What the NYT Popcast Gets Wrong About K-Pop in English
I’m so excited to publish this guest post by Ruby, a classical musician, BTS fan, and most importantly, one of my Agust D concert buddies. You can find her and more of her insights into all things BTS at @lapsed_bard on The Website Formerly Known As Twitter.
Back at the beginning of December, the New York Times dropped a podcast episode that made enemies of approximately every BTS fan (ARMY) who heard about it. Summaries and quotes and responses were many, and I don't imagine I'm about to say anything particularly groundbreaking here, but I wanted to take the time to express some of the problems with this podcast episode, and why ARMY got so mad about it.
(It's me, I'm ARMY; I'm mad about it.)
The topic of this podcast episode, broadly, is the incursion of K-pop into the American music market, and the question of whether adaptation to this new market is threatening what makes K-pop unique. The podcast is hosted by pop music critic John Caramanica, and his guest for this episode is Kara, a blogger who declines to provide a last name for fear of backlash. John and Kara preemptively deflect criticism by making an artificial distinction between “people who think critically about pop music” and “people who tweet”, between “grownups” and anyone who disagrees with them. As it happens, I am a grownup who tweets, a trained musician who is heavily engaged in critical discussion of pop music and culture and who, in fact, disagrees with them.
I do want to disclose up front that I have read a transcript of the podcast, but I have not listened to it. Frankly, it was hard enough to get through; I think if I'd had to listen to human voices saying the words I was reading, I would have shut it off. I have tried to apply the most charitable tone interpretation to their discussion, but even so...
The DISRESPECT
One of the main things that struck me throughout this podcast was the lack of respect on display: for BTS, for K-pop in general, even for the Western music industry.
Right up front, John refers to BTS member Jung Kook as “Kook”, presumably intending to use his surname and thereby revealing that he couldn't be bothered to do a quick Google search and find out that Jung Kook is the stylized stage name of Jeon Jungkook. Surname Jeon, given name Jungkook.
John and Kara go on to discuss BTS, Jungkook, and other K-pop acts as though they have no agency in their own careers. In discussing Jungkook's album Golden, and the ways in which it is a “shiny [pop] artifact”, John asks what it says that “for Jungkook, at this stage of his career, this is the direction that folks chose to go with”, implying that Jungkook simply went where he was directed. If you've paid attention to his trajectory as an artist at all, it's very clear this isn't the case; Jungkook, who has been in the music industry for ten years, has stated repeatedly that he wanted to explore different sounds and try out a more Western pop style, and this is backed up by his numerous covers of American pop songs over the years.
The disrespect to Jungkook as an established artist with opinions is really an extension of the disrespect to BTS and K-pop as a whole. Earlier in the episode, John casually mentions “the people pulling the strings on BTS,” disregarding the fact that BTS are famously autonomous. They own shares in HYBE, the “parent” company of their label, BigHit Music, because it was their success that allowed the company to transform from a small entertainment company into a multinational corporation. Obviously this is not the norm. However, in describing the Hallyu wave, the spread of Korean pop culture around the world, Kara describes K-pop artists looking to expand their careers beyond singing and dancing as “vectors for any number of causes or promotional opportunities,” adding with a laugh that if you need a K-pop star to add flash to your big event, you just “call the embassy”, as though they are puppets of the government.
John and Kara also refuse to see BTS's ten years of musical evolution as in any way innovative or even internally consistent. Kara calls them “chameleons”, but it's not a compliment. To hear her tell it, they sort of blindly flailed around until they fetched up at “Mic Drop” (specifically the Steve Aoki remix, 2018), which was supposedly some kind of arrival point. It would take another whole essay to trace the hip hop core of BTS through their discography up to “Mic Drop” and beyond, alongside the development of their sound via other influences, and this is not that essay. Let me just say that for someone who claims to have still been on the BTS train at that time, Kara seems to have a very incomplete understanding of their music.
The cherry on top of this refusal to properly contextualize is the way they talk about “Butter,” the second of BTS's all-English singles released during the pandemic. Following up on the success of “Dynamite,” their first English single to top the Billboard Hot 100 in 2020, “Butter” smashed records and got a standing ovation at the 2022 Grammys. John's take on “Butter” is that it felt “incredibly craven”; he describes it as “a business decision masquerading as a pop hit.” Kara then validates that take in a way that I can only describe as a bad-faith interpretation of events.
It's forgivable that two people with no particular interest in BTS don't have a detailed understanding of their movements and motives during this time period. It's also true that there is no way to separate the production of popular music from the profit motive. That being said, you just have to look at the timeline of events to see that “they manufactured a pop hit because their company was on the rocks” is a pretty thin claim.
