Wonder, Her, Tear, Answer

"Bullets have often shaped the course of human history. But in June 2013, it was a group of Bulletproof Boy Scouts who began a journey that would change the state of global music forever."

Happy anniversary, BTS: Blood, Sweat & Tears, you're officially five-years-old today! Like any good book mom, I'm still thinking about you, and thinking about what I could have done differently: was the layout right? My tone? Did I spend too little time on one section, and too much on another? It's been a while since I woke up thinking about a potential typo that I was convinced had made it into the book, grabbed a copy, and let out a sigh of relief that it wasn't there, and then wondered where were the elusive typos in my book that I know haunts practically every book ever published. But, as Min Yoongi himself said, "Perfection is an elusive term. I simply just did my best."

If you've read Notes on K-pop for a while, or even just for a minute, and not known that I wrote a book exploring the glory that is BTS, and that it arrived on August 11, 2020, I wonder if this is a surprise to you. I very rarely talk about BTS publicly nowadays, keeping that love mostly to myself, though let myself some moments of indulgence here or there. My friend Monique actually suggested I get real indulgent and give the book a 5-year photoshoot with a cake, crown, and flowers to, but before I decide if I'm going to do that or not, I wanted to spend some more time writing it, or at least about it. I think this may be the last time I write about BTS: Blood, Sweat & Tears, so please forgive me for going on and rambling a bit.

With BTS: Blood, Sweat & Tears, I packaged my love of BTS, and my hopes that someone may read this labor of love and feel like they better understand what makes this septet so beloved. It's not an emotional read, and I'm terrified of rereading it because I certainly was too clinical throughout much of it, but it is a book about passion, fervor, and discordant emotion turned to artful noise.

In recent years, "noise music" has become a bit of a slur in some K-pop spaces, and it always makes me crack up because all music is technically noise (and also because the genre that we call "noise music"has a long, valuable history.) We just are able to tune into the beauty and value of the noise, with songwriters and performers finding a way forward through the noisy mess of human experience and turning it into a singular, often 3-minute long, space that makes sense to our ears and our hearts.

BTS does this so well, and if you've never cried to a BTS song... Well, then you're not me, that time I listened to "I'm Fine" while walking through the rain in Times Square one night several years ago, and thinking about how far it takes to get to actually meaning that phrase rather than the shoulder-shrugging version to deter outreach, when really a human means "Save Me".

"I'm Fine" is actually the first song on my "The Story of BTS listening guide", a 49-minute playlist I made for writing sessions of BTS: BST, when I wasn't playing songs on repeat while writing their individual blurbs. The song's exuberant energy towards understanding, healing, and moving forward is what I wanted to put into the book, which itself is a three-part book broken into history ("Blood"), music review ("Sweat"), and essays ruminating on BTS's success ("Tears"). (And if you're wondering about the name's confusing acronyms... It was originally just meant to be "Blood, Sweat & Tears: The Story of BTS" in a nod to that iconic song and what it represented for BTS, but... marketing wanted BTS's name to be upfront. So marketing won!)

Writing BTS: BST was both harder and easier than I ever imagined. I was, and still predominantly remain, a short-form writer rather than one who regularly publishes 10s of thousands of words on one topic. That was one reason I broke the book into parts; it helped me write it better when it was easier to tackle. It was also hard because I don't think I knew what I wanted the book to be. It was a coffee table and academic work and an overview of their career and a testament to BTS's power all wrapped in one. What it wasn't was a personal take on BTS, or a meme-oriented exploration of fandom (though I'd love to read that!), or, what I think many people feared, a hit piece in pretty packaging.

Because at the same time as it was a book created from my love, it was also a book borne out of pain and fear, and frustration and sorrow. If you don't know how much I love BTS, that's extremely understandable. For five years, I've barely spoken about one of the most important things to me. Even prior to that, talking about BTS felt like an impossibility some days. I don't call myself ARMY publicly unless directly asked, because I respect the community and that the community at large does not want me in it.

