Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS

Product Information

From the first album 2 cool 4 Skool 2013 to their recent album Proof of 2022, BTS tell a story of the growing pains of a teenager and the transition to an adult, who whilst still learning, is happy with who they are with a couple of other stories mixed in the middle. Sharing everything you could ever want to know about BTS in one remarkable volume, Beyond the Story is not to be missed. BTS shares personal, behind-the-scenes stories of their journey so far through interviews and more than three years of in-depth coverage by Myeongseok Kang, who has written about K-pop and other Korean pop culture in various media.

Let's not kid ourselves: This oral history was put together by the editor-in-chief of Weverse Magazine and officially published through the gates of HYBE, so it won't pull a Bob Woodward and expose the cruel inner workings of the K-Pop industry, or take a turn and suddenly talk about the personal lives behind the personas of the members, or go full postcolonial studies on the marketing of Korean culture - it's not what the book aims to do. The love that BTS has for writing music, producing it and performing is well documented in the book. It’s a book for fans, as a non-fan is not likely to read 400 pages with hyper-details (exact dates, times, number of album units sold not rounded up) that distracted often from the narrative. Rather, it's a neatly produced puzzle piece in the overall mythology of BTS, the story about seven young men who signed up with a small entertainment company and then became the biggest band in the world.I had always been very shy and introverted, but my social anxiety and my constant need to isolate myself from everything and everyone around me reached an utterly concerning level, to the point where I would literally stay locked up inside my room for 2 weeks straight without even trying. The amount of love and appreciation I have for them is more than enough for me to endure these hard times caused by their absence. Some of them are in the military, some of them are touring the world and some of them are working on their solo albums, but I constantly feel like they're right beside me, just like I've always felt since the moment I met them in 2014. Or I may have appreciated this better if I hadn’t already consumed 10 hours of Bangtan content every day for 3 months, at the peak of my fanhood.

here’s the thing about books like this⸺we don’t really get to have a critical opinion on them, because it’s simply someone else’s life, and what right do any of us have to speak on people who have already gone through endless hardships?

In this respect, BTS and Big Hit, without even realising it themselves, were in the process of tearing down boundaries. All of these would have been fascinating subjects to dive into, even for a subchapter's length, but the book seems afraid of revealing anything too vulnerable, which wouldn't fit this hero narrative it has decided to structure itself around.

Still, it would have been nice to explore some humanizing aspects more in detail — for example, when RM had to confront that his great hip hop influences had a culture of misogyny and how he in response worked to improve his perspective — but the book merely mentions and moves on from these in-depth moments of development, as though it’s afraid to acknowledge the members as having any flaws at all. Otherwise, BTS remains a multimedia endeavor that now has an official book that seamlessly blends into their overall oeuvre. A team spearheaded by a group of underground rappers that included a middle schooler who had just started lessons needed more than just cohabitation to cohere into a group⸺they needed some form of alchemy.The text takes readers from the trainee days to the Grammy stage, tackling all albums and many ideas behind the multimedia storytelling that is the BTS universe. I'm too blessed to have met them in this life" said by Jhope about the members perfectly sums up how I and millions of others feel too. Numbers getting bigger doesn't actually carry much emotional weight without well-built context and it seems that they're supposed to pack the punch that an actual narrative would have provided to the story, yet fail miserably. Beyond The Story is finally out and as promised it is an astounding record that delves deeply into Bangtan's active years before and after their debut in 2013. Their vast and diverse discography filled with songs about self-love, self-acceptance, self-discovery, friendships, relationships and so many other important issues along with their sincere lyrics, their outstanding performances and their humble, entertaining and genuine personalities are just SOME of the reasons why BTS will always have a special place in my heart.