BTS tell the United Nations to speak yourself

The occasion was the launch of Generation Unlimited, a UNICEF partnership for young people, at the General Assembly's opening week. BTS had worked with UNICEF since November 2017 on the Love Myself campaign against violence towards children, which had raised more than a million dollars by the time they arrived in New York, and they were invited to speak as its ambassadors.

RM delivered the speech in English while the other six stood behind him. He began with the small town of Ilsan, the night sky, a boy who at nine or ten stopped looking up and started listening to what other people said about him, and how music brought the looking back. The sentence the room stood up for was the ending: "No matter who you are, where you're from, your skin colour, your gender identity, just speak yourself." It took about seven minutes.

UNICEF's recording has been watched more than twenty million times. BTS returned to the UN in 2020 by video and in 2021 in person, as presidential envoys of South Korea. But the 2018 speech is the one people quote, because it was the first, and because it put a Korean boy band's message about self-worth into the building where governments talk.