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The members of superstar South Korean boy band BTS will begin their mandatory military services imminently, their record label confirmed on Monday, effectively postponing their careers for at least three years.
BTS is South Korea’s most globally successful music act in history, establishing a string of world records and firsts such as becoming the first Korean music artists to debut at the top of the Billboard 200 charts and the first to be nominated for a Grammy Award.
The band’s near-universal popularity resulted in an invite to the White House this summer, where group members declared they would united to “put an end to” anti-Asian racism with leftist President Joe Biden.
It was great to meet with you this week at the White House, @bts_bighit. The rise in anti-Asian hate crimes requires all of us to stand up, speak out, and give hate no safe harbor. Thanks for all you’re doing. It matters. pic.twitter.com/R1YpKnO9zA
President Biden (@POTUS) June 4, 2022
The BTS collaboration with Biden would prove to be their last uncontroversial public appearance, as the band members described being exhausted and emotionally wayward in a livestream shortly thereafter that concluded with them announcing a “hiatus” – and their record label desperately denying in multiple public releases that the band would pause its career.
In South Korea, all able-bodied men must complete two years of military service by age 28, as South Korea remains in a permanent, frozen state of war with North Korea. The news that BTS will join the South Korean military followed a tense weekend in which the communist North Korean regime fired hundreds of artillery shots and a short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) into the sea neighboring both countries, a potential threat of an impending nuclear attack.
The office of conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol is reportedly on 24-hour watch for a nuclear detonation, the South Korean outlet Yonhap reported on Monday.
BTS members had already benefitted from a legal exemption offers to extraordinary talents to extend that deadline to age 30. Jin, the oldest member of the group, will turn 30 in December.
“BTS member Jin will cancel his plan for military deferment by the end of October and will follow through with the enlistment process set by Military Manpower Administration,” HYBE, the talent agency representing BTS, said in a corporate filing published on Monday, according to South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo.
