Jung Kook, one of the world’s biggest K-pop idols and one of the world’s biggest pop stars, period, is attempting to describe what his gut feeling actually feels like. “It’s kind of like…,” he trails off, toying with the double piercing on the right side of his lip. A pristine white t-shirt makes the sleeve of tattoos on his right arm appear even darker. “It’s kind of indescribable.” And he laughs, giving himself a light palm-tap to the forehead. “I don’t get chills or anything like that, I just have that feeling, like, this is going to work, this is it.”
It was back in March, by his estimation, that he first heard “Seven”, his UK garage-influenced, debut solo single featuring American rapper Latto, and fell instantly in love with it. “We scheduled a recording [in Los Angeles] right away and then the meeting about the video concept. Everything was such smooth sailing,” he recalls.
The track, released in July, spent weeks on the singles chart in the UK and US (where it took the No 1 spot), and snatched the Spotify crown for the fastest song ever, at a mere six days, to reach 100m plays. On YouTube, its video, featuring South Korean actress Han So-hee, was watched 39m times in a single day. The only other time he’s ever felt that unshakeable gut reaction about a song, he says, was with “I Need U” (2015), the first single from BTS’s acclaimed third EP, The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Part 1, widely regarded as a significant launchpad towards their superstardom.
Jung Kook holds the instinctual and the intangible in high regard: the former is what guides his present, but his future is cradled by the latter, at least in terms of how he sees himself as an artist. But more on that later, because Jung Kook – who recently turned 26 and has been very, very famous for a decade – is thinking about who he is at this very moment. “I think I’m the type of person who is honest with their emotions,” he says. “I change quickly. I have to do the things I want to do right now.”
We’re talking over Zoom, Jung Kook in a nondescript room within the enormous building that is the Seoul headquarters of HYBE, the multi-label corporation which began as Big Hit Entertainment in 2005, and which had never trained or debuted a K-pop idol group before BTS. A week prior, he’d been in London, and before that, New York City, battling a
