Dynamite

By mid-2020, BTS had already placed songs on the Hot 100 and sold out stadiums worldwide, but every one of those songs had Korean lyrics at its core. “Dynamite,” released August 21, 2020, is entirely in English, written by British songwriters David Stewart and Jessica Agombar and built on a deliberately retro disco-pop pastiche – horns, a four-on-the-floor pulse, a lyric about dancing through hard times that was explicitly conceived, per the group’s label, as a bright, escapist counterweight to a year defined by lockdowns and cancelled tours.

It worked on a scale even the group’s prior hits hadn’t: “Dynamite” debuted at No. 1 on the Hot 100, the first chart-topper by an all-South-Korean act, and stayed there for multiple weeks. The all-English choice was a calculated bet that the group’s existing audience plus English-language radio’s historic resistance to non-English hits would add up to something bigger than either alone, and the bet paid off almost immediately – a crossover that the group’s earlier, Korean-language singles, for all their streaming numbers, hadn’t managed to force.

What’s easy to miss, five years on, is how unlike the rest of the BTS catalog “Dynamite” actually is: no rap verses, no Korean, a genre the group had never fully inhabited before. It’s a pure pop move, executed by a group that had spent years proving it could do everything else, and it’s the song that finally cracked the one chart that had stayed stubbornly out of reach. Greatest of All Time.

Hero image: BTS at a White House press conference, May 31, 2022, The White House. Public domain.