Billboard

By the time I became interested in BTS, I already knew they were special.

I had seen the performances.

I had discovered how hard they practiced.

I had listened more carefully to their lyrics and the messages behind them.

But there was still one thing I never expected.

I never imagined BTS would become this big around the world.

Not because I doubted their talent.

Because, at the time, global pop music still felt like a world with a very high wall around it.

And at the center of that world was the English language.

The Global Pop World Didn’t Feel Open to Everyone

For decades, the biggest international pop stars overwhelmingly came from English-speaking markets.

There had been exceptions, of course.

And Korea already had artists who had reached international audiences. PSY’s “Gangnam Style,” for example, became a worldwide phenomenon in 2012.

But what BTS was attempting felt different.

They weren’t arriving with one viral song.

They were a seven-member Korean group trying to build a lasting global career while continuing to release music largely in Korean.

As a Korean watching this happen, I didn’t assume the rest of the world would simply accept them.

Asian artists could face stereotypes. Korean lyrics could be treated as a barrier.

How far could seven Korean men really go in the center of the Western pop industry?

I didn’t know.

Then the wall started cracking.

America Heard BTS Before BTS Changed Their Language

One of the first moments that made the change impossible to ignore came in 2017.

BTS performed “DNA” at the American Music Awards, their first U.S. television performance. ABC described it beforehand as their U.S. TV debut; the audience that night included fans singing along to a Korean-language song.

Think about what was happening.

A Korean group was standing on a major American awards-show stage.

They were singing in Korean.

And people in the audience knew the words.

For me, that was significant.

For years, international success often seemed to require artists from smaller music markets to move toward English.

But BTS was showing another possibility.

Maybe the audience could move toward the artist instead.

Then Came the Billboard No. 1

In 2018, something happened that would once have seemed almost impossible.

BTS’s LOVE YOURSELF 轉 ‘Tear’ reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200, making BTS the first K-pop act to top the main U.S. album chart.

And this wasn’t an English-language album designed to disguise where they came from.

GRAMMY.com noted that it became the first predominantly foreign-language album in more than 12 years to top the chart.

That mattered to me.

Because BTS wasn’t succeeding after becoming less Korean.

They were succeeding while remaining recognizably Korean.

Their names were Korean.

Much of their music was Korean.

Their story began in Korea.

And millions of listeners decided that none of those things prevented them from connecting with the music.

Music Had Arrived Before Language Did

This was where their international success reminded me of my own first experience with “MIC Drop.”

I’m Korean, and even I wasn’t sitting there analyzing every word the first time I heard it.

The rhythm reached me first.

The performance reached me first.

My shoulders were already moving.

Only later did I look deeper.

Perhaps millions of international listeners experienced something similar.

They might not have understood every Korean word.

But they understood energy.

They understood emotion.

They understood confidence, sadness, loneliness and joy.

And if they wanted to understand more, they could search for translations and explanations afterward.

That made me realize something very simple:

Music had arrived before language did.

Then Seven Korean Men Walked Onto Wembley

If the Billboard chart proved BTS could compete in the world’s largest music market, another moment showed the physical scale of what had happened.

In June 2019, BTS headlined Wembley Stadium in London.

Not a small K-pop event.

Not a niche Asian music festival.

Wembley.

The same stadium associated with some of the biggest names and moments in global popular music.

BTS became the first South Korean group to headline the stadium, and both shows sold out. Wembley reported that tickets for the two dates sold out within 90 minutes; Korea.net reported a combined audience of about 120,000 across the two performances.

For someone who remembered wondering how far a Korean idol group could possibly go, seeing that was extraordinary.

The question was no longer:

“Can K-pop really become global?”

The evidence was standing inside a packed stadium.

Then the World Stopped

And then came 2020.

COVID-19 changed almost everything.

People stayed home.

Schools closed.

Travel stopped.

Concerts disappeared.

BTS lost their planned world tour too. In a 2020 message at the United Nations, RM spoke about how their plans had disappeared and how isolation had affected them.

This period has always felt important to me when thinking about BTS.

I don’t believe COVID created BTS’s global success.

By then, they had already topped the Billboard 200 and sold out Wembley Stadium.

BTS was already global before the pandemic.

But I do think the pandemic created a strange new moment between BTS and the world.

Millions of people were spending more time at home.

They were online.

They were anxious.

They were lonely.

They needed somewhere to escape for a few minutes.

And music was still able to travel when people couldn’t.

“Dynamite” Arrived at Exactly That Moment

In August 2020, BTS released “Dynamite.”

It was their first song released completely in English.

Big Hit described it as a song of joy and confidence created amid the discouragement of the global situation—a way of bringing energy through music and performance.

And then it exploded.

“Dynamite” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, making BTS the first South Korean artist to top America’s main singles chart.

This was another wall.

And BTS had gone through it.

But I think focusing only on the record misses part of what made the song special.

The world was going through one of its darkest periods in decades.

And here were seven people dancing in bright clothes, singing something light, energetic and deliberately joyful.

For a few minutes, people could move.

Smile.

Dance in their rooms.

Forget what was happening outside.

That’s why, looking back, I sometimes think BTS’s music functioned as a kind of escape route during the pandemic.

Not because music could solve COVID.

Of course it couldn’t.

But music could make a difficult day feel slightly less difficult.

And Then They Sang “Life Goes On”

What BTS did next may have been even more meaningful.

Instead of pretending everything was fine, they released BE.

Big Hit described the album as reflecting the fear, anxiety and helplessness created by COVID-19 while still expressing the determination to move forward. Its lead single carried an extremely simple message:

“Life Goes On.”

The song subsequently became the first non-English-language song to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

To me, there is something almost poetic about that.

For years, people wondered whether Korean-language music could truly sit at the center of American pop culture.

Then, during a global pandemic, a Korean group reached No. 1 with a song whose title needed no translation:

Life Goes On.

The Language Barrier Hadn’t Disappeared

I don’t think BTS magically eliminated every barrier facing Asian artists.

Prejudice didn’t disappear.

The Western music industry didn’t suddenly become perfectly open.

And language still matters in global entertainment.

But BTS proved something important.

Those barriers were not absolute.

A song didn’t necessarily need to begin in English to create emotion in London, Los Angeles, Paris, São Paulo or Seoul.

An artist didn’t have to erase where they came from before the rest of the world could listen.

And perhaps that’s what amazed me most.

When I first saw BTS, I thought:

They’re a very good Korean idol group.

Years later, I was watching the world debate where BTS belonged in global pop history.

I hadn’t expected that.

I don’t think many of us had.

They Didn’t Simply Enter Global Pop — They Changed What Seemed Possible

Records tell part of the story.

Billboard No. 1s.

Sold-out stadiums.

GRAMMY nominations—BTS eventually received five nominations through the 65th GRAMMY Awards.

But numbers alone aren’t what fascinates me.

What fascinates me is the change in possibility.

Before BTS, a Korean-language boy band becoming one of the biggest music acts in the world seemed improbable to many people.

After BTS, it no longer seems impossible.

That’s a much bigger achievement than a chart position.

Because records are eventually broken.

But once someone proves that a wall can be crossed, the people who come afterward no longer have to wonder whether there is a door.

They already know there is one.

And yet, after watching BTS break through those barriers, I began to notice something else.

Perhaps their most interesting legacy wasn’t happening on Billboard at all.

It was happening among the millions of people who called themselves ARMY.

Continued in Part 3: BTS Changed More Than Music — The Message That Built a Global Fandom