Suga and J-Hope were the first two members to join after RM, at a point when Bang imagined a pure hip-hop group. And I believe maybe it was fate that drew me to him.” But when I saw him rap, I just thought he was really, really awesome. “I really didn’t know a lot about being a singer. “I just simply thought RM was really cool,” Jung Kook says. Jung Kook, the youngest member, whose multiple talents include an extraordinarily soulful tenor, had offers to sign with multiple entertainment agencies, but chose Big Hit and BTS because of RM. “It’s still the same.”Ī lengthy recruitment and audition process brought RM his six bandmates: fellow rappers Suga and J-Hope, and singers Jung Kook, V, Jimin, and Jin. “We always set goals and standards that may seem ideal, and try our best to get there as close as possible,” Bang says. Now, thanks to BTS’ success, HYBE is a publicly traded corporation so large it just snapped up the American management company behind Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. When BTS debuted in 2013, Big Hit was an underdog startup in a South Korean music business then dominated by three huge firms (Bang had been a producer for one of them, JYP). “When I first met RM,” says Bang, “I felt a sense of duty that I must help him grow to become a great artist after acknowledging his musical talents and ways of thinking.” Bang Si-hyuk, the cerebral, intense-yet-avuncular mogul-producer who founded BTS’ record company, Big Hit Entertainment (now HYBE), signed RM first, in 2010, and gradually formed BTS around the rapper’s talent and magnetism. He was on a path toward an elite university education before a love of hip-hop, first sparked by a Korean group, Epik High, detoured him into superstardom. V’s jacket Suga’s T-shirt Jin’s top and necklace Jungkook’s coat RM’s jacket and necklace Jimin and J-Hope’s shirts and jackets by Louis Vuitton. Styling by Kyungmin Kim, Lee Ha Jeong, Kim Hyesoo, Hong Sil, Seo Hee Ji, Kim Hyunjeong. Grooming by Kim Da Reum, Seo Yuri, Kim Seon Min. Hair by Han Som, Mujin Choi, Lim Lee young, Lee Da Eun. Still, he makes understandable use of the interpreter when the conversation gets complex.īTS, photographed in Seoul on April 6th, 2021 Photograph by Hong Jang Hyun for Rolling Stone. talk shows, he taught himself his fluent English via bingeing Friends DVDs. As RM has had to explain too many times on U.S. Yes, there’s xenophobia, but there are also a lot of people who are very accepting. . . . The fact that we have faced success in the United States is very meaningful in and of itself.”Īt the moment, RM is in an acoustically treated room at his label’s headquarters in Seoul, wearing a white medical mask to protect a nearby translator, a black bucket hat, and a black hoodie from the Los Angeles luxury label Fear of God. It’s our hope, too, that people in the minority will draw some energy and strength from our existence. The way we think is that everything that we do, and our existence itself, is contributing to the hope for leaving this xenophobia, these negative things, behind. “There’s a light side there’s always going to be a dark side. “Now, of course, there is no utopia,” RM continues. The nation has long been deeply invested in its outsize cultural success beyond its borders, known as the Korean Wave. “We are outliers,” says RM, “and we came into the American music market and enjoyed this incredible success.” In 2020, seven years into their career, BTS’ first English-language single, the irresistible “Dynamite,” hit Number One, an achievement so singular it prompted a congratulatory statement from South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in. What RM is currently pondering, however, is how all of it contrasts with a darker landscape all around them, particularly the horrifying recent wave of anti-Asian violence and discrimination across a global diaspora. We’re talking about utopian and dystopian futures, about how the boundary-smashing, hegemony-overturning global success of his group, the wildly talented seven-member South Korean juggernaut BTS, feels like a glimpse of a new and better world, of an interconnected 21st century actually living up to its promise.īTS’ downright magical levels of charisma, their genre-defying, sleek-but-personal music, even their casually nontoxic, skin-care-intensive brand of masculinity - every bit of it feels like a visitation from some brighter, more hopeful timeline. This is a very serious and deep question,” says RM, the 26-year-old leader of the world’s biggest band.
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