BTS: Beyond the Story

Worlds Collide

______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).
Worlds Collide
But even j-hope, who had opened his own ad hoc dance school in the
practice studios, had become completely exhausted six months before their
debut. He recalls:
______It was probably the beginning of January, 2013. We were so tired,
even when we should’ve been at our most motivated. There was a
practice studio where they filmed our dance moves, and we
basically lived in there. Which was why we would stop talking
when we entered there, became really prickly about things …
In their quest to become an “overperformance group,” the members
practiced their choreography and took lessons at the same time. In the midst
of it all, they also went on specific diets to be at their best possible physical
states when on stage, to the point where they were obsessive about the
amount of salt they would put on the chicken breasts that they ate for
protein.
But suffering and worry had more to do with their mental than their
physical states. To be affiliated with Big Hit Entertainment, which was not as well-known as SM Entertainment, invited a kind of gaze j-hope felt was
overwhelming.
______When people kept asking us when we were debuting, to a trainee
that’s really … That question is like a knife to the heart.
j-hope was truly desperate. The fraught journey to his debut reads like a
series of desperate moments. He recalls his life’s story up to his move to
Seoul:
______I didn’t learn a lot at the hagwon where I learned to dance, because
of the tuition fees. So for the most part during lessons, I would just
sit on the hagwon sofa. Because I loved dance so much … After the
lessons, I would keep practicing on my own in the practice studios.
The hyungs who taught me, especially this one dancer named
Bangster, became a kind of teacher to me.8 He said to me, “Hey, do
you want to come to our practice studio and practice with us?” And
that’s how I joined the dance team Neuron.9 That’s where I first
came in contact with street dancing. Later, when I signed my
contract with Big Hit Entertainment as a trainee, there was no place
for me to practice. That was why despite signing the contract, I
stayed behind at the Gwangju hagwon where my dance training was
outsourced to. And that’s when the A&R team contacted me. Telling
me it was time to come up to Seoul.
j-hope, RM, and SUGA had to wait two years until their debut, and Big
Hit Entertainment was barely scraping by at the time due to Glam’s failure.
The practice spaces were so cramped that someone’s singing in one room
would carry over to trainees in the room three doors down. These
circumstances, to the seven boys who were about to debut, were a source of
great anxiety.
SUGA especially had reasons to be anxious. He was preparing for his
debut despite the aftereffects of a shoulder injury incurred from a traffic
accident. He explains:
______I did all kinds of part-time jobs in 2012, right before our debut was
set. My family needed money, so I would teach MIDI, work in a
convenience store, and do deliveries, and it was on a delivery where
I injured myself on a motorcycle. SUGA’s voice turns a shade quieter as he recounts the turmoil of those
days:
______The company was in dire straits, and I was worrying my head off as
to whether I could continue my life as a trainee. It was really hard
for me, the act of living itself. I’d left home pinning all my hopes on
debuting, I’d managed to enter this company … I felt so desperate.
Jimin had his own issues concerning his debut. He recalls:
______I had given up a perfectly good life learning dance in high school to
come up to Seoul, but no one cared … You could be eliminated after
any of the tests they would put us through time to time, which was
scary. I was really putting the pedal to the metal then.
As Big Hit Entertainment let go of all their trainees save the ones
earmarked for BTS, Jimin became more and more anxious that the
company could let go of him as well at any time. Unlike RM, SUGA, and j-
hope, the vocalist-position members including Jimin had no assurance they
would be allowed to debut in BTS. The lack of time for proper training and
the obligation to train even harder after his debut was decided put more
pressure on Jimin.
______I wanted desperately to find the reason why I was in this scene. That
I wasn’t here only because I was forcing it or out of sheer luck.
Which was why I tried to make one more person like me, to show
one more person how much better I was doing … Maybe I was a
little impatient.
Jimin’s desperation at the time resulted in the following episode, a
serious one at the time but somewhat cute looking back.
______I didn’t know how to dance like a member of an idol group. I’d
never dealt with dancing like this until I became a trainee. So
whenever the movements changed, I would pause and memorize the
position. You know that Zolaman character, that stick figure with the
big head and sticks for a body? I drew every single move and
position in that character and memorized them. It made everyone
around me laugh.
