Day 60: First Snow + a Lesson on K-Pop

I slept in really late today. I didn't have anywhere I needed to be and I had stayed up way too late the night before so I slept until just past 3 pm. I lay in bed on my phone for a while and found out that it had snowed that morning. I didn't feel like doing much exploring, especially if it was snowy and cold out. I instead found a cafe just around the corner and took my laptop to sit and do work.

When I walked outside the snow had mostly melted, but everything was wet and gross. Luckily the cafe was close by! It had a nice atmosphere, but not as many food options as a lot of the other cafes I have been to. I got a drink and this small bread treat thing and spent the next few hours working on a blog posts and just playing around on my computer. At one point I took a test to see which BTS member would be the best travel buddy for me and I got Namjoon so that was fun haha!

I left the cafe a few hours later. I was feeling super lazy so I stopped by a convenience store nearby to grab some kimbap for dinner and then I went back to my room to finish unpacking and watch some more Netflix. It was nice to have a lazy day, but I also felt so unproductive and crappy because I hadn't actually accomplished anything. Tomorrow I am meeting a few friends to go to a site where BTS filmed one of their prologue videos, which made me feel a bit better about being lazy today. The girls I am meeting are named Beta and Kika and I met them around a month ago when I went to Olympic Park.

This was a super short post so I am going to fill a little more space with a small lesson about BTS, focused on the prologue video I mentioned above and what it is. The prologue video was filmed at the place we are going to tomorrow (an abandoned swimming pool near Seoul National University). I'm going to include music videos below. Uou don't have to watch them, but I would love it if you do! I at least suggest watching "Fire" and "Save Me".

Originally BTS started off like most other k-pop groups: creating individual albums that did not relate to each other. However, they found little success doing it this way so the CEO decided to try something different. Thus began BTS' love for series. The first series they released was called 화양연화 (hwa yang yeon hwa), meaning 'the most beautiful moment in life'. This series consisted of three different albums released between April 2015 and May 2016. The series focused on what BTS considered the most beautiful period in life: years as a teenager. Concepts from the albums included the innocence and preciousness of the period, but also addressed the darker side: the uncertainty, the fear, and the struggles that affect us during that time of our life.

The first album of the series was released in early 2015 and was simply called The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Part 1. Two music videos were released for this album: Dope and I Need U. I Need U would later become their first ever music show win. Oh geez and now I want to explain music shows. Ok this small lesson on BTS is now going to turn into a small lesson about the K-pop industry as well.

Here is a short clip with the end of the I Need U performance + BTS winning their first music show + their encore stage. It shows a little of the process and how the winner is determined.

The K-pop industry is very different from the western pop music industry. It is incredibly competitive. There are new K-pop groups debuting almost every week and each one needs to work very hard to be as active as possible so the public remembers them. Many of them disband (break up) and very few go on to be successful enough to make money.

The process of creating a group is also different. An entertainment company is in charge of creating and training the members and choosing who to debut in a group. There are three major entertainment companies in Korea (SM, JYP, and YG), but there are many, many others. People can be cast by a company through a variety of different methods. Sometimes people are stopped on the street by company reps and asked to audition, others join through yearly auditions held by companies, and others perform on shows or contests and can be recruited by a company. The company will then typically spend years training them to become idols. G-Dragon, from one of the most popular K-pop groups in Korea (BigBang), trained for 11 years, beginning when he was just 8 years old. Each person must meet a certain skill standard for dancing and singing (or rapping) before they can debut.

After debuting it doesn't get easier. Each time a group releases an album they must then promote it. Since the K-pop industry has so many groups trying to become popular or stay relevant, the competition is insane. Idols often make frequent appearances on variety shows or TV shows to try and get, or keep, the public's interest.

Then come the music shows. There are several major music shows that air on TV on different days of the week. For the first few weeks after a group releases an album (no matter how popular they are) they go on these music shows to promote it. Each music show announces a weekly winner from the promoting groups. The winner is determined from many different factors including sales, online votes from fans, and scores from judges. Winning a music show is considered a huge accomplishment, however they are super expensive. I once read that it costs upwards of $4000 just to appear on the show because the company needs to pay for outfits, makeup artists, and more.

This leads me to my next lesson on the k-pop industry: it typically takes years and years and years for an idol to actually start earning money. Their company trains them and pays for the music shows and all the other expenses a group incurs. However, the artists have to pay them back for this. Depending on how long a person has been training for and how successful their group is it can take years for them to make enough money to pay off their debts to their entertainment company. It is also really hard to make money. Artists rarely earn anything from album sales or music shows so they turn to advertising. Since K-pop is so popular in Korea, K-pop idols make great endorsement models for everything from cosmetics to cars. Unfortunately, the companies only want groups that have a large enough fanbase that it will affect their product sales. All these reasons result in the majority of idol groups disbanding because they simply cannot afford to keep going. BTS almost disbanded several times before they were finally able to become successful enough to stay afloat. There was even a point in time where the company completely ran out of money in the middle of filming a music video. Ok, so enough on the K-pop industry for now and back to BTS.

The second album of their first series was released in November 2015 and was called The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Part 2. BTS released a music video for the track Run from this album. The fan theories behind all the events in this music video and how it relates to the rest of the series are so intense and interesting, but I get confused trying to follow them so I won't even start to try and explain it today.

The third and final album from the series, The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Young Forever, was released in May 2016 (this is one of my all time favourite albums). They released several music videos for this album including an MV (music video) for "Save Me", "Fire", and "Epilogue: Forever Young".

"Save Me" is my favourite BTS song (in terms of sound not lyrics, I love the lyrics form their recent series the most). It is also my favourite music video. Rather than being flashy and crazy, it is very simple. They filmed it in one take in a huge empty field in the pouring rain. The behind the scenes of it are crazy because they are all soaking wet and freezing, but they keep having to retake the MV when someone messes up. It's my favourite because I get to watch their amazing dancing and not be distracted by anything else. "Fire" was also an awesome music video because the dance break in it is amazing and their outfits are super cool. "Epilogue: Forever Young" makes me cry, end of story.

Alright so that is a very short summary of the first series BTS ever made. They then went on to produce the Wings series and, most recently, the Love Yourself series (which is seriously beautiful and inspiring and just all around amazing). This summary doesn't even begin to cover the meanings of each individual album or the fan theories behind how the music videos and songs are related (which are so detailed and insane that I am seriously awed by the people that come up with them). Back to the reason I actually brought all of this up... before their first series was released, BTS released the 화양연화 prologue video. The first part of the video was filmed at the swimming pool that I will be going to tomorrow.

Thank you so much for listening to my little lesson on K-pop and BTS and I hope it was at least a little interesting! If you have any questions please comment or let me know, I absolutely love talking about K-pop and BTS. This began as a super short update post and turned into a much longer one haha...

Hope everyone is doing well,

Emily

(November 24, 2018)