“The Number Ones” (Dynamite)

I received a copy of Tom Breihan’s The Number Ones for Christmas and have been enjoying it quite a bit. The book expands and condenses his excellent Stereogum column into something of a guide to the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It’s light reading for us pop music history buffs who like a little nonfiction before bedtime but maybe, also, you might learn something about an artist or genre you weren’t all that familiar with before. (I was unaware, for example, of the origins of KC and Sunshine Band.)

The trouble comes in the final chapter, which attempts to tackle BTS’s “Dynamite”. 

Breihan’s central thesis on “Dynamite” is correct: 

“But even if K-pop never gains more of a foothold over here, then BTS’s success will still be historically significant. It represents the moment that one fan base firmly established that it can control the Hot 100 for months at a time.

Apparently, the Hot 100 is no longer a historical record of the music that dominates pop culture at any particular moment. Instead, the charts look more and more like a battlefield for competing fan armies. A change like that forces a reconsideration of the entire idea of pop stardom. BTS have taken the existing model and blown it up like dynamite.” (pp. 310-311)

No lies detected, as the kids say. The trouble is that while Breihan is very astute when it comes to the American pop charts, he is much less knowledgeable about BTS and K-Pop. It’s not a crime for a music writer not to know everything about everything but it becomes a problem when that writer must rely on other sources to attempt to place BTS in context as a K-Pop act. And the mainstream sources available on BTS and K-Pop are incredibly poor. You have your choice of hagiography mixed with a heavy dose of press release, ill-informed and poorly researched, or gun-for-hire type biography written for fans. 

Something I’ve said over and over again is that the reason I care about the misinformed narrative on BTS getting pushed in the press is not because I’m a “hater” but because that false narrative then trickles down into books like The Number Ones and becomes the received wisdom on BTS and K-Pop. And that is a problem for me and for people like me who care about this genre and its history.

A lot of this ground I’ve covered before, especially in my episode 50 which was done in response to Tammy Kim’s horror show of an article on K-Pop and Breihan echoes many of her (false) claims in this chapter. 

But let’s dig into it. 

Here are some of the points I think it’s worth correcting:

“On those two networks, the dominant genres were sentimental ballads and the traditional Korean gospel music known as trot.” 

“Western genres made their way into South Korea’s pop music, though the Korean pop industry was still built around a few televised competitions.” (p. 296)

First of all, “trot” is nowhere near “traditional” or “gospel.” It’s a style of music broadly analogous to something like schlager in Germany or American country music. But it’s also important to keep in mind that in countries like Korea, you can’t look at the “official” output of state run media and assume it’s all anybody listened to. You can listen to more on that in episode 43 on the Chinese underground rock scene. And for Korea pre-1980s I’ll direct people here to the episode I did with blogger Gusts of Popular Feeling on the popular music of the 1960s and 1970s in Korea. 

Western genres made their way into Korean pop music mostly via the American troops posted there as well as via Korean returnees from America. (Quite a few Koreans ended up in America thanks to their service in the US military during the Vietnam War.) And it happened well before the 1987 date given here. From the 1950s, Korean musicians would be hired to play for American soldiers on base. And what did they play? American hits. Where do you think Korean rock god Shin Jung-hyeon got his start? 

But you have to keep in mind that bootlegs (especially from Japan) were extremely prevalent and easier to get than official versions. In fact, a lot of the pop from the late 1980s-early 1990s takes pretty direct inspiration from Japanese pop. My favorite example, of course, is Korea's “first boy band” Sobangcha who are a direct bite of Johnny’s & Associates Shonentai.

“In 1992, Seo Taiji, a Korean musician who had previously played bass in heavy metal band Sinawe, formed a boy band called Seo Taiji & Boys. The group took inspiration from American rock and R&B, as well as from the hugely popular American boy band New Kids on the Block.” (p. 296)

Seo Taiji & Boys have been retroactively canonized as “the first Kpop group” which is true but it’s also not true. Seo Taiji did not care about NKOTB nor did he form a “boy band.” Seo Taiji wanted to be the Beastie Boys crossed with Mötley Crüe. Seo Taiji & Boys became the focus of ambient teen hysteria that had previously been centered on NKOTB and, like the Beatles before him, had a complicated relationship to it. It may seem like a nitpicky distinction but I think it’s important.

