Los Angeles

Los Angeles functions in Jungkook’s story as more than a travel destination. It is the place where a fourteen-year-old from Busan first confronts an unfamiliar scale of possibility, where dance training exposes the limits of his preparation, and where later recording sessions turn the distant dream of becoming an American pop star into a demanding professional reality. The city repeatedly places him between identities: Korean trainee and global performer, protected youngest member and independent artist, private beginner and public spectacle.

First Arrival and Dance Training

Jungkook first reached Los Angeles in July 2012, at fourteen, on the first flight of his life. He traveled from Seoul in economy class with Son Sungdeuk, who had identified him as Big Hit Entertainment’s most promising trainee. Wearing a dark gray T-shirt and black shorts and carrying a red backpack with enough clothes for nearly a month, he emerged from the Tom Bradley International Terminal looking unexpectedly alert after the twelve-hour journey. The landscape immediately distinguished the city from Seoul: he was struck by its abundant vegetation and blue sky, and he stopped on the drive to his accommodation to pose on a palm-lined street.

The practical purpose of the trip was intensive dance instruction. After leaving his luggage, Jungkook went directly to Movement Lifestyle in North Hollywood, the studio founded by Shaun Evaristo, whose choreography credits included BigBang, a group admired by BTS. The first class proved easier than he had expected, but the second became an ordeal. Jet lag and the difficulty of understanding the instructor’s words contributed to what Jungkook later described in his blog as a nervous breakdown. In a rehearsal video, he and Son worked through a demanding passage from Joe’s “Pull My Hair,” combining pop-and-lock movements with finger tutting. At the end, Jungkook smiled shyly while acknowledging his errors and considering how to improve, turning embarrassment into a method of learning.

A Month Between Homesickness and Discovery

The training schedule did not erase his homesickness. During the following weeks, Jungkook regularly sought out the nearest Korean restaurant, ordering spicy noodle soup with yellow pickled radish and other familiar dishes that restored both his connection to home and the energy required for long hours in the studio. He did laundry once or twice a week, went to the beach on weekends, and ate unfamiliar foods such as sausage skewers and lo mein. These ordinary routines give the Los Angeles episode its texture: the city was not experienced only through professional ambition, but also through meals, chores, weather, and the gradual acquisition of independence.

Bang Si-hyuk had instructed Son to let Jungkook enjoy himself and try new things, and Son took him to the Getty Center. There Jungkook saw an exhibition of Gustav Klimt drawings borrowed from Vienna and black-and-white portraits by Herb Ritts. Before leaving, he performed a one-handed handstand, which he called a “Nike,” on the travertine steps and again on the carefully maintained lawn. He also bought a skateboard and began riding it along the sidewalk outside Movement Lifestyle in North Hollywood. At the beach he watched the sun set and entered the Pacific; the day before returning to Korea, he ate lobster for the first time at The Lobster on the Santa Monica pier, while proudly insisting that snow crab remained better for a boy from Busan.

The month changed the direction of his imagination. Jungkook later confessed that, after experiencing Los Angeles, he wanted to become a professional dancer rather than an idol. That impulse did not remove him from the idol system, but it revealed how the city widened his sense of what performance could be. Los Angeles became an early counterworld to the tightly organized path awaiting him in Korea: a place where dance technique, unfamiliar surroundings, recreation, and self-directed aspiration could coexist.

The City as a Threshold for BTS

Los Angeles also became a setting in which BTS learned how to confront the cultural distance surrounding its ambitions. About a year after the group’s debut, BTS returned to the city to film BTS American Hustle Life, training with hip-hop mentors including Coolio, Tony Jones, and Warren G. The program’s staged kidnapping and its association of Black men with crime and violence created serious problems of racial representation, and its editing captured the group’s limited understanding of American racial issues. Yet the experience behind the scenes was described as formative. RM, who had long loved hip hop but had made serious mistakes through cultural appropriation and forced speech, later emphasized Warren G’s lesson that hip hop could make room for anyone who genuinely loved it, regardless of race or nationality.

