RM: The Life Story Behind BTS's Leader
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RM, whose real name is Kim Nam-joon, was born on 12 September 1994 in Ilsan, a planned city in Goyang, South Korea, and he grew up in a household that valued study, reading and English. As a schoolboy he was known for his test scores and for teaching himself English by watching the American sitcom Friends, a detail he has mentioned in interviews, and he was writing lyrics and performing as an underground rapper before he finished school. In 2010, when he was sixteen, he joined Big Hit Entertainment as its first trainee, and the company built its new boy group around him. That group was BTS, and RM became its leader, its main rapper and one of its main songwriters, a set of responsibilities that would shape the next fifteen years of his life and make him one of the most influential figures in popular music.
Growing Up in Ilsan
Ilsan was a quiet, orderly place to grow up, a city of apartment blocks and wide streets built in the 1990s, and Kim Nam-joon was a quiet, bookish teenager who spent his time reading and writing. His parents were not in the entertainment business, and his path into music came through hip-hop, not through a television audition. As a teenager he performed under the name Runch Randa in the South Korean underground rap scene, working with other young rappers and posting songs online, and he was noticed for lyrics that were more thoughtful than the bragging that dominated the scene. A producer at Big Hit Entertainment heard his work and invited him to audition, and in 2010 he signed as a trainee, the first member of a group that did not yet have a name or a lineup, and the first brick in a company that would become one of the biggest in Korean entertainment.
Big Hit was a small company in 2010, without the money or the contacts of the big three Korean agencies, and the group it was building was originally planned as a hip-hop crew. Over the next three years the lineup changed several times, and RM stayed at the centre of it, writing lyrics, learning to dance and helping to shape the group’s sound. BTS finally debuted on 13 June 2013 with the single album 2 Cool 4 Skool and the song No More Dream, a track that complained about a society that pressured young people to follow a single path. The debut did not make the group famous overnight, and for the first two years BTS played small venues, appeared on music shows with little promotion and built its audience one fan at a time, largely through social media and direct contact with fans, a strategy that later became the model for the group’s global success.
As leader, RM’s job was unusual for a K-pop idol. He spoke for the group in interviews, translated for the other members in English, and wrote or co-wrote many of the lyrics, including the ones that dealt with mental health, pressure and self-doubt. The 2015 album The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Part 1 marked a turning point, with the song I Need U giving the group its first music-show win, and the albums that followed, Wings in 2016 and Love Yourself: Tear in 2018, took BTS to the top of the Billboard 200, the first Korean act to do so. RM’s lyrics on those records, including the Love Yourself series, spoke directly to young listeners about loving themselves, and the message became the centre of the group’s public identity, including a campaign with UNICEF called Love Myself that began in 2017 and raised money for children affected by violence.
The Underground Rapper Who Became a Trainee
RM’s first solo mixtape, called RM, came out in 2015 and was a raw, hip-hop record that dealt with his identity, his ambitions and his doubts, including the track Do You, in which he asked the listener what they wanted to be. His second mixtape, Mono, released in 2018, was quieter and more reflective, recorded largely in his home studio, and it included the song Seoul, a love letter to the city where he lived, and the track Forever Rain, about loneliness. In December 2022 he released his first official solo album, Indigo, a ten-track record that mixed hip-hop, R and B and indie rock and featured collaborations with Erykah Badu, Anderson .Paak and the Korean singer Youjeen. Indigo was praised by critics for its honesty, and it showed a side of RM that the BTS records, made for seven voices, could not, because it was entirely his own.
In September 2018, RM spoke at the United Nations in New York as part of the launch of the youth programme Generation Unlimited, delivering a speech about loving yourself that was watched around the world. He spoke in English, without notes for much of it, and told the audience that he had learned to love himself only after years of doubting his own voice. The speech was widely shared, and it made RM the public face of a group that had become a cultural phenomenon: BTS had addressed the United Nations, played stadiums in the United States and Europe, and become the first Korean act to perform at the Grammy Awards. RM’s English, learned from television and from reading, made him the group’s translator in interviews, a role he has described as both a privilege and a burden, because he carried the meaning of the group’s words into another language.
RM has been open about his love of art, and he has become known for visiting museums and galleries whenever BTS tours, posting photographs of paintings and sculptures on social media. He has said that art helped him through the pressure of fame, and he has donated to art institutions in South Korea. He is also known for his reading, and he has recommended books to fans, including the novel The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim, which became a bestseller in Korea after he mentioned it. These interests have shaped his public image: not a typical pop star but a thoughtful young man who treats fame as a platform for things he cares about, from art and books to the environment, a subject he has spoken about in interviews and in his lyrics.
