There are seven of them, all in their 20s - RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and Jungkook - and they’ve been singing and dancing together since 2012, when 47-year-old South Korean music mogul Bang Si-Hyuk, aka “Hitman” Bang, pieced the group together at his Big Hit Entertainment factory, one of the pillars of the K-pop industry. Over a 13-hour trans-Pacific journey, here’s what I learned.
While I was well aware of their status as a once-in-a-generation pop culture phenomenon - I’d seen them on Saturday Night Livelast April (along with 4 million other viewers) and sampled their music videos on YouTube (where they have 22.2 million subscribers) - I admit to being a little fuzzy on some of the finer points of BTS history, like where they came from, why they are so appealing to so many millions or even what BTS stands for (Bulletproof Boy Scouts, but more on that later). stadium leg of their continuing 2019 tour, which resumes in October after a three-month break, was so fierce, it repeatedly crashed Ticketmaster’s servers, selling out all 300,000 seats - average price: $452 each - in a matter of minutes.īTS: Exclusive Photos of the K-Pop Sensationįorty-eight hours earlier, I’m on an Asiana Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Seoul, the only 47-year-old man on the plane with a pile of BTS books on his lap. That same month, they became the first Asian band to surpass 5 billion streams on Spotify. The candy-colored video for their single “Boy With Luv,” featuring a hook sung by Halsey (“Oh my my my!”), surpassed 100 million views in less than 48 hours - a YouTube record - when it dropped in April, and is currently closing in on 600 million views. Their latest, an EP titled Map of the Soul: Persona, sold 3.5 million copies worldwide in the six months since its release, 562,000 of those in the U.S. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 chart in less than a year, a feat that’s all the more astounding considering their songs are mostly in Korean.
How successful? BTS is the first group since The Beatles - to whom they also are compared for the hysterical fan mania they generate - to score three No. That undoubtably has something to do with my dining companions: BTS, the super-magnetic, mop-topped K-pop boy band that is currently among the most successful music acts on planet Earth.
Normally there’s a weeks-long waiting list to get in (it’s famous for its dry-aged pork belly), but on this humid August evening in Seoul, South Korea, I waltz straight to a table in the VIP private lounge. The restaurant is called Dotgogi, which means either Sesame Meat or Aged Pork, depending on which online translator I consult.
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