BTS: Beyond the Story

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Rap Den

RM, who would become the leader of BTS, spent his teens as KimNamjoon in the city of Ilsan, Gyeonggi Province.

He remembers the municipality as "a city where everything was satisfying."

______The city was so well-planned when it was built, and all the greenspaces had an emotionally calming effect.

The city was home to the Ilsan Lake Park, which was easily accessible to anyone who lived in the vicinity.

The residential areas were mostly apartment complexes, and there were the two large commercial zones: LaFesta and Western Dom.

The city was indeed planned out from its very founding, with impeccably arranged roads and facilities.

The entire city was spacious and peaceful for most of the week, with the two commercial district becoming busier and more festive from Friday night through the weekend.

______It's a place where there's a certain feeling of comfort. There's a little of that city gray and the bored faces of pedestrians, but there are no tall buildings or big corporate offices, which makes the sky easier tosee. It has an excellent environment for concentrating on your studies. It's not the countryside, but it feels like that to me.

While near Seoul, ilsan wasn't as large or bustling as the capital, which became a factor in RM discovering hip-hop.

He started going online in first grade and learned about rap through Nas and interviews and documentaries of hip-hop artists on YouTube, while picking up English along the way.

But offline, the life of middle-schooler Kim Namjoon was at somewhat of a distance from hip-hop.

It was about as far as the distance between ilsanand Seoul's Hongik University neighborhood.

______If Ilsan offered any advantage to hip-hop, it was the fact that Sinchon and Hongdae were so close. Just a bus ride away. It was my dream to perform in places like Drug or Geek Live House, which don't exist anymore, and maybe in a bigger place like Rolling halllater on.3 That place could hold 500 people.

A bus ride from Ilsan to Hongdae took a little less than an hour.

But if a weekend in Ilsan meant a family of three or four taking a stroll around the lake in the park, a weekend in Hongdae and Sinchon meant rappers and aspiring rappers and their audiences gathering in clubs.

When RM made the decision to audition with hip-hop label Big Deal Records in 2009 to become a professional rapper, it didn't mean he would simply be going back and forth on a bus between ilsan and Hongdae.

It Meant jumping into a world he had only seen online, a world completely different from the city he had loved so much that he said, "It's a privilege to have been born in Ilsan."

Not only that, but the place where he ended up arriving wasn't Hongdae but Gangnam.

______I made the first cut, so in my second audition I got to perform with artists who had debuted, but I messed up the words. I thought it was over for me.

But interestingly enough, a friend of the rapper Sleepy of the hip-hop duo Untouchable happened to come to the afterparty for the audition, andhe mentioned that Sleepy had been interested in RM's work recently and took his phone number.

______Sleepy said he'd seen me at an audition. He must've been impressed because he talked about me and asked for me. So, I gave my phone number to his friend to pass on to him. That's how we wrote emails to each other. Sleepy happened to be old friends with Pdogg. And When Pdogg asked him, "Do you know any rappers who are young?" he recommended me.