BTS and the Debut Nobody Expected to Last
On 11 December 2023, RM began his mandatory military service in South Korea, enlisting alongside V, another member of BTS, and he served in the army’s 15th Infantry Division. He was discharged on 10 June 2025, and he returned to civilian life to a huge welcome from fans, with the other members of BTS also completing their service around the same time. During his service he kept in touch with fans through occasional letters and messages, and he used the time to read and to think about his next work. His second solo album, Right Place, Wrong Person, released in May 2024, just before his enlistment, was a restless, experimental record that mixed hip-hop, jazz and rock, and it showed an artist who was deliberately trying to move away from the sound that had made him famous, even at the height of his fame.
The scale of BTS’s success is hard to overstate. The group has topped the Billboard Hot 100 with Dynamite in 2020, the first song by a Korean act to do so, and has sold out stadiums on every continent, including Wembley Stadium in London. RM has been at the centre of that success as the group’s leader and chief lyricist, writing songs that have been streamed billions of times. He has also been recognised by the South Korean government, receiving the Order of Cultural Merit in 2018, the youngest person to receive it at the time, alongside the other members of BTS. The honour was given for the group’s contribution to spreading Korean culture around the world, and RM’s role in writing the group’s message was a central part of that citation, because the words were what made the music travel.
RM’s writing style is distinctive in K-pop, because it is personal and literary in a way that idol lyrics rarely are. He has quoted the Korean poet Kim Chun-soo in his lyrics, referenced the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and written about the pressure of living up to other people’s expectations. His 2015 track Joke played with wordplay and rhythm in a way that showed off his technical skill as a rapper, while his 2018 track Seoul showed a softer, more reflective side. Critics have noted that his English lyrics, including those on Indigo, are written with a care that is unusual for a non-native speaker, and he has said that he writes in English because it lets him say things he cannot say in Korean. That bilingual ability has been one of the group’s greatest assets, and it is one of the reasons BTS was able to reach audiences that other Korean groups could not.
The Leader Who Wrote the Group’s Words
In 2024, before his enlistment, RM released a documentary film called RM: Right People, Wrong Place, which followed the making of his second album and showed him working in the studio, travelling and thinking aloud about his life. The film was screened at the Busan International Film Festival, and it gave fans a rare look at the process behind the music. He has also continued to collaborate with other artists, including the American singer Megan Thee Stallion on the track Neva Play in 2024, a collaboration that bridged hip-hop in Korea and the United States. These projects show an artist who is interested in the wider world of music, not just in the K-pop system that made him famous, and who is building a solo career that can stand apart from BTS, on its own terms, with its own sound and its own audience.
RM’s influence on Korean popular music goes beyond his own records, because he helped to change what a K-pop idol could be. Before BTS, idols were expected to be polished, obedient and silent about their opinions, and RM was none of those things: he wrote his own lyrics, he spoke about mental health, he talked about books and art, and he did it in public. That openness gave other idols permission to be more honest, and it changed the expectations of fans, who began to value authenticity over perfection. It is a quiet revolution, and it is one that RM led without ever claiming to be a revolutionary, simply by being himself in front of an audience of millions, and by writing about what he actually thought and felt.
As BTS prepares to return as a group, RM’s future is the subject of enormous interest among fans, but his own statements suggest he is in no hurry. He has said that he wants to make music that is honest, even if it is not commercial, and that he wants to use his platform to support young artists and the arts in Korea. His story, from a bookish teenager in Ilsan to the leader of the biggest group in the world, is a story about what happens when a small company bets on a writer rather than a dancer, and when that writer turns out to be able to carry a group through fifteen years of fame without losing his own voice, a rare thing in any industry, and a remarkable thing in pop music.
Solo Work: RM, Mono and Indigo
The numbers behind RM’s career are staggering, and they are worth stating plainly, because they show the scale of what he has been part of. BTS has sold tens of millions of albums, broken streaming records, and played to millions of fans in stadiums around the world, and RM has written or co-written a large share of the group’s catalogue, including songs that have been translated into dozens of languages. His solo album Indigo reached the top of charts in several countries, and his mixtape Mono was the highest-charting Korean solo album on the Billboard 200 at the time of its release. These are not just statistics; they are evidence of a writer whose words have travelled further than he ever imagined when he was a teenager in Ilsan, posting songs online and hoping someone would listen.
