Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS

Product Information

I'm more than willing to wait for them and I promise to be there for them and cheer louder than any person on earth when they all eventually come back to us. In the book, BTS share stories of their journey so far through more than three years of in-depth coverage and interviews conducted by journalist Myeongseok Kang, an expert in the K-pop and Korean pop culture arena. It was wonderful to hear the members’ perspectives on the different ups and downs they’ve had as a group. We worked together so much and talked with each other so much that little by little, we really did feel we were becoming a team. This is an artist that constantly ekes out plenty of audiovisual content, and to me the challenge of a book is to prove the necessity of this written medium, when BTS have already bared their souls before in multiple documentaries, movies, vlives, youtube livestreams, etc.

Complete with a timeline of all major milestones, BEYOND THE STORY is a remarkable archive -truly everything about BTS in one volume.Nevertheless, will doubtless be taking the book down from my shelf again and again just because it makes me smile. This repeats, and combined with other issues, such as unrelenting corniness in the place of actual emotion, it gives the book a childish tone. I think it's no surprise to anyone that I finished this in one sitting, not even leaving my room to eat or drink water. They also go in depth with explaining how overwhelming their international success became and why they almost decided to disband at the beginning of 2018. In doing so, BTS nurtures the power to build brighter days and they choose to take another step on a road that no one has gone before.

I am so thankful to the members for getting our acts together, and I want to say how thankful I am to ARMY for always loving us. I loved how they subverted my expectations of the things that a boy group would discuss in their songs. I skimmed through to look at the pictures and I’m already screaming and hyperventilating at the details😭😭.I figured I'd be able to have a variety of experiences if I were an idol and an actor at the same time. Beyond the Story chronicles BTS’s rise to global stardom in seven chapters, starting prior to their musical debut in June 2013 and taking readers through their decade-long journey to today.

I liked the music and the video, but what really cemented my becoming an ARMY was reading the translations of the lyrics to their songs. 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. The book would have benefited from heavy editing and as it is, could have gotten the message across in half the length or less. Complete with a timeline of all major milestones, Beyond the Story is a remarkable archive -truly everything about BTS in one volume.

A lot of quotes from the band members gave me deja vu, like I'd heard them in lives or interviews before. It clearly tries to build this hero myth around the members of BTS, doing so mostly by boasting with numbers and surface-level beating-the-odds motivational clichés (an actual quote from the book: "– – BTS's accomplishments over those seven years followed the progression of what could almost be considered a classical hero narrative"). The fact that despite what they faced, they still became the people we know today is a miracle in and of itself. I won't sugarcoat it, reading some parts was very painful and I'm so proud of who these seven people have become despite all that was thrown at them and how much they are willingly changing the way things are done in the music industry in South Korea and also in the world in general.