![]() As with anything annoyingly good, I felt the need to research what I was experiencing, which only got more complex as I Googled. Video viewing is paramount to appreciating BTS, who take the medium more seriously than any artist since MTV’s heyday, and in fact, have helped inspire Western artists to get their shit together visually again. Signed to the indie-turned-major Seoul label BigHit, they also collaborate with a larger in-house team of producers, cinematographers, and creative directors. They all dance and compose some also choreograph, shoot film and design. (By the way, they are: rapper/producers Kim “RM” Namjoon, Min “Suga” Yoongi, Jung “J-Hope” Hoseok and vocalists Kim “V” Tae-hyung, Kim Seokjin, Jeon Jung-kook and Park Jimin.) All members are between 21 and 26 and intimidatingly creative. I learned their names and roles in the band, which I later learned is ARMY code for a point of no return. Soon, I was in a whirlwind of discovery on YouTube. I became curious about what else these young disruptors had up their sleeve. This was something fresh and exciting and. So, a decade after “Paper Planes” snuck onto Top 40 radio and turned it upside down, a Korean group was infiltrating the system.singing IN Korean. I admitted I was impressed, especially when I realized the song had taken over US iTunes and was getting considerable Stateside radio airplay (sure, it was via a tweaked Steve Aoki and Desiigner-assisted remix, but still radical stuff alongside Marshmello and Shawn Mendes). Obscenely sharp and catchy, it was a subtle fuck you to their haters and cynics, while also a welcome display of the rap line’s ability to spit rapid-fire rhymes - rare in this age of xanny slur trap. My own entry point came through repeated subconscious exposure to their name on Twitter and other social platforms and, eventually, their braggadocio-fueled rap anthem Mic Drop (so-named for Obama’s infamous speech ending gesture in 2016). They - and their incredibly engaged, organized fanbase, ARMY - are forcing Western gatekeepers to evolve or get left behind. Anyway: BTS is THE zeitgeist, and for good reason. I could fire off statistics all day it’s tempting when they are so singular in scope. ![]() They’ve sold out Rose Bowl, Wembley and other historic stadiums in record time. They are the most popular band in Trump’s America, singing almost entirely in Korean, yet scoring their third #1 album in under a year, a feat not achieved since The Beatles. ![]() Their current album, the Jungian-tinged Map Of The Soul: Persona is the best selling album of the year globally, hitting the 4 million mark in only a few months. Their sales are enormous: over 15 million albums sold since 2013, most of them coming in the past two years alone, when their global popularity exploded. The impact of BTS, commercially, critically and culturally is hard to overstate. But also the most unexpectedly disruptive, radical thing the pop world has seen since M.I.A. Yes, they’re a Korean seven-member boy band. BTS: the most-talked-about band on Earth.
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