One last detail about RM is the way he has handled the attention that comes with being the leader of the world’s biggest group. He has never courted controversy, and he has never used his platform to attack anyone, and he has been careful about what he says in public, because he knows that his words carry weight. That care is not the same as caution, because he has also been willing to speak about difficult subjects, from mental health to the pressure of fame, and to do so in a way that is honest and unguarded. It is a balance that few public figures manage, and it is one of the reasons he is trusted by his fans, who know that when RM says something, he means it, and that he has thought about it first.
Before BTS debuted, RM was already working as a songwriter for other artists, and he co-wrote a track for the vocal group 2AM in 2010, when he was still a teenager. That early work shows how the company saw him from the start: not just as a performer but as a writer, someone whose words could be used by other singers. It also shows how long he has been writing professionally, because by the time BTS debuted in 2013 he already had three years of studio experience behind him. That background is one of the reasons the group’s early songs sounded more considered than most debut records, because the writer at the centre of them had been learning his trade since he was sixteen.
The United Nations Speech and a Global Platform
The world tours that followed BTS’s breakthrough were among the largest in pop history, and RM was at the centre of them as the group’s spokesman on stage. The Love Yourself World Tour in 2018 and 2019 played stadiums in the United States, Europe and Asia, including two nights at Wembley Stadium in London and a show at Citi Field in New York, the first time a Korean act had played a stadium in the United States. RM addressed the crowds in English, translating the group’s feelings for audiences who did not speak Korean, and he spoke about the meaning of the Love Yourself message in city after city. Those speeches, delivered night after night, were as much a part of the show as the songs, and they are one of the reasons the tour felt different from other stadium tours.
RM’s interest in art has gone beyond visiting museums. In September 2020 he donated 100 million won to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in South Korea, to help reprint art books that had gone out of print, a gift that was widely reported and praised. He has also spoken about the Korean artists he admires, including the abstract painter Kim Whanki, whose work he has photographed and shared with fans. That support for Korean art is part of a wider pattern: RM uses his platform to draw attention to things he cares about, whether it is a painter, a poet or a book, and his recommendations have a real effect, because millions of fans follow them. It is a quiet kind of cultural influence, and it is one that he seems to take seriously.
His collaborations outside BTS show the range of his musical taste. In 2019 he appeared on Seoul Town Road, a version of Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road, a collaboration that brought Korean hip-hop to an American country-rap hit. The lead single of Indigo, Wild Flower, featured the Korean singer Youjeen, and in 2023 he worked with So!YoON!, the singer of the Korean indie band Se So Neon, on the track Smoke Sprite. In 2024, the single Come Back to Me, from Right Place, Wrong Person, was released with a music video directed by Lee Sung Jin, the creator of the television series Beef. Each of these collaborations is different, and each one shows an artist who is interested in the wider world of music, not just in the K-pop system that made him famous.
Military Service and the Next Chapter
In September 2021, BTS returned to the United Nations, this time to address the General Assembly itself, and RM spoke again, this time about young people and the future, in a speech that was broadcast around the world. The group had been appointed as special presidential envoys by the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, and their appearance was a sign of how far Korean popular culture had travelled, from a niche interest to a subject of diplomacy. RM’s role in that appearance was the same as it had always been: to speak for the group, in English, and to carry their message into a room full of world leaders. It was a remarkable moment for a young man who had taught himself English by watching a sitcom, and it showed how much his life had changed since Ilsan.
RM’s solo concerts and live performances have been rare, and that rarity has made them special. In December 2022 he performed a small concert in Seoul to launch Indigo, playing the album live for an audience of a few hundred fans, a deliberate contrast to the stadiums he plays with BTS. The concert was filmed and shared online, and it showed RM in a different setting: a small stage, a live band, and a set of songs that were personal and quiet. He has said that he prefers that kind of performance, because it lets him connect with the audience in a way that a stadium cannot, and because it lets the songs breathe. That preference tells you a lot about what he values as an artist, and about where his solo career is heading.
His influence on the Korean language itself has been noted by scholars and by the media, because BTS’s global success has led to a surge in people learning Korean around the world. RM’s lyrics, which mix Korean and English, have been studied by language learners, and his speeches at the United Nations have been used as teaching material. He has also spoken about the importance of the Korean language, and about how proud he is to perform in Korean on the world’s biggest stages, a choice that was once seen as a barrier and is now seen as a strength. That pride in his own language is part of what makes him an important figure in Korean culture, not just in Korean music.
My Take:
When I think about RM, the first thing that comes to mind is not a song but a speech: the one he gave at the United Nations in 2018. He stood in front of the world and talked about learning to love himself, and he did it in English, in his own words, without hiding behind a script. I think that moment explains why BTS became so much more than a pop group. RM gave the group a language for talking about doubt and pressure, and he gave millions of young listeners permission to feel the same things. That is not a normal job for a pop star, and it is not one he asked for, but he carried it with a seriousness that I find genuinely admirable, and it is the reason his name will be remembered when the charts have moved on.
