Ending Violence Through Music

                                                                                          By Ebony Velez

Korean boy band, BTS made a worldwide hit with their mini-album, “Love Yourself: Her”. The album, which consists of 9 songs, was released September 18, 2017. After its release, it flooded through Social Media platforms internationally with #love_yourself, which was number one on Twitter’s trending hashtags. Love Yourself also hit #1 on Billboard charts, “...securing the group a No. 1 debut on the World Albums chart, which counts traditional sales” Billboard’s writer, Jeff Benjamin said.

The songs mentioned in their album discuss many topics such as dealing with depression, school struggles and the most popular, violence. One of the songs, “Sea”, concludes the topic of depression. The song summarizes that without despair, there is no hope, “Where there is hope, there is always hardship,” via Color Coded Lyrics).  Other songs like “Pied Piper”,  also discusses the topic of school struggles. The band has been covering topics similar to these in many of their past albums as well.

On November 1, 2017, BTS officially partnered up with UNICEF and introduced their campaign “LOVE MYSELF” along with #ENDviolence. The overall goal of the campaign is to make the world a better place through music and lend a hand to children and teens exposed to violence. According to the campaign’s official website, the band plans to follow with the campaign for at least 2 years, “For the next two years at least, BTS will continue to follow through with this campaign, along with #ENDviolence, and work to raise a BTS LOVE MYSELF fund.” The donations from the fund will be donated to UNICEF to help those who have experienced violence.

For more information about the campaign and ways to support, you can visit its official website, https://www.love-myself.org/eng/home/ or if you want to participate and see other information about the campaign, you can visit http://www.unicef.or.kr/event/bts_endviolence/eng All donations count!  Be a part of making the world a better place.