That state of mind is what Bang Si-hyuk was aiming at when he built BTS. Talking about the group, people at the company decided that what people needed more was the kind of hero who lends a shoulder to lean on, even without saying a word.

It reaches young people under pressure, naturally enough. The members have in fact spoken publicly about their own anxiety and depression, a subject many Korean artists only raise once a career is over. In 2017 BTS started the "Love Myself" campaign with UNICEF to end violence against children and teenagers. In its UN speech the group asked people to accept their real selves and say so out loud.

RM has even spoken up on LGBT rights, still close to taboo in Korea. In 2013 he retweeted "Same Love," a song widely read as an argument for gay rights, and commented: "A song about homosexuality. I'd heard it before but didn't know the lyrics. Once I understood them, I liked the song twice as much."

The latest news is that BTS has re-signed with Big Hit for seven years, taking the partnership to 2026.

Social Media Deserves the Credit Again

In March 2016, Twitter turned 10. In a Forbes ranking of the artists mentioned most on the platform over the previous month, BTS came first, ahead of Kanye West and Justin Bieber. Its activity on Twitter also won the group its own emoji, which no K-pop group had been given before. According to Guinness World Records, BTS, with more than 16 million followers, was the most-engaged-with music group on Twitter in 2018.

Suga told the BBC: "I think we're very lucky because we were born at the right time. Without social media, we couldn't have been this successful."

Because Big Hit had few resources in the early days and could not get at television, the most effective channel for exposure, video sites and social networks became the ground it fought on. The company also placed no limits on the artists: express yourself honestly, and that was enough.

Big Hit made all sorts of idol variety shows for BTS and put them on video sites. An idol variety show is a reality program built around the members of a particular group. It was both how people first got to know the artists and a look at another side of their lives. Still of school age then, BTS came across as warm and funny, with plenty of crude, blue material — which is how the Bulletproof Boy Scouts, the meaning of Bangtan Sonyeondan, picked up the nickname "Bangtan Dirty Boys."

There was also a video series called Bangtan Bomb, a mini-drama that used a few minutes of footage to show the members' lives on stage and off. The format became a case study in promoting artists: Wanna One, the idol group that debuted last year, uses a mini-drama too.

Next to the fragments of Bangtan Bomb, the YouTube documentary series BTS: Burn the Stage is fuller; the trip to the United States to learn hip-hop is in it. Together with what goes up on Instagram and Twitter, all of this makes a group that was already never out of the news feel present everywhere.

After word got out that BTS had re-signed with Big Hit, the hashtag #7MoreYearsOfBTS went viral on Twitter.

What Did ARMY Do?

ARMY is the name for BTS's fans, an English acronym for Adorable Representative M.C for Youth. This crowd, which RM called the best fans in the world in his UN speech, was crucial to the group's rise.

Even by the standards of Korean fandom, ARMY's powers are startling. BTS's fans in the United States ran a campaign of phone calls to radio stations across the country asking for BTS songs. When BTS performed "DNA" at the AMAs, the fan chants from the floor were loud and in time. More than once, ARMYs have paid for ads in Times Square in support of the group. The average ticket for the 2018 North American tour cost $452, more than 1.5 times the price of an Eagles ticket.

Given the fervor and the follow-through, the second meaning of ARMY fits.

Idol groups with fan clubs and fan sites are nothing unusual. Fans translating and spreading news about their idols, or making their own videos to pick apart a music video or a lyric, is routine. But without the early evangelism of its core fans, BTS, short on promotional resources and channels, would have had a hard time reaching where it is now.

JREKML, who makes reaction videos on YouTube, is a good example. His videos of himself watching BTS videos — eyes wide, mouth open, expressions exaggerated — pulled a lot of people into BTS. He has more than 1.2 million subscribers.

JREKML was even noticed and acknowledged by BTS. At a concert in the United States, the group picked him out of the audience; J-Hope and Jimin pointed at him and smiled, and J-Hope shouted, "I know you!" JREKML shouted back, "I know you too!"

BTS did not debut with a silver spoon in its mouth, and for a while the industry did not think much of it. Starting as an underdog and climbing toward the top is the shape of the group's career, and that shape gave fans a collective identity, which added to their cohesion and their drive.

At the Melon Music Awards in November 2016, BTS won Best Album. When the members went up to collect it, EXO fans in the hall booed at them to get off the stage. Afterward, ARMYs registered multiple Twitter accounts to vote for BTS at the Asian Music Awards that followed.

"Everyone else is a bloodsucking demon beast; we're the Chosen Children and their Digimon," Li Zan, 24, told QDaily.

Li Zan did not take part in that vote, but looking back she describes the mood as shared outrage against a common enemy. At a later Asian Music Awards ceremony, sitting in the front row, she watched J-Hope make a finger heart at her from the stage — and quit her dull job the next day. "That was when I realized life should be lived in moments like that, when the adrenaline surges."

After falling for BTS she took up Korean, and later saw the group play in Seoul, Hong Kong and Fukuoka; in Kitakyushu, in Fukuoka Prefecture, she shook J-Hope's hand.

It was the work of ARMYs like Li Zan that let BTS break Bieber's six-year hold on the Billboard Music Award for Top Social Media Artist in 2017. BTS took more than 300 million fan votes at the 2017 Billboard Music Awards, a record in the award's history.

Cover image: Wiki Commons