What strikes me about RM’s lyrics is how literary they are. He quotes poets, he references philosophy, he writes about the gap between who he is and who people expect him to be. In a genre where lyrics are often an afterthought, he treats them as the point, and I think that is why his solo work, especially Indigo, feels so different from the BTS records. Indigo is a record about growing up, about cities, about the people who shaped him, and it does not sound like it was made to top a chart. I respect that choice, because it would have been easy to make a safe, commercial solo album, and he chose to make an honest one instead, which is the harder and better thing to do.
I also think RM’s English is one of the most underrated parts of the BTS story. He taught himself by watching Friends, and he became the group’s translator, the person who carried their meaning into interviews in London and New York. That is a heavy responsibility, and he has talked about how lonely it can feel to be the only one who understands what is being said about you in another language. I find that detail moving, because it shows the hidden work behind fame: the translating, the explaining, the carrying of a whole group’s voice. He did it for years without complaint, and the group would not have travelled as far without him, because the world would not have understood them.
Mono is the record I return to when I want to understand RM, because it is so quiet. It was recorded at home, it deals with loneliness and rain and the city at night, and it does not try to impress anyone. I think that record tells you who he is when the stadium lights are off: a young man who likes to read, who likes to walk through Seoul, who worries about whether he is good enough. That honesty is rare in pop music, and it is the reason his fans trust him. They do not just like his music; they believe him, and that belief is worth more than any chart position, because it is the thing that lasts when the fame fades.
The military service years were a test for BTS, and I think RM handled them with the same calm he brings to everything else. He enlisted, he served, he wrote letters to fans, and he came back without drama. I admire that, because it would have been easy to treat the service as a burden or to use it as publicity, and he did neither. He treated it as a duty, and he used the time to read and to think. Right Place, Wrong Person, the album he made before enlisting, is a restless record, and I hear in it an artist who knows he is about to disappear for a while and wants to leave something honest behind, which is exactly what he did.
I am fascinated by RM’s love of art, because it is not a hobby he picked up for publicity. He visits museums on tour, he posts photographs of paintings, he donates to galleries, and he talks about art as a way of surviving fame. I think that tells you something about how he copes with a life that most people would find unbearable: he looks at other people’s work, he reads, he finds quiet places. That is a healthy instinct, and it is one of the reasons he has lasted as long as he has. Fame can hollow a person out, and RM seems to have found a way to fill himself back up, which is a skill as important as any musical one.
There is a tension in RM’s career that I find interesting: he is the leader of the biggest group in the world, and he is also a solo artist who wants to make difficult, personal music. Those two things pull in opposite directions, and I think Indigo and Right Place, Wrong Person are both attempts to resolve that tension. He is not trying to leave BTS, and he is not trying to be a smaller version of BTS on his own. He is trying to be a different kind of artist, one who can write a song about a city at night and a song for a stadium in the same year. I think he is succeeding, and I think the solo work will be what people remember when the group years are history, because it is the most personal music he has made.
When I listen to RM’s early mixtape from 2015, I hear a young man who is angry, ambitious and afraid, and I hear the underground rapper from Ilsan who had something to prove. When I listen to Indigo, I hear a man who has proved it and is now asking what comes next. That arc, from proving yourself to asking what matters, is the arc of a real artist, and I think it is the reason RM’s story is worth telling. He did not just become famous; he grew up in public, and he let his audience watch him do it, which is a braver thing than it looks, because growing up in public means letting people see your mistakes as well as your successes.
My honest view is that RM’s greatest contribution to BTS is not his rapping or his English but his writing. He gave the group its words, and those words gave the group its meaning. Without the Love Yourself message, BTS would have been a very good pop group; with it, they became a cultural phenomenon. I think that is a remarkable thing for one person to have done, and it is why he deserves to be remembered as a writer first and a pop star second. The songs will age, but the words, especially the ones about loving yourself, will not, because they speak to something that does not change with fashion.
Finally, I would tell a new listener to start with Indigo, then go back to Mono, and then listen to the BTS album Love Yourself: Tear, because those three records together tell the story of a writer growing up. Indigo shows the man, Mono shows the doubts, and Tear shows the leader. Taken together, they explain why RM matters, and why his story is not just a K-pop story but a story about what a young person can do with words. I think that is a story worth telling carefully, and I think RM has told it well himself, which is the best kind of biography there is, because the subject has done the work of explaining himself.
