The Number Ones: BTS’ “Butter”

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

I was mad. I was too mad. I wanted to pop off, and I didn't think about the consequences. Those consequences were real. I should've anticipated them. I did not.

Here's why I was mad: "Butter," the second English-language single from the South Korean boy band BTS, debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. This seemed wrong to me. It was the kind of thing that kept happening — forgettable songs going straight to #1 because of the rabid fanbases who work as coordinated units to improve those songs' chart fortunes. Many, many pop stars had fans who were willing to undertake those efforts, but nobody seemed quite as motivated as the BTS Army, the legion of online stans who went to extraordinary lengths to supercharge BTS' chart numbers. This group had once again succeeded in pushing BTS to the top of the Hot 100. This bothered me, since I really didn't think "Butter" was that popular. Oops.

By the time that "Butter" gave BTS their fourth chart-topper in eight months, I was a few years deep into writing this column, and I was also working on my book. I had romantic notions about the idea of the #1 song, the one that plays out of a million car windows at the same time. The actual results of the weekly Hot 100 often contradict those romantic ideas, as record labels have been faking their way into #1 hits since the chart's earliest days. But when I saw stories about BTS fans pooling money to buy singles, or using VPNs in other countries so that their purchases would count on the American charts, I got annoyed. I wasn't hearing those BTS songs out in the world, and the group's ability to continually recapture the #1 spot felt cheap and fake. I didn't like it.

When I was a kid, I didn't have a video game console at home because my parents were convinced that it would cause me to fail in life. So I only got to play video games at my friends' houses, and I didn't get isolated hours to practice or learn game intricacies. But I could always beat my friend Evan at Virtua Fighter on his Sega Saturn, just by button-mashing. He'd try to do these elaborate combos that he knew, and I'd just be like kickkickkickkickjumpkick and win. Evan hated this. He'd throw controllers across the room and shit. He would insist that I was doing it wrong, even though I was playing the same game as him and getting better results. This was basically how I felt about BTS in the summer of 2021.

So I wrote something. This was unwise. My point, which I tried to make in a calm and evenhanded fashion, was that the pop charts are effectively useless if a fan army can hold them hostage for weeks at a time. They don't reflect anything beyond the efforts of one devoted group of people. But this particular devoted fanbase was not into what I had to say. The comments section on that post was a fucking disaster. My Twitter mentions were worse, and they stayed like that for months. BTS fans would go digging into my old posts for things to dunk on, or they'd be like, "That's why you have so many bumps on your forehead!" It was unpleasant. Stereogum got hit with a DDOS attack, which took the site offline for a few hours one afternoon, and that was unpleasant, too.

I wrote that piece from a place of annoyance, and there were a few things I didn't take into consideration. I'm not sorry that I offended the BTS Army. I think a lot of those fools were just waiting for the opportunity to go psycho on somebody, and I became that person for them. You can't walk around in fear of that kind of thing. It's just a natural byproduct of being on the internet and having opinions. But I wish that I'd thought a little harder about what it meant to have a fanbase, rather than an artist or a record label, who was ready to use the Hot 100 to make a point, collectively. That was interesting. It was a pretty new development in pop-chart history — this group of people around the world coming together with a common cause, supporting their favorite group with their hearts and minds and wallets. Viewed in a certain light, it might've even been wholesome.

In the weeks after I published that article, I paid a lot of attention to one guy who jumped into my mentions. I'm not on Twitter anymore, and I can't find any record of this interaction, but I think the guy was an indie rapper in Toronto. He was not a member of the BTS Army, but he took their side. This guy called me out for bashing this group of fans who were just using their money to support their favorites, rather than celebrating the fact that this chart triumph was the work of actual fans rather than record-label vampires. The BTS Army noticed this guy, and they started supporting him, buying his music. A little while back, I had a Bluesky interaction with this guy, who said that the whole episode changed his life. (Again, this is all from memory, since I can't find the actual interaction. I'd put the guy's name in here if I remembered it, and I'll update this post if I hear from him later.)

Community is a good thing. We all need it wherever we can find it. Increasingly, we find it, or some simulacrum of it, online. The pandemic was still raging when "Butter" debuted at #1, so it was harder to find that shared feeling in the real world. Now: I think using your own money to aid in the chart fortunes of a multinational corporation is chump shit. It's sucker behavior. If you buy 14 different digital copies of the same BTS single, the members of the group will probably only get the tiniest fraction of what you're trying to give them. Instead, the money will go to Columbia, BTS' American label, and to Hybe, the Korean company that launched the group. In 2019, Hybe went public on the Korean stock exchange. A few months before "Butter" came out, it paid a billion dollars for Scooter Braun's company Ithaca Holdings. If you're putting your grassroots organizing efforts into supporting a company like that, you are wasting your efforts. It's an impulse that I cannot understand. But if that same impulse leads you to directly support a Toronto rapper after he defended your boys in some annoying writer's Twitter mentions, then I can only respect the passion.

