BTS: Beyond the Story

Trainee Dorm Life

______I was fooled (laughs).
Jin laughs, thinking back to his casting at Big Hit Entertainment in the
spring of 2011. What the worker in charge of signing him had promised him
back then technically hasn’t come to fruition. Jin continues:
______“Look at how idols these days go into acting, we’ll let you become
an actor eventually.” That’s how they convinced me. They were very
persuasive.
Indeed, around that time, it wasn’t uncommon for a member of an idol
group to also be working as an actor at the same time. While some members
specialized in singing and dancing, others were more known for appearing
in variety shows or dramas on television, pulling in audiences from outside
the idol market.
As Korea’s idol market expanded with the rise of BTS’s popularity and
more acts began performing overseas, fewer idols ventured into acting. Jin, for one, became too busy doing stadium tours around the world with BTS,
which naturally made him focus on his work as a musician.
But many idols, to this day, continue to sing and act at the same time.
Jin had entered university as an acting major. His interest in idol music
sprung from his curiosity about artistic activities in general.
______I do like to try different things. I figured I’d be able to have a variety
of experiences if I were an idol and an actor at the same time.
Laughing, he adds:
______Reality had other plans.
Until he became a Big Hit Entertainment trainee, Jin had a happy, fairly
relaxed upbringing. Jin himself describes his childhood in Gwacheon,
Gyeonggi Province:
______I could just go down to the playground and my friends would be
hanging out, and if I ever wanted to talk to anyone I’d just call them
up and say, “Hello, I’m such-and-such.” All the kids in the
neighborhood were friends with each other, and our parents would
befriend each other as well. Walking down the street, you’d run into
someone you’d say hello to every five or ten minutes.
Even moving from Gwacheon to Seoul didn’t change his life much.
Jin’s parents once suggested he go to the country and try out the farm life.
______My parents said, “Let’s try different things to see what you have an
aptitude for.” And that my granddad, grandma, and uncle were
farmers, so why not try farming for a bit? That’s how I ended up
growing strawberries and melons for a month. I did so much
pruning for the melons that I didn’t want to eat melons for a long
time after that (laughs).
Jin is the oldest member of BTS. When he signed with Big Hit
Entertainment, he was eighteen and in his first year of university, at the age
when most Korean youth begin thinking about what they want to do with
their lives. Jin says:
______Since becoming a trainee, I worked hard during practice hours. But I
didn’t exactly stake my life on it, as they say.
The future he had vaguely imagined for himself was to keep training,
debut as an idol, and at some point, incorporate acting into his schedule.And so, Jin continued to go back and forth from his home to training
sessions at Big Hit.
But in the summer of 2012 when he entered dorm life, Jin had no choice
but to change his entire lifestyle. By the time he joined the other boys at the
dorm, the lineup for BTS had been decided, and that meant the content and
quantity of Jin’s training would change drastically. Jin thinks back to those
days:
______The company did not tell us we were going to debut, in so many
words. But we were almost the only trainees left at the dorm at this
point, which made me think, ‘I guess it’s going to happen soon.’
Jin also remembers his first impressions of the dorm.
______(Sigh) … Clothes strewn everywhere, cereal scattered on the floor,
the dishes hadn’t been done …
On January 27, 2013, Jin made a posting on the BTS blog titled “How
Trainees Usually Make Tteokgguk.”e His ambition had been to create a
proper meal he could share with the other members.
______For example, SUGA would basically just “eat to live.” He ate
chicken breasts for protein but even eating them was too much of a
hassle for him so he would blend it with some grape juice and a
banana and gulp that down straight from the blender. I had a taste of
it and thought, ‘Nope, this isn’t it,’ and cooked up some things that I
sprinkled with hot sauce or steak sauce.
Before staff was hired some months later to help with the cooking and
cleaning, Jin managed to coordinate the other members into taking turns
with chores. As with many other people, cooking and cleaning were key
activities for Jin in maintaining a semblance of a normal life. The problem
was, Jin himself had to admit that they were simply getting too busy for
normality.
________After about three months there … I finally realized why they had
come to live the way they did. On days when we had a lot of
rehearsals, we’d be working fourteen hours out of a twenty-four-
hour day.

School of Hip-Hop

Dewey Finn (played by Jack Black), the main character in the movie School
of Rock, is a nameless musician who under false pretenses gets a job at an
elementary school in place of a friend who is a licensed teacher. When he
realizes how talented the students are, he tries to put them together into a
rock band. The students, however, know nothing of rock music, and Dewey
ends up teaching them the history of rock-and-roll during class instead of
the usual curriculum.
If one were to switch rock music with hip-hop, this “School of Hip-
Hop” was what went on in the BTS dorm. RM created a playlist of artists
including Drake, Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., and Tupac Shakur for his
fellow members who were less familiar with the genre. RM says:
______I made a list out of about fifty acts whom we could listen to
together. We did cyphers to develop our rapping sensibilities and
deliberately watched videos together.
That RM had took it upon himself to be the Jack Black of the dorm was
because BTS was mired in a uniquely terrible situation in the world of idol
music.
Big Hit Entertainment had debuted a girl group called Glam a year
before BTS, with a docuseries of their formation shown around that time on
SBS MTV (now known as SBS M). Teaser trailers for their debut were also
released on YouTube.
But unfortunately, Glam never caught on in popularity, and Big Hit
Entertainment was saddled with a sizable financial burden. When a small-
to-medium-sized entertainment company fails at an idol project, the
consequences are more treacherous than anything that can be described in
words. As SUGA describes the mood back then:
______I thought the company was going to go under.
But to RM, the biggest problem they were facing was that their group,
which was about to debut, didn’t seem to know in what direction they were
supposed to go musically. RM says:
______Bang Si-Hyuk and I would have the members listen to artists like
A$AP Rocky or Lil Wayne. But the members who joined later on
knew Big Hit as a company created by the Bang Si-Hyuk who had
made 2AM and 8Eight and had worked at JYP Entertainment. But now they were being asked to do hip-hop and rap, which must have
presented for them some confusion.
The best RM could do was to talk to the debut-imminent group about
hip-hop as much as possible. Right until their debut, RM, SUGA, and j-
hope’s School of Hip-Hop was holding nonstop classes. Some nights, they
would come home after rehearsals ended at 11 P.M. and talk about music
until 6 A.M. with no sleep.
Thankfully, the students of this school were very diligent. V recalls:
______There was a time when RM, SUGA, and j-hope would sit us four
vocalists down and very seriously say, “I really think you should
listen to this song,” or “Let me teach this to you.” RM put so much
care into putting together the best songs in hip-hop history that I
couldn’t possibly say no to him. His care was so palpable that I felt I
absolutely had to listen to these songs a lot, even if I happened to
dislike them.
The classes were slowly paying off. V says:
______Since then, I’ve come to a point where I’m proud of saying I listen
to music the most among all the members. Listening to all that hip-
hop back then made me fall in love with it. I would ask the hyungs
to recommend more music, and I would find my own tracks to listen
to as well.
V’s response has something to do with how the classes were taught.
This is how Jimin remembers RM, SUGA, and j-hope’s teaching:
______The hyungs would say things like, “Isn’t this the coolest?” and show
us all the gestures the artists would make themselves as they played
us the songs. At first it was just fun and laughter, but there came a
point where I saw how it really was the coolest. I thought, ‘This
music these hyungs are into, this is real music.’
Jimin adds:
________That’s how we were indoctrinated into the hip-hop mindset
(laughs).