Meanwhile, Jung Kook, who was still quite young, was in the process of
learning about himself while experiencing dorm life for the first time and undergoing copious amounts of training.
______My personality completely changed. Being tossed into a place full
of strangers made me very shy all of a sudden. I would try to avoid
everyone else’s shower times when using the bathroom, and I slept
in the upper bunk of a bunkbed, but even as I sweated from the heat
at night, I wouldn’t go down from my bed in case I woke up the
hyung sleeping in the lower bunk … I realized then, ‘Ah, I’m just
very shy.’
His particular situation was a perfect storm of the combined realities of
K-pop, the upcoming debut of BTS, and Big Hit Entertainment’s corporate
situation.
Korean idols normally debut in their late teens, or at the latest, their
early twenties. Many of them begin as trainees in their mid-teens under
contract with entertainment companies. Jung Kook, who would debut at the
age of fifteen, is considered a younger case in terms of both entering an
entertainment company dorm and debuting as an idol. On top of his age,
there was also the prospect of debuting with older boys like RM and
SUGA, who had already been active on the hip-hop scene and were
obsessed with that genre of music. This meant at the same time as he was
training and worrying leading up to his debut, Jung Kook had to discover
just what kind of person he was deep down. He says:
______To tell you how bad it was, you know how once you reach middle
school, you learn how to use the formal register with your
upperclassmen? I didn’t even know how to do that. Informal Korean
felt natural to me, and I didn’t pay much attention to the people
around me. But then I entered the dorm and saw how I was coming
off. That’s when I started using formal Korean. How do I say this …
I think I was lacking in my attitude toward other people, in
understanding and deference and empathy. And then I met the other
members and thought, ‘Oh I see, this is how you’re supposed to act
with others’ or ‘I should speak like this, too’ and learned how to
express my feelings by seeing how it was done.
To Jung Kook, RM was especially the reason he had decided to sign
with Big Hit Entertainment, and j-hope and SUGA were his role models.Jung Kook adds:
______Those hyungs were on a higher level among the trainees, which
made me think, ‘Wow, I want to be like them, too’ or ‘The hyungs
are dressed so cool’ and I would buy the same clothes (laughs).
Back then, I think I was having these trivial thoughts more than
worrying over whether I was going to debut or not.
On the other hand, the three hyungs he looked up to were burning up
with anxiety as their debut was pushed later and later. The day they would
finally get to stand onstage seemed further away than ever, and the group
seemed to be going in a direction they hadn’t expected. Amid all this, they
had to teach hip-hop to the others in the dorm and set the tone for the
younger members they were living with.
In addition to this, RM, who had become the team leader, had the task
of receiving from Bang Si-Hyuk the big picture about their group. RM
remembers:
______The company never pressured me into doing things. But they did
remind me that the smallest things could create big risks and say
things like, “You have to do well as a leader” or even, “You have to
wake up the members of your group.”
This was where worlds were colliding in the dorm. To RM, SUGA, and
j-hope, debuting was an immediate problem, whereas the four vocalists who
were debuting faster than they had anticipated were still grappling with
what it meant to be put out into the world. Jin says:
______I hadn’t really understood what it meant to be an idol. If I’d known
beforehand, it would have been easier to get used to that reality. But
once I’d debuted, I was just so busy, and also so happy …
Once their debut was set, Jin had to readjust to a trainee life that was
very different from the one he had been used to until then. Jin and RM went
as far as to have a serious conversation about it at one point. Jin says:
________The both of us were in agreement that the team had to go up. But
the difference between us was that I was wondering if we could
pursue our happiness a little first and then think about what was
going to happen, while he believed we had to give our all now for
the sake of later happiness.While thinking in a slightly different direction, V says as well that he
thought differently from the three rapper hyungs.
______Most people train for years before debuting, so I hadn’t even
considered that my time would come only after a few months of
training. I made sure I attended all the practices, but outside of
practice times, I hung out with my school friends a lot.
To V, debuting was still far away, and he wanted to experience being a
teenager properly as well as working as a trainee.
But V’s life abruptly changed once he heard the following from the
company:
“It’s time for your debut. You, you’re BTS now.”