It's amusing to me when people are surprised to find out I'm a fan of BTS. I wrote my undergrad dissertation on them. I saw them in concert in 2018 (on Jimin's birthday). It's not at all a secret.

You may have heard that they released an album this month, their first in almost four years. I have things to say, not about the music (I'm not a music critic, and I think my musician brother would cringe to see me try) but about some of the discourse that's arisen since ARIRANG's release.

Here's a quote from my dissertation, which I wrote in 2017/18, but seems relevant now:

It should be stated clearly, however, that their success in the West is not what has made them suddenly worth examining. The borderline infuriating surprise at the quality of BTS’s content, as well as their international success, is proof enough that Western intellectual superiority still tinges our perception of what makes ‘good’ art, and what makes art ‘successful’.

Since ARIRANG's release, many articles and comments from critics state that BTS is trying to appeal to global (implicitly: American, anglophone) audience, and separate themselves from being labelled as just K-pop idols (implicitly: frivolous, unserious artists).

A Vulture article noted that "[i]t’s revealed in the Netflix doc BTS: The Return that BTS’s label, Big Hit Music, pushed for more English despite the guys’ concerns about authenticity."

It would really suck if the label were the ones pushing for this global (cough cough American) sound with English lyrics.

"Fan frustration intensified after Vulture described BigHit Music vice-president Nicole Kim as pushing back against the group’s preference for Korean lyrics. Kim allegedly argued the album needed a more English-focused approach to succeed internationally.

In the same article, Kim was quoted criticising past BTS tracks ‘ON’ and ‘Black Swan’ as less “relatable,” a remark that sparked immediate backlash from ARMYs, many of whom view those songs as among the group’s most meaningful releases." (Source)

I would argue that solely striving for relatability is striving for the death of art. A piece of writing advice that I incorporate in my process is to mine the emotional truth from individual experience ("write what you know", in that I know the emotions and feelings firsthand), and then craft it into story. People who have never met me resonate with my work. I strike different keys depending on the individual, who then takes their personal experience and transposes it onto the work, but I have purposefully signalled a specific emotion, feeling. The hope is that those who have experienced the emotion firsthand will feel recognised, and that those who have not will have touched that core and come away with some understanding.

The universality comes from the familiarity of emotion. The fascination comes from the marvel that despite difference, human beings can experience such similarity. I have very little in common with any of these men, and yet it's difficult not to feel connected to artists via their art, to feel we have something in common as human beings. I'm not limiting that to BTS. Any musical artist, visual artist, writer, can punch me in the stomach with the uncanniness of familiarity.

The universality or relatability that I connect with in BTS's music (and any artist from outside of my own culture and lived experience) is, primarily, emotion. I can listen to a song and have no idea what the lyrics mean, and still feel. That's still communication. Anyone who has ever had to navigate a situation whereby neither party spoke the same language can testify that people communicate in a hundred other ways; our faces, our tones, our body language, gestures. It's not "universality" that I protest, but the baggage that the word carries, depending on who says it. Why is writing in English a move towards the global? Wouldn't Mandarin and Spanish be the logical move? Why is marketing towards the American consumer the same as marketing towards the global one?

Frankly, some of the criticism of ARIRANG not being "Korean enough" feels like the brink of a slippery slope. I'm not Korean, I can't speak on whether anything is "Korean enough" (though these arguments did prompt spirals of thoughts — is my own work Irish enough? queer enough? autistic enough? is that the metric against which my work must be judged? what's the quota I must meet?). My problem is with the conflation of terms like global and universal with American and Anglophonic.

I wrote a huge section of my undergrad dissertation about the interesting cross-cultural adaptations present in BTS's work — primarily their references to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin and Hermann Hesse's Demian.

Mueller calls Hesse’s writing “confessional, personal, functional, alive, written with the heart’s blood”, and that is exactly what BTS have attempted to emulate in their work, almost a century after Demian was first published (151). It is less the logical narrative of a story that BTS have adapted from Demian, but the ‘spirit’ of the novel, namely its nature as a bildungsroman, moving its themes, and even characters, easily from the literary form, to the visual.

BTS were capable of reading a novel by a Westerner and appreciating it, so why is the inverse not expected of Westerners?

BTS's work is not impenetrable to the average Anglophone just because the lyrics are in another language, and to be honest if someone cannot be bothered to look up lyrics or pore through fan forums or read reviews, then that is their own choice and loss. The joy of Kpop is, in large part, the community. Why else would every band have a unique name for their fanbase? Lightsticks, photocards, merch, all ways of generating revenue absolutely, and ways for community members to signal an identity.

If someone has a question, therefore, it is not difficult to find an answer. Most folks are happy to babble away about their favourite musicians. Read some stuff, learn some things, make a friend along the way. That was the fun part, wasn't it??? Did we not all enjoy doing that??????

Why must we continue to spoon-feed everything?

I think exchanging art and cross-cultural adaptation and intertextuality are all wonderful. Being confined to your own small box will smother art (I'm refraining from diving into a conversation about appropriation, for the sake of the length of this post, so please just take for granted that this excludes appropriative works).

The cross-cultural element to BTS’s “WINGS” adds a fascinating dimension to their adaptation of Demian and “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. As Hutcheon beautifully puts it, “stories travel to different cultures and different media” (A Theory of Adaptation, 31). It is also not a one-way system, however; both Hesse and Le Guin were interested in and influenced by Eastern philosophy, and this carried into their writing. Peter Roberts writes that Hesse was “a man of the West who turned to the idea of ‘the East’ in seeking to understand himself and his society” (249). This permeates Demian, where Emil Sinclair turns to an alternative philosophy in order to understand both himself and the world around him, also. One may term this as a ‘mutual cultural exchange’. There is a back-and-forth between Hesse, Le Guin, and BTS. They each draw from each other’s traditions, philosophies, and narrative styles, while putting a novel spin on their work.

Art is supposed to be a fucking conversation!!!!!!!

All of that is to say, I don't care what direction BTS takes their work in, as long as it is their choice. I understand (though my experience is on a microscopic level, compared to theirs) that as artists who want to make a living/keep a contract, you are obligated to make work that will sell, and sometimes you need to make compromises. Ignoring that is stupid. I, too, would love to make any art I wanted for the sake of it, but I would also like to be able to eat.

However, if labels or shareholders or whoever are the ones pushing and prodding for "relatability", to the point that BTS's music becomes indistinguishable from anyone else's, then that is disheartening. Disappointing. Saddening.

I don't know that there is anything new that anyone can say. I don't know that there are any original ideas left. The joy and novelty comes from the unique voices and perspectives, the distinct interpretation, the translation of an idea and feeling into art. I don't want all of my music to sound the same. I don't want all of my books to read the same.

It's bad for the ecosystem.