BTS Makes Cover

BTS are on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter, on newsstands now.

The K-pop sensation, whose seven members announced in August they were taking much-needed five-week vacation, is now talking about their next steps. In the cover piece, RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V and Jungkook talk about their music and hopes to return to the Grammy stage.

“When we were presenting [at the Grammys in 2019], we said that ‘We will be back!’, so hopefully we can keep our words,” RM says. “It would be an absolute dream come true. Just thinking about it is thrilling.”

They’ll also be resuming their Love Yourself: Speak Yourself world tour on October 10th at the King Fahd International Stadium in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – a performance that has generated controversy, after the country’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman was implicated in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

While RM says he “wouldn’t say it was easy” to decide to perform there, Jimin adds, “To put it simply, if there’s a place where people want to see us, we’ll go there. That’s really how we feel.”

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While their hiatus initially caused speculation that they might be heading for a breakup, the guys say they plan on staying together for years to come. “As long as our bodies hold up, we’ll be doing the same thing in 10 years,” promises Suga.

Other interesting tidbits from the piece:

While at home, all seven members share a single $7 million condo in the most expensive complex in South Korea, sleeping two and three in a room, dorm-style with Banksy art on the walls.

South Korean music mogul Bang “Hitman” Si-Hyuk put the group together in 2012 for his Big Hit Entertainment group. Bang reveals that he considered several alternate names for the group when it started, including Big Kids and Young Nation, but instead opted for BTS – short for Bangtan Sonyeondan – which translates in English to “Bulletproof Boy Scouts.”

They have three of the top 25 most retweeted Twitter posts of all time, second only to former Pres. Barack Obama.

However, BTS fans, known as the ARMY, were highly upset by the way the reporter depicted the group and K-pop in general, calling the article xenophobic.

In the article, the reporter admits he does not know much about BTS or understand why the group is so popular. He also made a subtle hint that all of BTS’s fans are teenage girls. “Forty-eight hours earlier, I’m on an Asiana Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Seoul, the only 47-year-old man on the plane with a pile of BTS books on his lap,” the article reads. To make matters worse, the article in The Hollywood Reporter made several references to BTS’s English-speaking skills.

“For now, though, BTS is content to just keep doing what the group has been doing. They have no delusions about TV or movie careers – at least not ones that require them to speak English,” reads the article.