I won't take entire blame here, given the way that fan communities operate online, but I made many mistakes while reporting on BTS, some egregious journalistic failures and some more personal ones (I am haunted by a joke I made once, and realized that my sarcastic sense of humor, so common in New York media, wasn't appropriate for Billboard readership, or maybe ever to leave my own brain). I wrote too much, too quickly, without always confirming something I wrote was the most accurate it could be, and often self-edited due to lack of of editorial oversight, to my work's detriment. I learned through writing BTS: BST how much a good editor really does, and I'll be forever grateful to Sarah Fairhall from Viz, as much as I probably drove her up a wall.

I certainly tweeted too much back then. Leaving Twitter, then X, in September 2022 was a long time coming, and as I continue to engage on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky I'm trying not to repeat those mistakes. And they were certainly mistakes. If you weren't there, I won't revisit, but there were certainly things I could have done better, and acted less childishly. BTS say that forever we are young, but I was too old to act the way I did at times. Being a woman online who is a music journalist is a special sort of hell that I trapped myself in even deeper depths for reasons that don't really matter now, but did so much back then.

Actually, as I write this, I realize that this may still be relevant in 2025 to some people, but I hope it isn't. I hope people aren't sending images of corpses to inboxes saying, "this should be you". And if there's another Onion-style account holding polls to determine what nasty nicknames to call journalists they've decided they don't like, I'd rather not know. I don't know if I'm just too old to care, or not as invested in the space as I no longer write nonstop, or just matured and went to therapy enough, but I find myself attempting to care less about what people get mad at online nowadays and more just trying to find happiness and joy.

I look at BTS:BST now, and I know that as much as I love it it's not a beloved book by readers. That's the hope every author has for their books, or at least that their books get read. I sometimes doubt anyone has read this book in good faith aside from a few of my friends (the ones who I didn't turn away by obsessing over BTS and ARMY for several years), but I hope someone somewhere has enjoyed it for all that it is. I apologize for what I would write differently nowadays, and if I ever revisit it I think I'd pare everything down to make it flow better and less dense, and add in some really interesting interviews with creatives that I ended up removing from the final copy for reasons that now seem so strange to me. There are many regrets, I will say, and I wish I had done better, as a writer, a person, and an ARMY.

But while there was a very serious week when I thought about pulling the book's publication (I don't remember the reason, but there was serious upset over something I had written and I spent a lot of time talking to my agent and editor about if I would be paying back my contract and not publishing this book), I'm so proud of BTS: Blood, Sweat & Tears.

If I write nothing else ever again, I'm glad to know that I wrote words with meaning, that attempt to interpret one of the most beloved things of my life. I've never actually reread it; I'm too scared to find that I disagree with myself nowadays, or that I just simply hate the way I wrote a sentence. I guess that's part of the craft though. Once you hit publish, that's it. It's a bit weightier with a book, especially a book you bring into the world knowing that many people will vilify it without ever reading it, but I think that's just the world we live in nowadays, huh?

If you've read this far, I thank you for reading this rumination on craft, love, and regrets. And you probably have forgotten the title. It's a nod to the thematic styling of BTS's Love Yourself era, from which this book was primarily born, but also to the way that era relates to the creative process, particularly mine with this book. The excitement and joy of first pitching then writing, I think for a long time I resented that people weren't reading it, or that they were flat out hating on it without giving it a chance.

It made me mad, at myself, at the book, at fans, but especially of a few former friends who I felt abandoned by because they chose to agree with negativity over me, who I felt like was painted over with a show of how much I was like them, even if my perspective was more critical or not always aligned with others' values. "Look at how much I love BTS, why do you not see it, and why do you not recognize that love comes in many different forms?" the book has at times felt like it's screaming. It's why I don't talk about it a lot; it hurts too much, and I love it, and myself, too much to engage with the discourse around it that I myself have caused to turn negative at times. I can't change past actions I regret and feel apologetic for, but I can change how I engage with the now positively, on terms that bring me joy, and I hope to help spread it.

But love doesn't need to be loud to be love, and it doesn't need to be perceived to be real. It just needs to be.