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It was, apparently, a grave insult, resulting in 48 hours of near-constant tweets sent by fans attacking my professional and personal integrity, and even complaint letters to this paper’s managing editor. In 2019, an article I wrote about the band’s transformational effect on pop music failed to mention all seven members by name in the headline - purely for brevity, I promise - referring to some as “other members”. Like any large group where emotions run high, things can occasionally turn sour. It all speaks to the phenomenal power and passion of the group’s international fandom, collectively known as the BTS Army.
The milestones kept coming - in September last year, the Guinness World Records announced BTS had smashed 23 records, from the most streamed act on Spotify (16.3bn in April 2021) to the fastest time to reach one million followers on TikTok (just three hours and 31 minutes). Their big international breakthrough came with the album Love Yourself: Tear, the first ever Korean-language album to top the US charts (and only the fifth ever foreign language record to do so), and a first top 10 entry in the UK album charts. And when on stage, they performed with crowd-pulling star-power. They were social media savvy, giving fans regular insights to their daily lives. They were gifted songwriters, and eventually had the pulling power to attract the likes of Ed Sheeran to further help them craft addictive, commercially friendly pop. They were real, fallible humans, cultivating an adoring, personal connection with a rapidly growing fanbase. It made them relatable in a way K-Pop groups hadn’t been for a while. Relatively so (it’s hardly as if they were singing about the slaughter of the bourgeoisie over slick R&B beats) but they did take the comparatively radical step of tackling things that truly resonated with young listeners: love and relationships, of course, but also mental health, as well as the mighty weight of expectation placed upon them by Korean society. Once the seven members - Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V, Jungkook - emerged in 2013, it was clear they wouldn’t be censored like so many of their predecessors. With Big Hit and BTS, the vice was loosened. Things became toxic, to the tragic extent that, in a number of high-profile cases, the pressures of the industry were linked to suicides among K-Pop artists.
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While Seo Taiji and Boys were celebrated for their socially conscious, honest lyrics, the idol group machine soon grew to become something oppressive, exerting control over what the artists sang about, spoke about, and did in their free time. They were formed by a new company, Big Hit Entertainment, with new ideas. It all made for intensely marketable acts and, as a result, cemented K-Pop as a national powerhouse. Suitably honed, they were assembled into idol groups with pre-assigned roles: the leader (The Gary Barlow, if you will), the singer who could also rap (The Simon Webbe From Blue…?), and even the pretty face (take your pick). Budding idols, often children and teenagers, were scouted through auditions, and then put through a stringent training programme to turn them into all-singing, all-dancing, fame-ready entertainers. K-Pop was nurtured as a key part of that and, largely controlled by three major studios, the concept of the so-called idol group was formed - similar to the Western boy band, but engineered with an exacting precision.
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