For Your Consideration

The voting for the 2025 Grammy Awards opened on October 4, 2024. On October 7, the New Yorker published a glowing profile of founder of Hybe née BigHit Entertainment Bang Shi-Hyuk titled, “The K-Pop King: Chairman Bang, the man behind BTS, is bringing his formula for creating K-pop idols to America.”

The article was written by one Alex Barasch, who appears to have preemptively made his X account private before this article was posted. A quick search reveals his biggest article at the New Yorker is one from last year about how Mattel wants to make movies from other toy brands now that the Barbie movie was a success. Judging from a scan of his work on Slate and the Variety website, Alex seems to mainly write on film and more general online culture clickbait with no background in either K-Pop or music journalism—all of which (plus a Jeff Benjamin promotional post for the piece on X highlighting how Jungkook was invited to perform in the Super Bowl) gives this piece more than a slight whiff of Grammy Advertorial for Jungkook and his album Golden.

As I’ve said on here and on my podcast many times, I wouldn’t care what BTS and their company (and their fans) got up to except when they are spreading misinformation about K-Pop and K-Pop history. The New Yorker was happy enough to publish Hybe promotional copy in 2022 in Tammy Kim’s infamous article, “How BTS Became the Most Popular Band in the World.” The article was so ahistorical and poorly researched, I ended up writing one of my most popular episodes in response: Episode 50, “The Rise and Fall of the Hip-Hop Idol,” which covers… the rise and fall of the trend of hip-hop idols, something that began well before BTS debuted in 2013.

Alex appears to have gotten the same packet of Hybe-approved K-Pop history as Tammy because the same lies are trotted out again in this piece: 

The boys also stood out for writing many of their own lyrics, occasionally in a regional dialect. When BTS débuted, in 2013, the dominant K-pop group, BigBang, promoted an image of glamorous misbehavior. BTS’s members foregrounded their uncertainties about the future, airing mental-health and personal struggles. (“Reflection,” a song co-written by the group’s leader, RM, ends with the refrain “I wish I could love myself.”) To young listeners, the group was more accessible—thematically and literally—than its K-pop predecessors. “I didn’t want them to be false idols,” Bang has said. “I wanted to create a BTS that could become a close friend.”

1. “The boys also stood out for writing many of their own lyrics, occasionally in a regional dialect.”

Fact check: False. They absolutely did not stand out for writing many of their own lyrics. Idols had been contributing to their music since the first generation days of H.O.T. and YG Entertainment (home of BigBang (debut 2006) and 2NE1 (debut 2009)) built their entire brand image on self-producing idols. This is a deliberate lie spread to try and make BTS seem like they aren’t a standard K-Pop group, which they very much are. (BTS did stand out in one respect, that’s when the then-Rap Monster got busted stealing lyrics.)

2. “When BTS débuted, in 2013, the dominant K-pop group, BigBang, promoted an image of glamorous misbehavior. BTS’s members foregrounded their uncertainties about the future, airing mental-health and personal struggles.”

Fact check: Misleading. BigBang did have a bad boy image at times however the contrast here with the stuff about BTS and mental health implies that BigBang only wrote about partying while BTS were doing more deep stuff about feelings. The truth is that not only did BigBang and its members write a lot more deeply personal material, BTS also has their fair share of misbehavior songs, especially in their early days. 

In 2009, BigBang released a group memoir titled Shouting Out To The World that delves into things they were feeling at the time. G-Dragon, who handled the bulk of BigBang’s material, was also no stranger to personal lyrics or lyrics dealing with mental health, which Alex might have known if he’d bothered to even skim the wikipedia page. G-Dragon’s “A Boy” from his 2009 solo album is a good example: 

As time passed by my loneliness grew

The sense of duty was the heaviest burden for me

When there’s an uphill there’s always a downhill

Too late to run away I wanna go

Remember back in that day, your shining dream

I cannot forget that dream

Don’t forget back in that day boy

Shout to the world with your cool voice, shine a light

Wow, such glamorous bad boy misbehavior on display here.

