"Boy With Luv" from BTS and Halsey is the future of artist collaborations

On Wednesday, April 17, BTS achieved another great achievement when the Korean group did TimeThe list of the 100 most influential personalities of 2019. The singer Halsey – who appears on the band's latest single, "Boy With Love" – ​​wrote a sincere note for the Septet in honor of their latest event of their career. She summarizes the BTS and their global appeal in a simple sentence: "Behind these three letters are seven amazing young men who believe that music is stronger than the barriers of language."

This is a statement that was confirmed by the enormity of the group's worldwide press conference the night before. More than 150 media from around the world submitted more than 500 questions to the press conference, including MTV News, which featured Korean media and was broadcast live on YouTube for the international press and fans. The subjects included their last album (Card of the soul: Persona), collaborating with Ed Sheeran on "Make It Right", that they find their unprecedented success invigorating or intimidating, and of course, Halsey.

According to rapper Suga, conceptualizing Character around the themes of "the love and the interest of you [the fans], joy of the little things, "it was important for them to collaborate with" an artist capable of expressing a variety of emotions and we thought that Halsey was appropriate for that. "

"We met for the first time two years ago and we felt that our passion for music was connected," he added for the group.

And it was a mutual thing. In a separate video screened for the press, Halsey highlighted how BTS's passion for music and fans made her want to work with them, crossing oceans and time zones to film the clip in Korea alongside the group. (She even learned part of the choreography – a first for the pop star.) "It's an absolutely amazing band that puts so much love and dedication into everything that it does" , she said. And this admiration continued behind the scenes when BTS, especially the Jimin and J-Hope dancers, helped Halsey perform the choreography on the set. "They were so kind and encouraging and they made me feel that I could really do it if I thought so."

There is also the fact that Halsey and BTS have a unique relationship with their devoted fans, who have seen them go from industry underdogs to royalty in the reign of pop without losing anything of theirs – their candor, their humor, their passion for social issues and their ability to talk to the anxieties of their generation through music – it makes them special. Or, as Halsey has said about the key to BTS's success: "When an artist loves his art, it lasts until the end of his days".

This mutual respect and their art is what makes a collaboration like "Boy With Luv" so simple. A feature is a transaction between artists – a piece for more radio tricks and a greater chance of succeeding in the charts. For BTS, collaborating with a Western artist like Halsey – who has two No. 1 singles to his credit – makes perfect sense as they try to break through the only thing that has escaped them so far in their journey: the American radio. For a BTS fan like Halsey, the opportunity to collaborate with the largest group in the world world is obvious. (You just have to ask Troye Sivan.) Still, I would hardly call Halsey's contribution to "Boy With Luv" a feature film; It's a collaboration in the most real sense of the term – a rich cultural exchange between artists that finds Halsey in Korean harmony and the BTS tailoring its bubbly pop to its own flowing style.

This is largely due to the way they approached the song as a collaborative effort. Halsey brings her own perspective to the song – which finds the seven young men of the BTS in poetry on a minutia of someone's day – with her signature air voice and her hard-hitting ad-libs of the style. want! "

"Working with BTS was really special because it's very different from what I do when I'm doing music alone," Halsey explained. "There are so many individuals in a group, and you have to take into account each of their personal styles.

It was really cool to get together and do something that reflects each one of us. It's a really special marriage of American music and music in Korea that is now a music for the world. "

As the musical landscape becomes more culturally diverse, a song like "Boy With Luv" sets a precedent for the future of artist collaborations – a future in which to hear BTS and Halsey sing in Korean or Bad Bunny and Drake croon in Spanish will not seem so new. Because music is his own universal language, a form of melodious communication. To really understand it, just open their minds.