2 COOL 4 SKOOL

The record

2 COOL 4 SKOOL is BTS’s debut single album, released on 12 June 2013 with seven tracks. The debut song is ‘No More Dream’. BIGHIT MUSIC’s album introduction on Bugs presents the group as a hip-hop act and describes the debut song as a reading of 1990s gangsta rap. The label groups this record with O!RUL8,2? and Skool Luv Affair as a school trilogy.

Reviews

weiv carried the record in ‘weekly weiv’ on 25 June 2013, as one of four new releases that week. The column gives each critic a short piece and a mark out of ten. Kim Yeong-jin wrote that “this album, which has the character of a teaser, does after a fashion show the team’s strengths and style clearly enough to be worth watching”, and gave it 6/10.

What he picked out lay outside the debut song. Taking ‘We Are Bulletproof Pt.2’ and ‘Like’ together with it, Kim wrote that “there is enough here, in the rapping and the vocals and in the production alike, to make the next album worth waiting for”. His reading of a debut rested on the placing of three songs rather than on one.

Among the tracks

‘No More Dream’ is the debut song and the only one of the seven with a music video. The official channel’s upload is dated 12 June 2013, the day of release. The label ships no separate English title for it: the title is English to begin with.

‘We Are Bulletproof Pt.2’ is one of the two songs Kim set beside the debut song, and the original its ‘Pt.2’ points back to is not on this record. ‘Like’ is the other. The label ships it as Like in its own distribution metadata; the Korean title on the tracklist above is ‘좋아요’ (Joayo), which is simply the everyday phrase for saying you like something.

Numbers

The label’s own distribution metadata prints the record as 2 COOL 4 SKOOL, dated 12 June 2013. The English song titles come from the same place: ‘좋아요’ is Like and ‘We Are Bulletproof Pt.2’ is We Are Bulletproof, Pt. 2.

What came after

The second of the three records the label groups as a school trilogy is O!RUL8,2?, three months later, and the third and last is Skool Luv Affair in February of the following year. The first record the group made about youth, once that sequence closed, is 화양연화 pt.1 (The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Part 1).