BTS: Beyond the Story

CHAPTER 1

SEOUL

Korea’s busiest crossroads is in Seoul’s district of Gangnam, near Sinsa
Station. Those driving down the Hannam Bridge over the Han River into
Gangnam will pass through this crossroads before heading to different parts
of the district, like Nonhyeon, Cheongdam, or Apgujeong. When there’s a
lot of traffic, drivers might be staring up at the traffic lights for tens of
minutes, waiting for their turn, which is why the subway is probably the
best way to get to Sinsa Station, if that’s your destination.
But if your destination is specifically somewhere near Exit 1 of Sinsa
Station, that’s a slightly different story—for example, if you happen to be
heading for the Cheonggu Building, which in 2010 housed Big Hit
Entertainment, later known as HYBE.
Seoul, Gangnam-gu, Dosandaero 16-gil 13–20. Even with the address,
it’s not easy to find the Cheonggu Building if you have never been to
Gangnam or the Sinsa Station crossroads. According to the KakaoMap app,
the distance between this building and Exit 1 is 568 meters. But it’s
impossible to tell from the map that the building is near the end of a steep
incline. Nor that several pivots along the way are necessary in order to
reach it. Unless you’re driving there with the aid of GPS navigation, it
could be a bit of an effort and wandering around to find Cheonggu
Building.
______I was at a loss.
Such was the case for Jung Hoseok, who would debut three years later
as j-hope of BTS. After signing a trainee contract with Big Hit
Entertainment in April 2010, he was undergoing training in his native city
of Gwangju when the company ordered him to move into the Big Hit
Entertainment trainee dormitory near the Cheonggu Building in Seoul. He
arrived on December 24, 2010.
______I was so scared. It was Christmas Eve and the streets were full of
cheerful people, but I couldn’t get my bearings at all.

Never had he ridden the Seoul subway or experienced Christmas Eve in
trendy Sinsa-dong. This was an area with high foot traffic, even for Seoul,
but the elusive location of the dormitory was as intimidating to j-hope as the
crowded subway or the unfamiliar vista of the Sinsa neighborhood.
______I kept saying, “This is frustrating!” and ended up calling the then
head of A&R. “So, how do I get there?”
After his call, he “kept going straight, and like, somehow and
somehow” to use his words, and finally arrived at the dorm. This was the
beginning of his dorm life, which he had been looking forward to since the
day before and which he still remembered vividly ten years later. On that
day, however, he was in for a shock.
________SUGA was there in his underwear (laughs). There were leftover
trotters in the sink, laundry strewn on the floor, and everyone
walking around in their underwear. ‘I guess this is dorm life?’ I
thought.
Big Hit Entertainment
About a month and a half before this, in the beginning of November, Min
Yoongi—who would debut as SUGA of BTS—had arrived at Sinsa Station
Exit 1, just as j-hope would, and was looking for the dorm.
________My parents dropped me off. There’s a practice studio in the
basement of Yujeong Restaurant near the Cheonggu Building. I
stood there until Pdogg came out and took me inside. My parents
told me later that I looked like I was being dragged off somewhere
(laughs).
SUGA was seventeen years old at the time. He was a bit too young to
leave his hometown of Daegu to come up to Seoul just because he wanted a
career in music. But in Korea, it is difficult to grow into a mainstream artist
if one doesn’t happen to be in Seoul.
______I was in a dance crew in Daegu, and there was a studio I worked in.
But the pie was just too small. We might have an event gig from
time to time? Sometimes we were paid in tickets for our
performances, not money. Not that we were doing it for the money necessarily, but I wonder if we should’ve at least been paid enough
to buy a meal, and a lot of times we weren’t paid even that.
By the time SUGA entered Big Hit Entertainment, he was already a
paid songwriter working in Daegu. He attended music hagwons to learn
MIDI, was introduced to composers, and went from studio to studio doing
all kinds of work. Back then, there was no arts high school that taught
mainstream music in Daegu, which was why for a time he studied classical
music with an eye on entering arts high school that way. He learned
different kinds of music from various musicians, composing everything
from school songs to trot. But for a teenager dreaming of a career as a
professional musician, especially a teenager obsessed with hip-hop, his
prospects outside of Seoul were slim.
______Hip-hop wasn’t very mainstream in Daegu at the time. This was
when people made fun of rappers, calling them “hip-hop warriors,”
and when the hyungs I made music with did cyphers1
in the park,
we’d get maybe twenty people as an audience. And our first one had
two people.
It was a fairly reasonable choice for SUGA to head to Seoul, in
retrospect. Indeed, SUGA and j-hope had deliberately made the decision to
enter the idol audition process before joining Big Hit Entertainment as
trainees; j-hope had undertaken auditions with other companies and already
had specific dreams of debuting as a singer by the time his dance hagwon
recommended him for an audition with Big Hit.
As Korean idol groups became explosively popular in the 2000s, not
only domestically but internationally, teenagers aspiring to stardom flocked
to famous dance hagwons that not only taught dance but also introduced
promising students to entertainment companies in Seoul. This was also how
j-hope’s initial training was outsourced to Gwangju before he entered the
dorm in Seoul.
______The Big Hit A&R people came to Gwangju and sat in on the
auditions in person. I danced for them, and then did eight months of
outsourced training after I succeeded in the audition. Once a month
during this training, I made videos of myself dancing and singing to
send to the company.