“In the late nineties, three huge entertainment firms… became K-Pop’s main talent incubators.” (pp. 296-97)

Fact check: false. I go into great detail on this in my history series but the short version is the “Big 3” didn’t solidify as part of the K-Pop narrative until the late 2000s. YG Entertainment started out producing artists, not idols, and didn’t get into the K-Pop idol group arena until BigBang debuted in 2006. SM Entertainment and JYP Entertainment were active but the other big agency at the time was DSP, home to heavy hitters like Sechs Kies and KARA. Again, it may seem like a small nitpick but this idea of “The Big Three” has become so calcified into the Kpop narrative in English that it’s worth reminding people that it didn’t just spring into existence at the dawn of time.

“Entertainment firms seek to attract the widest audience possible…” (p. 297)

In today’s K-Pop economy, it’s more accurate to say that they seek to attract the widest audience of K-pop fans possible, where “widest” here is in the geographic sense, not in a broad mainstream sense.

“By and large, K-Pop aims to overwhelm.”

“In videos, troupes of elfin, androgynous young singers with brightly dyed hair and color-coordinated costumes dance in dazzling pop-and-lockstep.” (p. 298)

This is a bit of projection from Breihan. K-Pop, by and large, aims to connect with the viewer. It’s overwhelming only if you’re not used to the style of performance. And, actually, I’d argue that K-Pop has become less big and less over-the-top in the recent past. And matching costumes are from a generation or two ago. Nobody does that anymore. There are larger-than-life exceptions of course (thank you for your service, Taemin) but by and large, a typical K-Pop video in 2023 is not particularly overwhelming, visually, and is likely consumed by the typical fan on a phone rather than a big screen and made with an aim to go viral on TikTok rather than overwhelm the senses. 

Also, the elfin and androgynous may be true for some groups today (I guess?) but K-Pop holds a wide variety of idols, most of whom are far from androgynous in their own context. (RIP the Beast Idol era). 

“...BTS started off as an underdog project that rejected many of the K-Pop system’s practices.” (p. 299)

Fact check (and please see episode 50 for more details): BTS debuted at the tail end of a boom of hip hop idols in the mold of BigBang and Block B. Their debut song was literally a big arrow pointing back 15 years at the debut songs of SM Entertainment’s H.O.T. and their arch-rivals DSP’s Sechs Kies. They were firmly in the mold of the K-Pop system and deliberately so. 

“The members of BTS often helped write and produce their own music, a rare thing in K-Pop.” (p. 300)

Again, no. This has become part of the received wisdom on BTS thanks to the efforts of the blue check BTS fan journalists but the truth is that many K-Pop idols have written and produced their own music over the years starting with H.O.T. (see episode 41 with Old R from the Kpop Sunbaes). G-Dragon (BigBang) and Zico (Block B) were very well known as songwriter-idols in the Korean mainstream before BTS ever debuted. It was not rare or unusual.

The same goes for writing and performing meaningful songs, political songs, and every other kind of song. 

BTS were not outliers but BTS have been sold in the English media as outliers.

Breihan goes on to try and tie Psy and BTS together because neither “fully operated within the K-Pop system” (p. 302) but what I couldn’t see clearly yet in 2018 when I wrote the final part to my idol history series was that what really separates BTS from the rest of K-Pop. It isn’t their art (often a rehash of concepts done by other groups) or form (again, hip hop idols were a dime a dozen when they debuted and remain so today) but their fans. BTS were able to break outside of the K-Pop subculture and roll up lost Directioners, Jonatics, Twihards, SPNFamily, MCRmys, and other fandom folks looking for a new fix. BTS fanfic is an under-discussed driver of BTS fandom recruitment. BTS fans used fandom knowledge from those migrating Directioners to get BTS first noticed by Billboard in 2017. And it’s via this line of cultural fandom transmission from America, through songs like “Boy With Love” and “Dynamite,” written for a western ear, that BTS was exported back out to the world as Top 40 bubblegum. And it’s this movement that Breihan correctly identifies in his central thesis of the chapter.

Please understand this post isn’t a critique of Breihan but rather of the poor quality sources available for writers like him who want to do their due diligence in exploring a complex and ever-changing topic like K-Pop.

K-Pop is dead; long live K-Pop.