Seven people make up the South Korean boy band BTS: RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook.
BTS, who amassed a sizable fan base known as the BTS Army, assisted in making K-pop a worldwide phenomenon when the first and second Korean waves hit western shores. The band, popularly known as the Bangtan Boys, was established in 2010 and their debut single album, 2 Cool 4 Skool, was published in 2013. By 2017, the group had become a global sensation.
Since BTS's rise to fame over the past few years has been so significant, the release of their most recent single, "Butter" — their first since a trio of ground-breaking, historically significant No. 1 singles in autumn 2020 — is a significant development.
With the smash single "Dynamite," which became the first K-pop song in history to debut at No. 1 on the US Billboard "Hot 100" chart, BTS made news in 2020.
They have worked with well-known musicians including the Chainsmokers, Steve Aoki, Nicki Minaj, Ed Sheeran, and Halsey since 2018, when they made history by becoming the first South Korean band to ever have an album launch at No. 1 on the US Billboard chart.
BTS was nominated for a Grammy in 2020 for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. Their extremely involved fans has even earned them a few Guinness World Records.
In order to accomplish this goal, BTS departs from established norms for K-pop boy bands in six key ways:
1.They frequently produce original music and lyrics.
2.Their songs are socially sensitive and particularly adept at capturing the stresses of contemporary adolescence in South Korea.
3.The majority of their social media presence is created and managed by them.
4.They don't have "slave contracts," nor do they have the onerous requirements that other idol groups' contracts entail.
5.Instead than concentrating on promoting individual singles, they frequently promote entire albums. (Despite their recent series of singles in the US, this is essentially still true.)
6.They don't always portray a highly polished picture; instead, they communicate honestly about the challenges and difficulties of their job.
K-pop began on April 11, 1992, when a hip-hop trio called Seo Taiji and Boys performed in a talent show on a national South Korean network. Seo Taiji and Boys were innovators who challenged norms around musical styles, song topics, fashion, and censorship, which was unprecedented for a culture whose musical production had spent the past few decades subjected to strict government oversight. But it wouldn’t last.
In the ’90s, three powerhouse music studios began cultivating what would become known as idol groups. Assembled through auditions and years of grooming within an intense studio culture — the highly regimented system of idol group production in Korean and Japanese music studios — idol groups are polished to perfection, designed to present the very highest standards of beauty, dance, and musicality. Children who enter these studios spend most of their lives enduring rigorous training to become part of an idol group. If they’re chosen, the studio exerts a huge amount of control, not only over the songs they sing and the way their band is marketed but also over their daily lives.
