BTS' "Permission To Dance" Tops the Charts

9:28 AM EDT on May 25, 2026

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music .

I hate that I have to do this. This is a nothing song. It doesn't mean anything to anyone. It was created expressly to serve a commercial function, to fill a hole on a schedule. It exists so that people can write detailed Wikipedia sentences about all the obscure chart records that it helped BTS to break. It's a padded statistic, a cool and refreshing glass of nothing at all. Does anyone sit around and bump this song? Do people put it on because they need a little pick-me-up in the middle of the day? Somebody must , right? Those people almost certainly exist. I just have a hard time imagining them.

If you're one of those people, you've probably already stopped reading this column, but thank you for subscribing to Stereogum dot com. If you're not one of those people, there's a good chance that you've stopped reading, too. Because who cares? Who needs to relive the BTS Summer of 2021? This column exists as a fun lens to explore pop history, and there's no fun lens to use when exploring "Permission To Dance." It's a purely cynical exercise, one that expresses nothing and means nothing.

God, I sound like my parents. I sound like every punk I knew in high school. I sound like everyone who ever hated pop music, who saw it as insipid drivel custom-built to suck money out of the pockets of dumb and idealistic teenagers. But I'm not one of those people. I love pop music. The magic of popular music is that exists in a state of constant war between art and commerce. When the right song comes along, you can spend about three minutes in a state of oblivious levitation, temporarily forgetting all about the rapacious mechanisms that brought the song to your ears in the first place. That's the unifying magic of the thing. I can't get there with "Permission To Dance." I can only hear the machinery at work.

Check this out: BTS released " Butter ," their second English-language single, at the dawn of summer 2021. Thanks in large part to the devoted efforts of the group's extremely large global fanbase, that song debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, then spent seven consecutive weeks in the top spot. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, "Butter" fell all the way to #7. It took that tumble because "Permission To Dance" came out. For one week, BTS fans shifted their allegiance to the new song, buying digital and physical singles in strong enough numbers to give BTS their second straight #1 hit. A week after that , the BTS Army turned its buying power right back to supporting "Butter." "Permission To Dance" fell straight down the top 10 — coincidentally enough, also to #7 — on its way to disappearing completely.

Do you think I want to talk about those arcane chart numbers? No. I would truly love to not care. A hit is a hit, and it doesn't suddenly become a flop when it leaves the #1 spot. If a song has ever been at #1 on the Hot 100, that itself is the feat, the achievement. That's the entire animating purpose behind this column — the romance of this elite and finite set of artistic/commercial works. Some of the songs in this column are eternal classics. Some are evanescent curiosities. Some are irritating novelties. And some, I guess, are statistics. It's hard to find any romance, any inspiration, in the statistics.

I seriously considered just skipping this column. Would anyone mind? Probably not, right? Most of the people who follow the contours of pop history don't care much about BTS and their stat-padding. Most of the people who care about BTS only care about pop history insofar as BTS have carved out a particular spot within it. And they have! They are an extremely popular act! Their success has great ramifications for the future of pop music, in America and elsewhere! It's just that this story has not produced many songs that are fun to listen to, or to write about. That's the real issue.

Well, whatever, fuck it. I set myself this ridiculous task, and my unique set of brain maladies will not permit me to ignore a #1 hit merely because I don't find it interesting. That's the challenge, right? There has to be a story somewhere in there, even if the story has more to do with chart-manipulation than music. Let's see if we can't mine some meaning in this void.

There's a great story about how "Permission To Dance" came to be. Well, no, it's not a great story. It's barely a story at all. It's more like ad copy, but it's what we have. Here's what BTS member J-Hope told Entertainment Weekly in a 2021 Zoom interview: "Ed sent us this amazingly good song, and as soon as we listened to it we just couldn't resist it. We thought it went really well with our image too, so we just went with it." (J-Hope's highest-charting solo single is his 2025 GloRilla collab " Killin' It Girl ," which peaked at #40.)

The "Ed" in this story, as you may have already surmised, is Ed Sheeran. That's right! Our boy is back! You can't keep Eddy Ed out of the #1 spot! If there's one person on this planet who cares about Hot 100 numbers more than your average BTS Army member, it's Ed Sheeran. Sheeran is one of the planet's biggest pop stars, a man capable of packing stadiums around the world with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a loop pedal (and many giant production trucks full of audio-visual equipment).

Sheeran has been in this column a couple of times as a solo artist, but he's never been shy about taking on freelance assignments. He's perfectly capable of crafting something that fits the BTS "image." The first time we saw him in this space, it wasn't for one of the songs he recorded. It was for " Love Yourself ," the Justin Bieber smash that he co-wrote. Is it any less dignified to write for BTS than for Bieber? Probably not, right? It's probably all the same. Sheeran was writing for boy bands back when One Direction were still together, and "Permission To Dance" wasn't the first track that he wrote for BTS. In 2019, Sheeran co-wrote the BTS single "Make It Right," which was remixed and released as a collaboration with the singer Lauv. Remember Lauv? No? Hmm. Not sure I do, either. The big-deal dance guy Fred again.. produced "Make It Right." Is that interesting? Not really? What if I told you that "Make It Right" peaked at #95? Still nothing? Damn.