Anyway, the joke is on me. I'd assumed that "Butter," like so many other singles that debut at #1, would immediately fade and be forgotten. This did not happen. Instead, "Butter" spent most of the summer in the #1 spot. When the new Hot 100 list came out every week, I'd get a fresh flood of gloating BTS fans in my mentions. Chart-manipulation tactics had something to do with the long reign of "Butter," but it wasn't the whole story. In the end, "Butter" made some real cultural impact, at least to the point where I didn't have to dig too hard to fill up the Bonus Beats section below. The song turned out to be a legit #1 hit, not something that I needed to rail against. That's why you shouldn't bang out blog posts when you're in a bad mood.

Anyway, I think "Butter" is a pretty OK song.

Eight months before "Butter," BTS scored their first #1 hit with "Dynamite," which was also their first English-language song. As I wrote in that column, BTS had previously insisted that they would never release an English-language single because it wouldn't be true to their identity as Korean artists. They wanted to reach #1 in the US, but they didn't want to compromise themselves to do it. The pandemic changed that calculus, or at least that was the official story. So BTS compromised themselves to make "Dynamite," an upbeat pop song that's cheerfully generic to the point of self-parody. A few months after that, BTS made it back to #1 with the Korean-language pandemic ballad "Life Goes On," so they managed to accomplish their goal on their own terms anyway. But when summer 2021 rolled around, somebody decided that it was time for some more English-language BTS singles.

"Butter," like "Dynamite" before it, is a made-to-order song, one that was specifically created to serve a market function. When "Dynamite" came out, the freelance songwriters did a lot of press about the whole process behind making that first English-language single for BTS. The process behind "Butter" was a little more opaque. RM, the only BTS member fluent in English, is also the only one who had anything to do with writing the song. The group announced the single at a press conference, and RM explained, "We wanted to participate in the [making of the] song, but it was already pretty good. But we felt some of the parts, like the rap, were not fully compatible with our style, and we thought that this was then something we could work on." Suga, another one of the BTS rappers, had been studying English for a year, and he had some ideas, too. At that press conference, though, he said, "My suggestions were immediately dropped. No questions, no consideration — just immediately binned." Apparently, he wasn't even mad about it.

So RM is one of the seven songwriters who was credited for his work on "Butter." Five of the others — Jenna Andrews, Rob Grimaldi, Stephen Kirk, Sebastian Garcia, and Alex Bilowitz — are industry journeyman types, songwriters for hire. All of them are American or Canadian. Some of them had already worked with K-pop groups. Some would later work with Huntr/x, the fictional demon-hunting K-pop group that'll eventually appear in this column. And then there's the seventh writer of "Butter": a gentleman named Ron Perry, who had never been credited with writing or producing a song before that one. Instead, Perry was busy with his day job, as chairman and CEO of Columbia Records.

Look: I don't know how this works. Maybe Ron Perry, a former music publishing executive who ascended to the top of the Columbia ladder in 2018, was really in the lab with all those other writers, working out chord changes and making subtle lyrical adjustments. Perry took credit for being the guy who found and pushed the "Dynamite" demo, and I assume he did something similar with "Butter." He's not the first label guy to be awarded songwriting credit on a big hit; it used to be fairly standard in the more crooked corners of the music business. Perry's credit left a bad taste in my mouth, and it definitely impacted my view of "Butter" as a product of cynical industry fuckery. It made me like the song less.

But if I take all that context out of the equation and hear "Butter" as a pure pop song, there's a lot to like. For one thing, it's got a nasty bassline, and more pop hits should have those. (The BTS guys were adamant that they weren't consciously biting Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" bassline, but it's fine if they were, since that one was half-stealing Chic's "Good Times" bassline anyway.) A bassline like that is a key ingredient if you're making sprightly, synthetic disco-funk, and that's what "Butter" is.

Here are some more things that I like about "Butter": The syncopated mouth-clicks, the retro synth-washes, the subtle notes of chicken-scratch guitar, the explosive chords that come in with the chorus, the strutting talkbox work on the bridge. I mostly like the vocals, too. On "Butter," you don't get the extra punch of hearing singers who really believe the lyrics that they're delivering. It's the opposite of that. Most of the BTS guys presumably didn't even understand what they were singing. But when you've got a situation like that, an anodyne disco-funk song about being smooth like butter is basically the best thing that you can sing, and that's exactly what "Butter" is.

