BTS - “No More Dream” (2 Cool 4 Skool, 2013)
“No More Dream” is BTS’s debut single. The opening acoustic bass line immediately tells us what kind of song this is, because it sounds like H.O.T’s 1996 debut single “전사의 후예” (Warrior’s Descendant), a song about social pressure and bullying. (A rough English translation is here.) “No More Dream” has a similar hip-hop sound and a similarly socially-conscious message: it’s dedicated by Rap Monster “to all the youngsters without dreams”, kids who study hard to get a good job and material success one day but don’t have any private ambitions of their own or don’t see the point in them.
K-pop is so intertextual that the similarity to H.O.T’s song is certainly not an accident. (For more examples of K-pop intertextuality, see Big Bang repurposing a famous Lee Moon-se song, or Girl’s Day taking a chorus melody from Nami.) It’s a way to fit BTS into an existing idol tradition: the serious, socially conscious debut song. The clearest illustration of this is BTS’s special performance stage at the 2013 MBC end-of-year Gayo Daejejeon, where (minus Suga) they covered Sechs Kies’ debut single “학원별곡” (Song of School Life), a rap-rock song about academic pressure, and “Warrior’s Descendant”, which then segued into “No More Dream”.
The video seems a bit nonsensical compared to the song’s strong message. If they want to be free to pursue their dreams, why are they pretending to shoot each other? Is their dream to smash furniture that’s been left out on the street? Is that an illegal enough activity to warrant a police helicopter? In my opinion these things are signifiers like the opening bassline is a signifier, and it’s meant to align the video visually with other idol music videos of the time coded as “hard” and “hip-hop”: the mock-dystopian parts of Big Bang’s “Fantastic Baby”; the manic weapon wielding in 2NE1’s “내가 제일 잘 나가” (I Am The Best); the club lighting colour palette of Block B’s “Nalina”. For comparison, all of these elements are present in idol rap group B.A.P’s debut “Warrior”, released the year before “No More Dream”, which has a similarly motivational message (and even more fake fighting and gunplay). (As rookies, B.A.P also covered “Warrior’s Descendant” for a music show special stage.)
Debuting with a socially conscious, rap-filled song is not a revolutionary move. (Even EXO, the most boy band of boy bands, did this.) But there are some unique things about “No More Dream”, and the most important is that it’s told from the specific perspective of a teenager while declaring change to be needed and possible, where most songs in this genre only do one or the other. For instance, songs like “Warrior”, Super Junior’s “Don’t Don” and EXO’s “Mama” speak from something like an omniscient narrator’s distance when asking for change. Conversely, “Warrior’s Descendant” and “Song of School Life” are written from a teenager’s perspective about their real complaints, but it stops short at listing them and saying, “Something needs to change.” But “No More Dream” is spoken peer-to-peer; in an interview two years later with Hiphopplaya, Rap Monster revealed that when he’d written lyrics on more general topics like money, Big Hit CEO Bang Sihyuk rejected them and asked instead for “[their] true stories”. BTS aren’t just spreading another empowering message, but one that empowers youth.
AMEN TO THAT.