The track Seoul, from Mono, is the song I play for people who want to understand RM in three minutes. It is a love letter to a city, and it is also a song about feeling lost in a place you love, about the tension between home and ambition. I think it is one of the most honest songs he has written, because it does not try to be grand or anthemic; it is just a young man talking about where he lives, and about how that place has shaped him. The production is soft and spacious, and the lyrics are the kind that stay with you, because they are about something everyone has felt: the feeling of belonging to a place and of wanting to leave it at the same time.
I keep thinking about the weight of being the translator, because it is a job that nobody sees. RM has described sitting in interviews in London and New York, listening to a question in English, translating it for his bandmates, and then translating their answer back, all while trying to be funny and interesting himself. I think that is an extraordinary amount of work to do in public, and it is work that most leaders never have to do. He has said that it can feel lonely, and I believe him, because it means that he is always the one who understands what is being said, and always the one who has to decide what it means. That responsibility shaped him, and it is one of the reasons he is so careful with his words.
The collaborations on Indigo tell me a lot about RM’s taste, especially the track with Erykah Badu, called Yun. Badu is a legend, and she does not collaborate with just anyone, and her presence on the record is a sign of how seriously RM is taken by musicians outside K-pop. I think the track works because it is about art and about the artist Yun Hyong-keun, a Korean painter RM admires, and because it is not trying to be a hit. It is a song about looking at a painting and wondering what it means, which is not a normal subject for a pop record, and that is exactly why I like it. It shows an artist who is following his own curiosity, and who trusts his audience to follow him.
I also want to mention the books, because RM’s reading list has become a phenomenon of its own. When he recommended The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down, it became a bestseller, and when he mentioned other books, fans bought them in large numbers. I think that is a remarkable thing for a pop star to have done, and it says something about the relationship between RM and his fans: they do not just want his music, they want to know what he is reading and thinking. That is a different kind of fandom, one based on ideas rather than on image, and it is one of the reasons I think his influence will last longer than most pop stars’ influence does.
My last thought about RM is that he is still young, and that his best work is probably ahead of him. He has the language skills, the audience and the taste to make the music he wants, and he has shown with Indigo and Right Place, Wrong Person that he is willing to take risks. What I hope is that he keeps the honesty that made Mono and Indigo special, because that is the quality that sets him apart. A pop star who writes like a poet is rare, and I want to hear what he writes next, because I think he has only just started to say what he really thinks.
There is one more thing I want to say about RM, and it is about the example he sets for young people who want to make art. He did not become a leader by being the loudest or the most confident person in the room; he became a leader by being the most thoughtful, the most prepared, and the most honest. I think that is a useful lesson, because it shows that leadership is not about volume but about clarity, and that a person who knows what they think and can say it well can lead a group of millions. RM has done that, and he has done it while staying true to himself, which is the hardest part of all.
One more thing I want to say about RM is about the example he sets for young people who want to make art in a system that is built for conformity. He did not become a leader by being the loudest person in the room; he became a leader by being the most thoughtful, the most prepared, and the most honest. I think that is a useful lesson, because it shows that leadership is not about volume but about clarity, and that a person who knows what they think and can say it well can lead a group of millions. RM has done that, and he has done it while staying true to himself, which is the hardest part of all, and the part that makes his story worth telling to anyone who is trying to find their own voice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is RM’s real name and where was he born?
RM’s real name is Kim Nam-joon. He was born on 12 September 1994 in Ilsan, a city in Goyang, South Korea, and he grew up there before moving to Seoul to train with Big Hit Entertainment.
How did RM become the leader of BTS?
He was the first trainee signed by Big Hit Entertainment in 2010, when he was sixteen, and the company built its new boy group around him. When BTS debuted in June 2013, he was its leader, main rapper and one of its main songwriters.
What is RM’s most famous solo album?
His first official solo album is Indigo, released in December 2022, featuring collaborations with Erykah Badu and Anderson .Paak. He had earlier released the mixtapes RM in 2015 and Mono in 2018, and his second album, Right Place, Wrong Person, came out in May 2024.
Did RM speak at the United Nations?
Yes. In September 2018 he spoke at the United Nations in New York for the launch of the youth programme Generation Unlimited, delivering a speech in English about loving yourself that was widely shared around the world.
When did RM do his military service?
He began his mandatory military service on 11 December 2023, serving in the army’s 15th Infantry Division, and he was discharged on 10 June 2025.
How did RM learn English?
He taught himself English as a teenager, largely by watching the American sitcom Friends, and he later became BTS’s translator in English-language interviews.
