South Korea’s BTS first K-pop band atop Billboard 200
LOS ANGELES — Clearly, some members of BTS were more interested in the puppies than others.
In a fifth-floor meeting room at the sleek InterContinental hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the seven young men who make up this South Korean boy band — RM, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, Jin and Jungkook, each as handsome and stylishly dressed as the next — were gathered on a recent afternoon to shoot a video for Buzzfeed’s meant-togo-viral “plays with puppies” series, in which an entertainer answers questions submitted by fans as he or she ... well, you can put it together.
RM, the group’s unofficial frontman, knelt eagerly to scoop up one of the fuzzy creatures, while J-Hope showed his excitement by singing the chorus from Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” albeit with a key lyrical adjustment: “Puppy, puppy, puppy / Oh!”
Yet Suga, glued to his phone during a break near the end of a long day of interviews, appeared less smitten — at least until Buzzfeed’s cameras started rolling. Then he put down the phone and cranked up the enthusiasm required of an international pop group determined to break America.
Fortunately for Suga and his bandmates, work like this is paying off.
Last week, BTS’ latest album, “Love Yourself: Tear,” entered the Billboard 200 chart at No. 1 — a first for an act from the busy K-pop scene, which was brought to the attention of many American listeners when Psy’s song “Gangnam Style” took off on YouTube in 2012.
The group’s elaborately choreographed performance on this month’s Billboard Music Awards (where BTS won the prize for top social artist for the second year in a row) was among the show’s most discussed moments online.
And tickets for the outfit’s fall tour — scheduled to stop for four sold-out concerts in September at Los Angeles’ Staples Center — are going for more than $1,000 each on the secondary market.
Indeed, BTS has become so popular in the U.S. that journalists at the InterContinental were asked not to reveal their whereabouts on social media for fear that word might spread and lead fans to descend on the hotel.
What’s remarkable about this crossover success is that it hasn’t come at a creative price; there’s no feeling of compromise to the vivid “Love Yourself: Tear,” BTS’ sixth full-length release since emerging in 2013 from the highly industrialized Kpop scene based in Seoul.
Sung mostly in Korean, the album emphasizes the precise and adventurous production that K-pop listeners expect as it jumps from swinging R&B to surging club music to rowdy hip-hop to the dramatic rap-rock balladry of the disc’s first single, “Fake Love,” which as a non-English-language tune just followed “Despacito” into the upper reaches of the Hot 100.
Curious fans — and with BTS, there’s really no other kind — will discover in “Love Yourself’s” liner notes that the group sought help from Stateside hitmakers such as Ali Tamposi, who’s written for Bieber and Cardi B, and the superstar DJ Steve Aoki.
But as with “Despacito,” the embrace of the music in this country seems to say more about a broadening of American taste than it does about BTS’ willingness to dilute its message (even as the group doggedly courts an audience here).
The members were quick to acknowledge the influence that American boy bands like the Backstreet Boys had on BTS’ catchy songs about romance and heartbreak.
Now, though, they see themselves as “re-exporting” their distinct sound, as RM put it through an interpreter, “to the rest of the world where we had initially drawn much of our inspiration.”
Asked if they ever felt pressured to sing in English, Suga said he’d tried it on a recent solo mixtape and found that it made a “better conduit” for certain “emotions or sensibilities.”
Yet RM, who switches in conversation between Korean and English, said he suspects that most BTS fans “won’t like that much if we sing in other languages.” Korean lyrics, he added, are a core feature of the group’s music, which its ultra-devoted fans have, in turn, “made as part of their identity.”