I expected quite a lot of this Youngdae Kim’s book “BTS – The Review: A
Comprehensive Look at the Music of BTS” as Youngdae Kim is a noted music critic
and author who serves as a member of the Selection Committee for the Korean
Music Awards. He is born and raised in South Korea but completed his Ph.D. in
ethnomusicology at the University of Washington and is currently living in the
USA where he is a critical column writer for MTV and Vulture by New York
Magazine among other things.
He has always been interested in and proud of BTS and I thought that
with this book BTS would finally get what they deserve: a serious, scholarly
look at their music from their debut in 2013 up onto early 2019 when the book
was written. With the subtitle “A Comprehensive Look at the Music of BTS” it
was what the book seemed to promise its reader, but I must say that I was
somehow disappointed.
Yes, Kim does review every single BTS album and the mixtapes of the
different members too, but the reviews are short and mostly concentrated on the
ballads as that seems to be the genre that Kim prefers. By doing so, he
neglects to give in-depths analyses of the backbone of BTS’ music production as
BTS started out as a hip-hop team and it is still the three rappers who write
the majority of songs that also include funk, r&b, jazz, Latin, EDM and
many other genres. In the same way the rappers take a backseat to the vocalists
in this book which is quite strange as the rappers are the fundament of the
band that existed as a trainee group before any of the vocalists were added.
As you can probably see, I’m not that thrilled with the reviews, but
then again, the reviews only make up one part of the book. The rest of it
consists of interviews with people in and around the Korean music industry,
whereof most of them have nothing to do with BTS. There is an interview with
the Korean hip-hop journalist Bonghyeon Kim, the Literary Critic Hyeongcheol
Shin, the Chairman of the KMA Selection Committee Changnam Kim, the popera
tenor Hyungjoo Lim and Billboard’s K-pop columnist Jeff Benjamin who more or
less backstabbed BTS as soon as he was paid to promote another Korean band. The
composer brother Su is also interviewed and at least he worked with BTS
especially in their early days, but he also worked with many other K-pop acts. Of
course, the people interviewed mention BTS, but most of the interviews are
about K-pop as such or about the interviewees. There are no interviews with BTS
themselves, with the founder of their company Big Hit, Bang Sihyuk (Hitman
Bang), or with their main producer Pdogg, which is very disappointing. After
having read the book, I think the subtitle should have been, “A Comprehensive
Look at K-pop and how BTS fit into it” instead. At least, that would have been
closer to the truth!
Youngdae Kim also mentions the very unique relationship between BTS and
their fans, ARMY, but throughout the book he insists that their fans are
teenagers or people in their twenties and that they are all girls. In the last
chapters of the book, he finally acknowledges that the band has middle-aged
fans as well, but not that they have male fans. Seeing the latest Korean statistics
that have been widely quoted in the western press too, at least 55% of BTS fans
are 30+, and these statistics don’t include fans over 70, so the true number is
probably 60%, which makes the core audience quite different from the general
audience of other K-pop acts. Besides, about 20% are males of all ages, but they
are hardly ever included in statistics.
All in all, I have to say that I think “BTS – the Review” is a rather
misleading description of BTS and their music. Of course it is not as bad as
what we are used to see written by people who don’t know anything about BTS,
but at the same time it is also more annoying as the author should have known
better than painting a picture of BTS as a band that is mostly carried by their
ballads and their vocalists and that has mainly female teenage fans. I was very
disappointed, even though Kim in the epilogue correctly concludes that the BTS
phenomenon is a movement that BTS and ARMY created together.
Three out of five stars: ***
