The most talked-about performance at Sunday night’s American Music Awards was by an act that wasn’t even nominated for an award. It was a historic moment for BTS, the K-pop septet that left audience members crying, Ansel Elgort cheesing, and seemingly the whole world tweeting. I know all of this not because I was watching the ceremony live but because my phone suddenly started pinging with “Who is BTS?” texts from non-Korean friends.
So, who is BTS? Known more formally as “Bangtan Boys” or “Bulletproof Boy Scouts,” BTS is a Korean boy band composed of three rappers and four singers, all in their early 20s. Their lyrics are almost entirely performed in Korean over robotic music that vaguely follows American trends. It’s catchy, yet unmemorable. Individual BTS members are largely indistinct (save for RM, formerly Rap Monster, who is the only English speaker), but they are seamless and strong as a collective. Compared with the best K-pop acts of the last decade or so — don’t come at me, BTS Army — they are decidedly nondescript and average. But who BTS are is far less important than what they represent: the torchbearers for K-pop.
In fact, K-pop, which began exploding internationally about a decade ago, has been thought in recent years to be in decline. There are myriad reasons, including the dissolution or hiatuses of hugely successful acts like Wonder Girls, SNSD, 2NE1, Super Junior, and Big Bang. In Asia, there are political factors: China, not long ago thought of as the most lucrative new territory for K-pop, has been locking out Korean entertainers due to controversy over the pending deployment of the U.S.-backed THAAD missile-defense system in Korea. And there are more intangible explanations, too, like the idea that K-pop became oversaturated with artists after the “Korean wave.” Supply, some have said, has begun to outpace demand.
Of course, none of these arguments apply in America, where K-pop remains an oddity, despite the efforts of Korean artists to make it here in the past. Excepting the outlier of Psy and “Gangnam Style,” the likes of Wonder Girls, SNSD, CL, and others have tried and failed to break through. The aforementioned are all products of the monolithic K-pop labels — JYP, SM, and YG, respectively — who employed various strategies (and hefty marketing budgets) to Americanize their artists enough to seem palatable to stateside audiences. None of it worked.
They failed to recognize that what Americans tend to appreciate most is a genuine product. To that end, BTS — from the relatively tiny label Big Hit Entertainment — leans hard into K-pop conventions. Keeping it real in K-pop, ironically, means keeping it somewhat fake. They dress similarly; they dye their hair; they smile for pictures and make cute finger hearts; they are “super excited to be here”; they sing and rap adequately; they lip-sync and dance impeccably. They are incredibly polished performers, seasoned over years of K-pop factory training, who choreograph their offstage decorum as carefully as their onstage theatrics. Their personas are anodyne to the point of artifice, more cringey than cool. This is K-pop.
BTS’s American Music Awards performance will likely be the introduction to the genre for a whole new audience. By embracing their K-pop roots rather than contriving a way to appeal to Westerners, BTS has attracted the curiosity of the uninitiated without alienating their already rabid fan base — one that you could rightfully rank among the most fervent in music. It’s these fans, via social media, who have propelled BTS to bigger stages. Beyond subjective judgments of talent and musicianship, there is an element of “right place, right time” that helps explain BTS’s meteoric emergence. Having a huge, highly engaged social media following is a globally recognized currency.
Which doesn’t necessarily mean that Jimmy Kimmel, or the producers of the AMAs, or Ellen DeGeneres (on whose show BTS will appear Tuesday) aren’t longtime K-Pop fans, though I highly doubt it. But hashtags and YouTube views don’t lie. If the past few years in entertainment have proved anything, it’s that the specific is the universal. As long as BTS continue to perform mostly in Korean, there is of course a ceiling to their success in the U.S. They’ve already said in a recent interview that they may record some of their hits in English. My unsolicited advice to them: don’t. There’s value to simply being the biggest K-pop stars in America. Remember how you got here.