BTS has left one of its truths unexplained so far.
The K-pop supergroup recently revealed that if it weren’t for COVID-19, they would have stuck (at least mostly) to their native language.
In an interview for a new Billboard cover story, members of the fanatically beloved children’s band talked about their discomfort with singing songs entirely in English.
“There was no alternative,” 28-year-old Jin told Billboard, who released the group’s first English-language song “Dynamite,” which became Billboard Group’s first hit. songs (“Butter” and “Permission to Dance,” which also reached No. 1) this year.
Although the charts and their fans ate up the tracks, the seven-member band was not unanimously satisfied: singing in English felt unnatural, Jin said. “The English I learned in class was so different from the English in the song,” he said. “I had to erase everything I had in my head first.”
With the group’s 2020 world tour plans scrapped due to COVID-19 and live performances still suspended in Korea, turning from Korean with a few splashes of English instead of singing full English songs felt like a move necessary.
In 2019, the group’s only fluent English and “de facto leader,” RM, told Entertainment Weekly that BTS had consciously prioritized adherence to Korean over singing in English, even though English offered more access. easy to various recognitions to which they aspired. That was, of course, before the pandemic.
“I don’t want to compare, but I think it’s even more difficult as an Asian group. These are our goals with a Hot 100 and a Grammy nomination, “RM told EW at the time.” But they’re just goals: we don’t want to change our identity or our genuineness to get number 1. Like, if we suddenly sing in full English and change all these other things, then it’s not BTS. We will do everything, we will try. But if we don’t get number 1 or number 5, that’s fine. “