BTS: Beyond the Story

Rap Den

RM,who would become the leader of BTS, spent his teens as Kim
Namjoon 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 green
spaces 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: La
Festa 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
districts 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 to
see. 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 Ilsan
and 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 Rollinghall
later 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, and
he 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.

Then came the call featured in “A Common Trainee’s Christmas”c
posted on the BTS blog4d pre-debut: “A bumpkin from Ilsan / who made the
top 1% nationwide / suddenly gets a call during midterms.” Sleepy called
RM and asked, “Hey, do you know this guy named Bang Si-Hyuk?”
RM, who had made the top percentile in his national mock exams.
SUGA, who had been writing songs since he was twelve and was already a
professional musician in high school. And the other trainees in the dorm,
who had auditioned for Big Hit Entertainment as rappers and hip-hop
fanatics. For all of them, dorm life was crucial to their development in a
musical sense, especially if their music happened to be hip-hop and rap.
According to j-hope:
______It was a rap den, a den of rap.
At the time of his audition, j-hope did not know how to rap at all. He
did Yoonmirae’s “Black Happiness” for the rap portion, but he felt so
dissatisfied with it that he feared he had failed his audition. To j-hope, the
happenings in the dorm must’ve come as quite a culture shock. He recalls:
______Wow, as soon as you walk into that dorm, the kids just started
freestyle rapping at you. I couldn’t do any of that! Every weekend,
the company filmed us rapping freestyle. But then they’d come back
to the dorm and keep putting on beats and doing rap.
The dorm overflowed with hip-hop, with impromptu singalongs to
songs like Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” going on in the middle of the
night.
Those dormitory days where hip-hop was work, play, and life all rolled
into one for a bunch of teenagers would play an important part in the
formation of BTS’s identity in the coming years. On hip-hop, and the
group’s special bond, j-hope would say:
______You couldn’t not rap in that environment. And everyone was so
encouraging to me there. I asked them all sorts of stuff about rap and
studied up on it and just learned a lot.
Although j-hope was a rap newbie, the beats-filled life at the dorm made
him quickly fall in love with hip-hop, which also allowed him to forge new
friendships with his fellow trainees. A place where rappers and this dancer who now rapped had gathered to train as professional musicians—this was
what j-hope refers to as “Season 1” of their dorm life.

“Season 2” began with the arrival of Jung Kook