Definitely not like those lyrics airing mental health struggles from BTS, such as:

“Yea, you’re the best woman, being bossy. You do so f**king well, being bossy. But now that I think about it, you were never the boss. Instead of boss I’ll say gonorrhea.” (“Joke” by RM)

Dealing with a “bossy” woman sure sounds like a powerful mental health struggle.

And needless to say, many other idols have written songs that talk to mental health struggles and other important topics. 

While second generation K-Pop is known for their hit hook songs with the catchy nonsense words (“Ring Ding Dong,” “Bo Peep,” “Gee,” etc.) that doesn’t mean these were the only songs being made and—most importantly—it doesn’t mean these songs are bad or worthless!! Like the lie about BTS being the only ones to write their own lyrics, this dichotomy of “mental health” vs. “Fantastic Baby” is a fake one created to make BTS seem Not Like Other Girls. 

Because let me tell you, I’ll take a timeless and catchy hook song with a nonsense chorus over some soggy Hillsong adjacent “love yourself” messaging any day of the week.

3. “To young listeners, the group was more accessible—thematically and literally—than its K-pop predecessors.”

Okay, no duh. Yeah, younger listeners want their own group at their age level?? This is basic K-Pop 101, not some kind of gotcha on the groups that came before. In fact, I translated an interview with Saito Eisuke, who worked with BTS on their promotions in Japan and he said, explicitly, that BTS was marketed to say, Winter Sonata was for the moms; BigBang was for your big sister; and BTS is for you.

So, yeah, we call that… a promotional strategy. Amazing that the guy who wrote the piece on Mattel was unable to pick up on that.

There’s a lot in Alex’s post that goes completely unexamined and unchallenged:

Before BTS, K-pop idols were polished and often remote. When a group launched, its members went on television to promote their album, then retreated until the next release. Bang realized that the Internet was a better way to reach young people. For BTS, he didn’t bother with TV appearances.

This is completely made up. Idols were posting sometimes very goofy things to social networking sites like Me2Day as promo well before 2013 when BTS debuted. Idols also appeared regularly on variety shows and did things like act in television dramas even when there was no album to promote. Incredible research from Alex here that he couldn’t uncover things like… Boys Over Flowers (2009) which starred a couple of K-Pop idols not promoting albums.

This cultivation of “authenticity” has been rewarded. BTS has sold more than forty million albums in South Korea alone, contributing an estimated five billion dollars a year to the national economy. 

Gosh, that’s a lot of albums for a country with 52 million people--almost one CD per person! Especially considering Korea stopped buying CDs well before the United States did and adopted streaming and digital sales as their primary methods of listening to music. There’s definitely no need to examine this “40 million albums in South Korea alone” number and look at things like the controversy surrounding bulk CD sales in Korea, where photos of stacks and stacks of discarded CDs of Jungkook’s Golden went viral last winter.

There are some telling quotes buried deep in the piece. e.g. This gem from Bang:

A few weeks later, he told me, “Music delivers a very strong experience and emotions in an instant of listening. But we want to make it so that it can be part of a much longer and more sustained type of content consumption.” He continued, “I’ve read books about gamification and why people are addicted to games.” He was studying multiplayer online role-playing games and first-person shooters, and planned to develop games across multiple genres; some would feature alter egos of hybe artists, but others would have no connection with the idols. 

Gamification, the present and future of Pop music, not just K-Pop. Buy and stream! Tom Breihan called this out in his chapter on “Dynamite.”

The article has just a couple of passing mentions of Min Hee-Jin and the coup against her, along with the (alleged) mistreatment of her group NewJeans by Bang and Hybe, which is the story dominating the K-Pop media this year. It’s incredible that a reporter with the backing of a legacy publication and access to Bang had weirdly no interest in the biggest K-Pop story of the year—or the biggest American music story of the year: P. Diddy. Really, Alex, no interest in asking Scooter what he did or didn’t know about P. Diddy and Justin Bieber?

The pull quote on Jungkook and the Super Bowl is doing the rounds but is it and this article enough to sway Grammy voters? Only time will tell. 

Meanwhile, over in Korea, Hag Autumn is in and the girls are coming for us.