BTS for BLM: K-pop, Race, and Transcultural Fandom

Abstract

This cultural report contextualizes K-pop group BTS’s history of engagement with Black pop cultural forms, to aid in assessing the significance of the group’s support for BLM organizations and anti-racist activism following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. While providing a counter-narrative to that of inter-ethnic antagonism that has been a feature of media discourse on Black-Korean relations in the US, since the 1980s, the report also provides an overview of the online organizing and protest strategies of BTS fans in the BLM movement, and the subsequent discourse about K-pop’s politicization that emerged in media coverage and on social media platforms; By bringing these accounts together, the essay aims to enrich our understanding of the political significance of emergent fan identities, while emphasizing the need for historical grounding in our discussions of race and transnational pop cultural phenomena.

Keywords:

• BTS
• K-pop
• Activism
• Race
• Fandom

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The US media coverage of the Korean pop industry has been overdetermined by early writing on Korean idol pop or youth-oriented, commercial pop music by American music journalists. An influential long-form piece by Jonathan Seabrook (2012) established a suite of common techno-orientalist tropes for reporting on K-pop. Seabrook used the Tiller girls and a factory metaphor to describe the Korean pop industry and, in the process, projected the industrial production process onto the performers themselves, presenting them as machine-like and, thus, subhuman.

2. For an analysis of idol–fan relations and K-pop’s unique form of parasociality, see Elving-Hwang (2018). For an overview of scholarship on K-pop fan cultures and ARMY as a transcultural fandom, see McLaren and Jin (2020).

3. The group is especially prolific, with five Korean and four Japanese studio albums, six compilation albums, two reissues, eight EPs, four world tours, six reality TV series – three broadcast on Korean cable outlets MNet (Rookie King, American Hustle Life) and JTBC (BTS in the Soop, seasons 1 and 2), and three web series produced and distributed by Naver VLive, a celebrity live-streaming app (BTS Gayo, Run BTS!, and Bon Voyage, seasons 1–4), and thousands of short video clips, vlogs, and social media posts on their Bangtan TV YouTube channel, Twitter, Tik-tok, VLive, and Big Hit Entertainment’s proprietary fan-artist chat platform WeVerse.

4. For an analysis of the multiple axes of conflict in Los Angeles, leading to and following the civil unrest of 1992 that was sparked by recorded evidence of police brutality in the arrest of Rodney King and the not-guilty verdict that followed the trial of King’s assailants, see Park (2019).

5. The notion of Black-Korean antagonism was also taken up in popular cultural representation, from Ice Cube’s ‘Black Korea’ track on his 1991 album Death Certificate to Spike Lee’s characterisation of Korean grocers in Do the Right Thing (1989). For a repeat of narratives of ethnic antagonism and Korean victimhood, see Edquist (2020).

6. See, especially, the group’s Map of the Soul: Persona, and their 2018 single, ‘Idol’, which thematises the multiple identities that celebrities must manage.

7. All male citizens of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) must enlist in the South Korean military by the age of 30 and serve a minimum of 18 months. Thus, as the oldest member of BTS is 29 in 2022, BTS must take a forced hiatus while its members fulfill their national duties. As global as their fame may be, they cannot escape the disciplinary power of the state.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle Cho

Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Popular Cultures and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching areas are Korean film, media, and popular culture, Transpacific reception of Korean wave content, platforms, transnational fandom, and race and gender in global media. Her first monograph analyzes millennial South Korean genre cinemas, and her current project theorizes vicarious experience in K-pop and its fandoms. She is co-editor with Jesook Song of a volume on mediations of gender politics in contemporary South Korea, and a collection of critical essays on the group BTS (with Patty Ahn, Frances Gateward, Vernadette Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong). Her public-facing writing on K-pop, fandom, and media convergence can be found at flowjournal.org, pandemicmedia.meson.press, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.