Anyway, we don't have any record of how Ed Sheeran felt on the day that he wrote "Permission To Dance." If he's ever spoken about what inspired him to come up with that little nugget, I haven't found it. Sheeran worked on the song with some of his regular guys. He co-wrote "Shape Of You," his biggest global hit, with Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid and early-'90s dance producer Steve Mac, and then he did "Permission To Dance" with the same two guys. Another "Permission To Dance" writer is Jenna Andrews, a Canadian singer who became a journeyman pop songwriter; she's one of the people who had a hand in "Butter." Steve Mac and Jenna Andrews co-produced "Permission To Dance" with Stephen Kirk, another guy who worked on "Butter." We're looking at a team of professionals here.

"Permission To Dance" could've easily become an Ed Sheeran song, but it would've been one of the least interesting Ed Sheeran songs, and I say that as someone who doesn't find Ed Sheeran songs to be particularly interesting. Here's the thing about permission to dance, according to the song "Permission To Dance": We don't need it. That's the message. The song is kind of like the movie Footloose , in that it imagines a fictional environment in which permission to dance is not granted, then takes great satisfaction in denying its own premise. Permission to dance? We don't need it. We already have it. And so: We dance.

Is that simplistic? Am I glossing over the nuances written directly into the text of "Permission To Dance"? Let's see. We'll just quote some lyrics here. "When it all seems like it's wrong, just sing along to Elton John/ And to that feeling, we're just getting started." Sure. Got it. Just getting started. "Just keep the right vibe 'cause there's no looking back/ There ain't no one to prove we don't got this on lock." OK. Interesting double-negative there. A little convoluted. "Let's break our plans and live just like we're golden and roll along like dancing fools." OK: What ? I know what that means, but why would you phrase it like that ?

Ed Sheeran is a native English speaker, to the point where he is literally from England. He might actually be the most English person alive. If you had never heard an Ed Sheeran song in your life, if you had never seen a picture of Ed Sheeran, you could still look at Sheeran from miles away, through a telescope , and say, "That man is English." Now: "Sheeran" is a name of Irish origin, and Ed Sheeran comes from Irish stock. He even has red hair. He once recorded a hit song called "Galway Girl." But you would never, in one million years, mistake Sheeran for an Irish person. He is English. He speaks English. He writes and sings in English, often quite competently. So what is it about BTS that causes English-language songwriters to write like they're glitching out? Why does everything sound like it's been run through multiple AI translation filters?

Perhaps I'm being unfair. The writing on "Permission To Dance" is arguably cleaner than the writing on other English-language BTS songs. Certainly, there's no "cup of milk, let's rock 'n' roll" here. And anyway, the lyrics are never the point on an English-language single from BTS. Most of the guys in the group are simply singing the phonetic nonsense syllables that have been placed in front of them. Nobody expects them to convey any emotion. Instead, it's all about the big, bright, sparkly melody at the heart of everything. "Permission To Dance" has one of those. It's not one that I can ever remember when I'm not listening to the song, but it exists.

"Permission To Dance" fits right into the same fluffy disco-pop zone that BTS established with " Dynamite " and "Butter," their previous English-language singles. It's got ebullient guitars and handclaps and bubbly strings. Those bubbly strings might be the best things about the song. But the more I think about this track, the more I hear "Permission To Dance" as a rote copy of Justin Timberlake's 2016 chart-topper " Can't Stop The Feeling! ," which itself is a rote copy of god knows how many other things. If you're using the Justin Timberlake Trolls song as your north star, perhaps you've taken a wrong turn somewhere. Maybe it's time to turn that map upside down.

"Can't Stop The Feeling!" might be the least interesting of the many, many chart-toppers that Max Martin helped write or produce, but it's still a Max Martin track. It's stitched tight. The pieces all work together. Ed Sheeran can do classically constructed pop music as efficiently as almost anyone on the planet, but he's not Max Martin. I hear "Permission To Dance" as Sheeran trying to do Max Martin, and he can't get there. The pieces are all where they're supposed to be, but it doesn't move the same. It certainly doesn't seem tailored specifically for BTS, whose members can't even deliver all these goofy lyrics convincingly. It sounds like content. (Before too long, this column will reach the moment that BTS crossed paths with the real Max Martin, and you'd hope that would at least become something interesting. Stay tuned to find out.)

"Permission To Dance" came out months after "Butter," but it's basically a "Butter" B-side, and it was received that way. The video radiates what feels like governmentally mandated cheerfulness. Supposedly, it's dedicated to the service workers who kept the world afl

_Originally reported by [Stereogum](https://stereogum.com/2499719/the-number-ones-bts-permission-to-dance/columns/the-number-ones/)._