BTS: Beyond the Story

The Battle for Razor-Sharp Dance

______Arrrrrrrgh!
When asked about BTS’s training process before their debut, j-hope
playfully lets out an exaggerated groan before elaborating.
________The alarm goes off at 10 A.M. and we grab a salad, some bread,
and chicken breast and go to the practice studio. Then we practice
and review ourselves as we keep screaming “Argh!” and start all
over again and then it’s “Arrrgh!” again and all of a sudden, it’s 10
P.M. Then we go back to the dorm and sleep. Ad nauseum.
As previously mentioned, Big Hit Entertainment had more trainees than
one would expect from a company of their size. Any entertainment
company just starting out with thirty trainees would inevitably need to
prioritize resources. The practice studios were always crowded, and the
trainees had to take turns with lessons. Jin says:
______When I got to rehearsals after school, there would be four studios
and the boy trainees would be gathered in one studio. The other
studios were being used to prepare Glam for their debut.
But with the tepid reception of Glam by mainstream audiences, the
company reallocated their resources to BTS. Except this time, the resources
were being reallocated under a greater financial strain.
Which was why, once the BTS members were confirmed to debut, Big
Hit Entertainment was forced to release all their other trainees from their
contracts. This was how the time and space to train the seven boys who
would become BTS was procured. Their rehearsal times also increased.
Significantly.
If RM, SUGA, and j-hope were running a hip-hop school in the dorm
after hours, the practice studios were a war zone of dance. It would be fair
to say that the members had more trouble getting used to dancing than
getting used to hip-hop.
With hip-hop, the trio of RM, SUGA, and j-hope at least had similar
sensibilities, and the younger members only had to follow the example of
the older ones. But the only members back then who were used to dancing
were j-hope and Jimin. RM and SUGA hadn’t even imagined they would
need to learn dance. j-hope explains:______SUGA and RM told me once that they thought we were going to
become a group like 1TYM and wouldn’t have to dance at all.
1TYM was a hip-hop group that included Teddy, who had also produced
BIGBANG, 2NE1, and BLACKPINK. They became popular in the late
1990s and early 2000s during the rise of hip-hop in Korea, and it seems RM
and SUGA had assumed BTS would follow in their footsteps as a hip-hop
group with mainstream appeal.
Of course, 1TYM, like BTS, emphasized the role of vocalists as well as
rappers, and they had some choreographed movement in their acts. But
according to Jin, BTS reset their mandate to become an “overperformance
group.” Of the mood in the training sessions at the time, Jin says:
______The proportion of our training taken up by dance actually wasn’t
that big in the beginning. But suddenly dance became important and
our training time for it went up a lot. We trained really hard
especially in the two months before our debut, and there were days
when we would be dancing for twelve hours.
Anyone reading this book is sure to understand what “overperformance”
means. Not long after, in their performances for their debut song “No More
Dream,” Jimin would execute a move where he would, with a boost from
Jung Kook, fly into the air and walk across the backs of the other members
standing in a line.
But the acrobatics was not all that made the overperformance training so
arduous. Jin adds:
______Bang Si-Hyuk asked for a little too much back then (laughs). He
would be watching playback of our performances on a PC and press
spacebar to pause. Then he would critique every angle of our bodies
and even our finger placements. He watched our dancing frame by
frame. We danced the same choreography for two months.
As Jin described, BTS practiced the choreography for “No More
Dream” to the point where they were in sync right down to every single
frame.
2AM, Glam, and the four years it took for Big Hit Entertainment to
debut BTS was basically the company catching up to the past twenty years
of the industry. It was an endeavor that required much research. The company analyzed the factors that made successful idol groups into hits,
and regularly consulted industry experts for their advice. Occasionally, Big
Hit would post a reward for anyone in the company who could come up
with the best proposal for the production of a successful artist.
What Bang Si-Hyuk learned in this process was that idols moved to a
completely different beat compared to the music industry that came before.
Idol music exploded onto the scene with the debut of Seo Taiji and Boys in
1992, and with the 1996 debut of H.O.T., an industrialized production
system was put in place. BTS debuted as the idol system approached the
twentieth year of its golden age. Its first teenage fans were now in their
thirties, and as fandom culture developed over the years, the content and
standards the fans demanded also became clearer.
Kalgunmu, or “razor-sharp group dancing,” was such content. Fans
wanted their favorite groups to create awe-inspiring moments of perfect
synchronized dancing. Not only did such perfection bring a visual joy to
their fans but it also served as proof of how hard the members had worked
on their teamwork in order to achieve it. But to Bang Si-Hyuk, who was
part of Korea’s first generation of hip-hop and R&B producers at JYP
Entertainment, kalgunmu was not something he was even considering. In
hip-hop, dancing was more about emphasizing the personalities of each
performer, which led to less pressure for perfectly synchronized
movements.
But in the world of idol music, kalgunmu was the law of the land. And
while there was an absolute need to follow this law, Jin remembers that
even for idol singers, BTS had ended up in the “overperformance” category
of artists.
______Sure, group dancing is essential for idols, but our dancing was more
intense than the usual.
As their mandate for reconciling the genre characteristics between hip-
hop and idol music became clearer, BTS was required to practice even
harder. At night there was the School of Hip-Hop convened by RM and
SUGA, who became students during the day at the “School of Dance”
alongside the others who were not used to dancing. j-hope was the teacher
in this latter school. He talks of those days:______Jimin and I were the only members who had learned dance before
we entered the company. I felt like the first thing we needed to do
was to help the other members find dancing fun. Outside of our
regular training sessions, we occasionally practiced at dawn. It was
kind of like the “den of rap” where we would put on a beat and try
freestyling. Rap had become fun for me during those sessions, and I
wanted the same thing to happen with dance for the others. I’d just
put on music and go, “Now dance, just dance however way you
want,” that kind of thing.
Fortunately, the members were very diligent about their studies in this
school. j-hope continues:
________We came together a lot better in training than expected. When
SUGA became obsessed with dance he would even joke, “I don’t
want to rap anymore, let’s dance.” It’s hard to believe I bet, but he
and I once went to Hongdae to learn breaking (laughs).