This history matters for Jungkook because Los Angeles is not presented as a frictionless gateway to global success. It is a place of instruction, but also of misunderstanding, unequal cultural power, and necessary correction. The city gave BTS access to mentors and practices that helped reshape its relationship to hip hop, while exposing the ignorance that accompanied its early attempts to enter an American musical context. Los Angeles therefore operates as both classroom and test: it offers mobility only through hard work, listening, and the recognition of what the group does not yet know.

From Group Member to Solo Recording Artist

In 2017, Los Angeles became the site of a different kind of threshold. In November, BTS occupied the tenth floor of the JW Marriott near the Staples Center after performing at the American Music Awards. A Vogue team was preparing an interview and photo session under severe time pressure, with seven iced American coffees ordered by the label and tensions between Big Hit Entertainment and Vogue complicating communication. Jungkook entered without warning, stood still with wide eyes, bowed politely, and disappeared before the room could settle around him. Later, while sitting in the makeup chair, he sang quietly to himself; despite jet lag, he kept smiling. When BTS performed the chorus choreography of “DNA,” he moved lightly and magnetically, taking the lead while humming the melody and captivating a film crew largely unfamiliar with K-pop.

The contrast between that shy entrance and his command of the choreography became a condensed image of his public development. In the room, he appeared respectful and somewhat timid beside older BTS members who cared for him and adjusted the collar of his denim shirt. In performance, he drew attention without appearing to demand it. Los Angeles made that duality visible: backstage vulnerability and front-stage control existed simultaneously, and neither completely canceled the other.

The city later became a professional proving ground for Jungkook’s solo work. On April 8, 2023, fans gathered at Incheon International Airport to see him depart for Los Angeles, where he stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. On April 10, he traveled to Andrew Watt’s studio, visibly anxious about recording abroad with a non-Korean producer. During the drive, he spent fifteen minutes practicing with a black straw in his mouth, using a technique he had researched online to strengthen and balance his vocal cords. Bang Si-hyuk accompanied him, underscoring the importance attached to the project.

Watt’s basement studio, decorated with tapestries and string lights, differed sharply from HYBE’s functional recording booths. Watt coached Jungkook from a sofa, encouraging him with thumbs-up gestures, high fives, cheers, and applause. Jungkook sang for roughly four hours, performing as though he had rehearsed the song for weeks rather than only a few hours. When Watt said that he sounded like Michael Jackson, Jungkook widened his eyes in disbelief. The praise did not eliminate his uncertainty: afterward he worried whether other people would recognize what he had achieved, and he continued to look pensive or insecure while traveling among sessions in Los Angeles, New York City, and Seoul.

Performance, Distance, and Return

Los Angeles helped make the scale of Jungkook’s solo ambition concrete, but it did not make the transition easy. Moving from K-pop into American pop required him to cross barriers involving language, cultural expectations, and different industry structures. His recorded range, vocal stability, breath control, phrasing, and ability to combine chest and head voice had already earned admiration, but the city placed those skills in a new professional setting, alongside producers accustomed to Western pop conventions. The goal was not simply to perform abroad; it was to make a Korean singer’s voice intelligible and compelling within a market that had historically treated Asian artists as marginal.

That pressure became part of the meaning of his later success. “Standing Next to You” became the title track of Golden, the full-length album released in November 2023, after the project expanded from a small EP into eleven songs. Jungkook recorded five songs in one week, usually singing for three hours a day across five consecutive days, while concentrating on rhythm and pronunciation. His work in Los Angeles thus belonged to a larger pattern of relentless preparation rather than a single breakthrough moment. The city offered the studio, the collaborators, and the symbolic horizon, but Jungkook supplied the repeated labor that made the horizon attainable.

Even after becoming a global solo performer, he retained the perspective of someone still astonished by access. Before his surprise Times Square show on November 9, 2023, he visited a Barnes & Noble in New York City with an iced coffee and stared genuinely amazed at a Golden display. The contrast recalls his first Los Angeles arrival: in both places, the artist encounters a world that seems larger than the self who has entered it. Los Angeles remains the crucial earlier threshold, the city that first offered a fourteen-year-old trainee the Pacific, a skateboard, difficult lessons, and a professional future he had not yet learned to imagine securely.