Meanwhile, SUGA, who was already a professional songwriter, became
interested in a particular person at Big Hit Entertainment.
______I always liked the songwriter Bang Si-Hyuk. I really liked the T-ara
song “Like the First Time,” and learned that Bang had written that
song. He wasn’t on television or anything back then, but he was
already famous as a songwriter among people in the know.
For teenagers with limited insider knowledge of the entertainment
industry, trusting a company recommended by one’s dance hagwon or
taking an audition because a favorite songwriter happened to work there
was the best course of action.
Even before the incredible success of today’s BTS, Big Hit
Entertainment in 2010 was already a well-respected company, more than
worthy to be a young musician’s dream company. Bang Si-Hyuk—the
current chair of HYBE—established Big Hit in 2005, and by the time j-
hope and SUGA had signed on, he had raised a string of successful artists
like 8Eight, J-Lim, and 2AM to stardom. 2AM’s “Can’t Let You Go Even if
I Die” in particular, composed by Bang, was a massive hit that rocketed the
team to supremacy. Big Hit Entertainment was hardly small fry in the
scheme of things, with a stable of successful artists and the owner and main
producer of the company well-known for his ability to consistently crank
out hits.
But the team Big Hit was trying to build at the time with trainees like
SUGA and j-hope, the team that would become BTS, was proving to be
something of a new challenge for Bang Si-Hyuk.
The making of a K-pop idol group is like the production of a Hollywood
blockbuster. Everything converges into a single effort, including capital,
planning, advertising and PR, and even the brand value of the company
itself. In spite of this, the industry was so competitive that only about five
boy groups and five girl groups in a decade could be considered successful.
Most of these popular groups came from what was known as “the big
three”: SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment.
These companies, like Hollywood’s major studios, had the lion’s share of
capital and industry know-how.

Big Hit, of course, had 2AM. But co-label JYP was the one that led the
effort from training to launch. That was why for Big Hit Entertainment, the
process of casting, training, and launching was a whole new venture.
And it went without saying that this whole process was much more
difficult and costly than simply launching a balladeer. Idol groups need
simultaneous mastery of song and dance on stage, and all that singing and
dancing need to be trained into them, which means enough practice space is
needed to teach scores of trainees vocals and dance. For those, like SUGA
and j-hope, who moved away from home, as well as whoever happens to
show high potential and is therefore deemed closer to debuting, room and
board need to be provided. To prepare an idol group for their debut requires
not only offices for the company itself but literal “spaces” for all of the
above.
This was why j-hope could only be taken aback by what he saw that
Christmas Eve when he first entered the dorm. Big Hit Entertainment was a
major company in the entertainment industry, one that a budding artist like
j-hope could trust to nurture his talent. But in some ways, the company was
arguably closer to being a kind of start-up, with administrative offices and
recording studios in cramped quarters on the second floor.
Bang Si-Hyuk used one of those tiny rooms for his artistic and
administrative work, including meetings. It was so small that there was
room for no more than three people, and that third person would have to sit
on the floor. Instead of bringing all the trainees into the same building,
Bang rented practice space and accommodations around the Cheonggu
Building.
These spaces, like their offices, were only just enough for their most
basic functions, which is apparent when contrasting Jung Kook’s practice
footage from February 2013a with the BTS dance footage filmed in HYBE
HQ.b In 2013, Big Hit clearly had everything they needed and more for a
company of their size. But compared to “the big three,” they might as well
have had nothing.
One thing Big Hit had a disproportionate abundance of was people.
Take the trainees, for instance. There were about fifteen male trainees vying
to become BTS. At one point, there had been twenty trainees competing to
join the girl group Glam, which debuted a year before BTS. And
importantly, Big Hit also had the producer and content creator Bang Si-
Hyuk, the producer Pdogg, and the performance director Son Sungdeuk.
But for the two teenagers who had come up to Seoul from Daegu and
Gwangju, the first thing that made a big impression, like SUGA’s comment
about moving into the dorm, was the fact that there were a whole lot of
other teens their age with similar interests. SUGA remembers:
________I went to the recording studio and RM and Supreme Boi were
there, and other trainees, and we got all excited just talking about
music.