BTS and American Media Hype
I’m in the middle of compiling information for my idol history podcast project--which is definitely happening--and unfortunately I keep coming across articles from English language media about BTS and their chart smashing success in the United States with their new album Love Yourself 轉 Tear that make me want to use the glossy photo cards that came with my (absolutely glorious) albums to poke my eyes out so I don’t have to read any more.
Let’s start with the basics: BTS moved 135,000 “album units” this week in the United States to grab number one on the Billboard album chart. To put that in perspective, this week last year saw Harry Styles top the album charts with with 230,000 “album units”. 135k is not exactly a record-breaking number so why is it getting so much attention? The only answer I can think of is that 1) BTS are Korean and sing in Korean which makes them a novelty and 2) because the English-language media has figured out that BTS is reliable clickbait.
What frustrates me about the majority of these pieces is what has always frustrated me about English-language coverage of Asian popular culture, the inability to understand any cultural perspective outside the American one we’re currently suffocating in. My favorite was this line from Amanda Petursich’s hastily google-researched New Yorker piece:
BTS differs from the boy bands of yesteryear in that its members’ presentation is fairly androgynous—they wear dangly earrings and visible makeup, and when they’re shot in closeup it’s to emphasize their soft, dewy skin.
BTS are not a “boy band” like N*Sync. They are a Korean idol group and that art form comes with a completely different set of artistic and cultural conventions to the “boy bands of yesteryear.” If you don’t understand that much, you have no business writing from a position of authority about the group.
Everything about male idol groups is tailored for women’s pleasure and the female gaze. The aesthetics of boy bands, as we think of them, are much more rooted in the gay male gaze. Luckily for horny teen girls and their horny moms, their tastes in cute boys and catchy pop overlapped just enough with Lou Pearlman’s to make the Backstreet Boys a hit group but that is all that boy bands have to offer women: cute boys and catchy pop. But even the smallest idol groups offer both of those things and a lot more.
(And saying this, please know that I don’t think there is anything wrong with boy bands. I also love boy bands a hell of a lot.)
When outsiders look at an idol group and see a boy band they are missing the full picture. An idol group isn’t just pretty faces on an album sleeve and a song on a radio. Fans develop relationships with the group by watching them interact naturally on television reality shows (sometimes acting silly, sometimes very sincere), by tracking their artistic progress and hard work through immeasurable behind-the-scenes footage from concert tours and music video shoots, by reading their social media posts and devouring interviews so that we know as much about what and how they're doing as we know about our irl friends.
Amanda Petursich expressed surprise at the androgynous look because she didn’t understand that many of us also enjoy taking our style cues from our favorite male idols. There’s a reason one of the most popular BTS fan twitter accounts is a fashion tracker and it’s not because we’re all rushing out to buy this stuff for the men in our lives. The horny teen girl element is only ever part of the idol group appeal, there are far more of us women who simply want to exist in their fantasy world of pretty men who are out there working hard to please us. Wearing a shirt that you thought looked cool when your favorite idol wore it is like being able to capture a piece of that beautiful fantasy for yourself in real life.
Allow me to quote myself from an older post about why I love idols that you should also read if you're interested in this stuff:
Idols exist for us to watch but they also exist for us to identify with and to fantasize about. And, very importantly, they enable fans to bond with each other. Japanese idol culture has a strong lateral component. The top down idol - fan relationship comes first but the fan - fan relationships are almost as strong. I’ve been to a handful of idol (and idol-type) concerts in Japan and at almost every one, people went out of their way to talk to me and help me out with things like… the intricate audience choreography during certain songs. Yes, we want to be waved to by the idol but the overpowering feeling that comes from joining thousands of other fans in a coordinated dance is just as strong.
While the Korean male idol aesthetic has its visual and musical roots with Teddy Riley and Max Martin, idol group culture borrows much, much more from Japanese idol group culture. There are the organized fan clubs that host special activities and help create a sense of a unified fan culture; fans learn special dances and songs to sing at concerts; fans are encouraged to write letters and talk about their lives with their idols. And because idol groups have a much longer life span than any boy band, these fan cultures take deep roots. Fans watch over their idols as they grow from young, inexperienced teens to confident, mature men. We become invested in their success and happiness. We form deep and lasting friendships with each other.
There is nothing equivalent to this in American culture and certainly nothing that exists so purely for women’s pleasure.
The post I read that best hit the nail on the head for BTS’s appeal in the West was from the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis. His review of the album is tepid--which is fine, not everybody likes this kind of pop--but what stood out to be was this:
The reasons traditionally given for BTS’s success back home – their lyrics are, by K-pop’s germ-free standards, pretty raffish and controversial – don’t hold here: you can’t imagine British teenagers are that desperate to hear youthful criticism of societal conventions in South Korea. So theories abound, ranging from the prosaic – they’re filling a vacuum in the market created by One Direction’s split – to the philosophical: if boyband fandom is all about projecting your fantasies on to the performers, then perhaps a group whose lyrics you don’t understand represent an appealingly blank screen.
BTS may not be a boy band but they are filling the boy band vacuum here. At least for the moment. The problem is that it’s a poor fit. In my short time in this fandom I’ve seen fans not familiar with idols and Asian cultures project so much nonsense onto BTS. Assigning outsized value to things like BTS writing their own music--plenty of other idols also write music--and attempting to read faddish American/Western identity politics into everything. There was one interview from BTS’s recent appearance at the Billboard Awards where the interviewer asked RM about the meaning of “Fake Love” and he said something like, if you don’t love yourself then how can love between a person and a person last. English language fans immediately jumped to the conclusion that because he didn’t say “a man and a woman” that meant something huge re: representation or whatever. Nobody considered the fact that he was translating his thoughts from the Korean language where words don't necessarily carry the same meaning or that maybe the song wasn’t about a romantic love at all, that maybe it reads best as the group singing to their fans:
For you, I could pretend like I was happy when I was sad
For you, I could pretend like I was strong when I was hurt
But the funniest part of all the English-language fandom hype over BTS “making it” in America is how we still don’t understand that we’re not the target market for any of this. I watched part of the BTS’s comeback special that aired on V-Live and it really struck me how much they hyped up the fact that the world was watching. This was all meant for the Korean audience. A Korean group had the entire world watching and they, as Koreans, were proud of the fact that they were out representing their country and their culture around the world and the world liked it. The Billboard chart itself isn’t the prize, the American media attention repackaged for the audience back home is. Whether it will turn out to have been worth the effort is another question. Americans aren’t used to not being the center of attention and our demands on BTS (learn fluent English, be authentic the way we understand it, immediately absorb a set of foreign cultural norms you have no context for) may prove to be too much. Or it may not.
Either way, I'll be at the tour this fall. Just try to stop me.
In conclusion, I’ll just leave this here:
A-yo, when it's tough
Doong tah dak, lean on the rhythm, oh
With our song for you
Everyone a-yo, everyone a-yo
(Originally posted May 29, 2018)