The lyrics are meaningless, of course. They're there to fill space, to give the vocalists something to do. They're delivery mechanisms for the melody, and the melody is sticky enough that the song was trapped in my skull, really fucking with my quality of life, for a decent chunk of that summer. The lyrics on "Dynamite" were meaningless, too, but they were almost meaningless to an aggressive, near-psychedelic level, which made the song funnier. Unfortunately, none of BTS' "Butter" lyrics are as funny as "cup of milk, let's rock 'n' roll." But some of the "Butter" lyrics actively resist interpretation.

Consider: "Ooh, when I look in the mirror, I'll break your heart in two." Now: I know that Jin means that he feels like a heartbreaker when he gets a look at himself, but we're missing a crucial step in there. "Ain't no other that can sweep you up like a robber" — that's another slightly baffling choice of words, especially when Jin sings the word "robber" more like "rubber." Suga opens the rap part with this line: "Ice on my wrist, I'm the nice guy/ Got the right body and the right mind." There's nothing wrong with that; I just think it's extremely goofy. But when RM says, "Got the Army right behind us when we say so," I don't really think that's goofy. It's just true. I found out the hard way.

As a song, "Butter" does exactly what it needs to do. It does the springy, squelchy disco-funk thing with propulsive economy, and its skates right past your ears effortlessly. The BTS guys might not sound emotionally invested in what they're singing, but they hit rhythmic pockets and get in some nicely feathery falsetto action. One cool thing about having seven members in your boy band is that the different singers can come flipping in, doing slick little call-and-response bits or shading the lead vocal with nice little moments of rich, full harmony. The rap parts and the ad-libs are clumsy, but they're not disastrous or anything.

Instead, the big strike against "Butter," beyond the various non-musical factors of the song's creation, is that it's just kind of fluffy and inessential. The thing that supposedly set BTS apart from their K-pop peers, at least in the beginning, was that they soulfully articulated the lost feelings of a whole generation of South Korean youth. You don't get any of that on "Butter." It's just a pleasantly generic little number about being a cool guy. There's nothing wrong with a pleasantly generic little number about being a cool guy. I love a lot of songs like that. I don't love "Butter," but I like it just fine.

I like the "Butter" video, too. It's just the BTS guys in suits, strutting around in offices. Sometimes, they're giving press conferences or getting arrested. (They had plenty of experience with press conferences, and one of them would later have experience getting arrested.) But there's no story or anything. Instead, it's a showcase for their choreography, and you can do some cool and elaborate things with that when you've got seven guys in your boy band. These seven guys can all dance, too.

When "Butter" came out, the single was sold as a discounted 69-cent download, and there were a bunch of remixes that were only slightly different from the original version. People could buy a certain number of those singers per capita in the US before Billboard stopped counting the sales toward the Hot 100, so fans took advantage. In its first week, "Butter" sold nearly a quarter million downloads, and digital sales were what kept it at #1 for so long. BTS kept releasing more remixes, and that helped, too. (Past and future Number Ones artist Megan Thee Stallion rapped on one of those remixes, and she sounded good on it.)

When "Butter" first came out, it boxed out two songs that I liked a lot better, and both of those songs felt more culturally present to me. "Butter" knocked Olivia Rodrigo's "Good 4 U" off the top of the Hot 100 after its one week at #1, and then "Good 4 U" spent a long time at #2, but at least I got to do a column on that one. Billboard ultimately named Dua Lipa's "Levitating" the #1 song of 2021, but "Levitating" never actually reached the top of the weekly chart, thanks in large part to "Butter." Lipa still has zero #1 hits, and I don't know if she'll ever be in this column. ("Levitating" is an 8.) In retrospect, though, "Levitating" and "Butter" fit neatly into the same neo-disco bucket. You could play them back-to-back in a DJ set without messing with the flow. Maybe I should look at those two songs as kindred spirits, not as chart rivals.

Ultimately, "Butter" had a longer stay at #1 than any other 2021 song, which is a little embarrassing for me, the writer of the blog post that called it a fake hit. The single went double platinum in September 2021, and I imagine that it would've racked up a bunch more certifications by now if someone paid to update its RIAA status. "Butter" is a real hit. The "fake hit" charges are a better fit for the next BTS single, which will be in this column very soon.

GRADE: 6/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's past and future Number Ones artist Lizzo funking up "Butter" for the BBC Live Lounge in 2021:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's the moment in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, a very fun 2022 animated movie, where all four Turtles sing "Butter" together when they think they're about to die:

(Don't worry, though. The Turtles don't die. They're OK. Also, past and future Number Ones artist Post Malone is in the cast as mutant manta ray Ray Fillet. He sings his name a bunch. Ice Cube, meanwhile, plays the villainous mutant bug Superfly. Cube's highest-charting single, 1993's "It Was A Good Day," peaked at #15.)

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Buy it here, or else steal it, like criminal undercover.