The kings of K-Pop, BTS, are the protagonists of this week’s Filo.Música. If you still don’t have them in your name, you’ve surely heard some of their songs or you saw them on Twitter’s Trending Topic. The post is that from South Korea they conquered the whole world and have views, awards and records to prove it. First things first: what is K-pop? The term means Korean pop in English and is how music that arises from a specific South Korean music industry is called. That is to say: there is no particular genre that characterizes it, but a ballad and a hip hop can be considered K-pop equally, what defines it is its origin, not its sound.
K-pop is identified with the so-called “idols”, who are people trained by an agency to be super complete artists but also role models. The process to become an idol is arduous and takes years. In general the “trainees”, as it is called to those who are on their way to being idols, enter school age so once they finish the classes they will train singing, dancing and languages. BTS was no exception and also went through this whole process under the company Big Hit Entertainment and its star CEO, Hitman Bang. From the get-go everything was approached from a different perspective: they sought to create music and artists to heal.
What is the point of this? Lifestyle in South Korea comes with a lot of pressure and stress, so the notion of being mentally healthy and achieving happiness is super important. The band incorporates this into their work by addressing these issues, making them visible and raising awareness about mental health, bullying and also elitism, among other topics. Conveying this message takes on another relevance when we put on the table the number of followers that BTS has: imagine that one of its fans came to do a census that gathered 400,000 responses from around the world that are still being analyzed. Using social media as its main form of interaction with its fandom, BTS capitalized on an army of fanatics around the world also known as ARMY, which in addition to loyalty has proven to have political influence. At least that’s how they let it look when they sabotaged a Donald Trump rally.
But not everything about this boyband happens outside: they have a lot in common with Argentina. The strongest? To have been part of connectBTS, an event that united K-pop with contemporary art and the world through a manned balloon powered by solar energy without fossil fuels. So why BTS and not another K-pop band? By the conjunction of all these factors, because despite being hyper famous globally they do not leave their human side and talk about happiness and mental health like other artists about parties, fame and money. BTS are not just the seven guys, they are also the company that runs them and their fans. They are his music, his records and his legacy. They are a global voice that really cares what it has to say, and at the height of a globalized world, they seek to unite despite differences and distances.