When HYBE formed, the tour had already been postponed, yes. The previous year. Long enough back that it would have been incredibly irresponsible not to fold the possibility of cancellation into the calculations when forming the new company. It's pretty insulting, not to mention a stretch, to suggest that HYBE was somehow created in such a short-sighted way that refunding a cancelled tour would put them in a precarious position.
As for “Butter” being released in a panic for cash: again, HYBE had just formed. The odds that “Butter” hadn't been in the works already when the change happened are incredibly slim. The idea that a corporation would be formed in such disarray that they would rely on a gamble in the American music charts for financial stability is laughable.
The context that matters, the context that far more likely informed the choice to create and release “Butter,” is that BTS were in the middle of a career pivot. The plan had been, release Map of the Soul 7, tour it, and then enlist for their mandatory military service all at once. (Most idol groups send members one or a few at a time, remaining active with reduced personnel while their members complete their service over several years.) The pandemic completely derailed this tidy plan. Now they not only had to figure out an artistic direction, after their last album had wrapped their whole discography up with a bow in preparation for leaving, but they also had to figure out a new enlistment timeline. Collaborating with American songwriters was hardly a new practice for them, so to think that this was cold-bloodedly put together to capitalize on some kind of gap in the American industry and make a truckload of money is a huge reach.
The Industry
Speaking of the American music industry, this episode contains remarkably little introspection from people who supposedly think critically about this on the regular. The discussion continually veers so close to understanding the structures in play here and just misses.
They mention BTS's reception in the west as a boy band, how that was immediately the framework adopted to understand them as a group. This is brought up as a strategic error on BTS's part due to the short shelf life of boy bands; at no point does either of them acknowledge that this wasn't a choice by BTS. Western audiences and industry gatekeepers presented them under that paradigm, despite “boy band” being a reductive and ill-fitting label. BTS didn't pigeonhole themselves; we just don't know any other way to talk about a male vocal group. That's on us at the reception point, not BTS at the point of delivery.
There's also talk about the kinds of music that don't necessarily “get exported to us.” Specifically, John mentions “Taemin holding down the fort for art-pop,” and later on, Kara talks about girl group IVE in contrast to the more mainstream-friendly NewJeans, holding up IVE as an example of the sort of thing that is really interesting but not received well in the American market. The discussion as a whole centers K-pop and the activities of its artists, contemplating whether it might be compromising itself to succeed in the west. Throughout, they keep brushing up against this idea that we're not getting the really good stuff here, as though it's somehow the fault of K-pop artists “conceding” to the American market. Not once do they seem to give any consideration to the question of what, exactly, might be preventing the more archetypical specimens of K-pop from breaking through to Western audiences. Is it possible, perhaps, that the structural factors that favour a particular sound have not allowed that more “interesting” music to be widely heard here, and instead spread the more radio-friendly, English-language, “watered-down” songs?
Why is the American music industry's risk aversion somehow K-pop's problem to solve?
The Orientalism
Look, this isn't my area, but even I can recognise Orientalism when I see it. To start with, this episode overtly others K-pop and its audience by repeatedly placing them in opposition to “normal” music listeners, rather than using a more neutral term like “mainstream.” Under an Orientalist paradigm, the thing that makes the “other” valuable is its “other”ness. The way this episode discusses K-pop – in fact, the whole premise of the episode – is rife with this attitude: K-pop might be losing its unique qualities by trying to appeal to the American music market, and this is bad.
I'm just going to reiterate that the American music industry does not seem in a hurry to accept the “valuable otherness” of K-pop. And here is where I will explicitly remind everyone that the entertainment industry is in fact an industry, and its purpose is to make money. This is the same in Korea. This is the balance beam every music artist – every creative in every industry, in fact – has to walk. So let's not pretend there isn't always some degree of financial consideration in play. No one is pure, let's just give everyone the same benefit of the doubt here.
So let's talk about another example of K-pop adapting to a foreign market: Japan. K-pop is huge in Japan. Korean idols have been releasing Japanese-language songs alongside translated versions of their Korean hits for at least two decades; Korean idol BoA's first Japanese album, Listen to my Heart (2002), sold over a million copies. Returning to BTS, since I know their music fairly thoroughly, I'd like to point out that their Japanese originals have a distinctive sound that sets them apart from their Korean-language repertoire. From what I have heard, this seems to hold true with many other idols as well, enough that I would tentatively call it the norm. Singing in a foreign language, changing their sound to appeal to a specific market – it's not a problem when that market is Japan. Why are we upset that this approach is now being employed in the American market? Why is this a soulless cash grab rather than an industry adapting?
Then we come to the discussion of Jung Kook's solo debut album, Golden. This to me is one of the more obviously egregious outcroppings of the Orientalist attitudes pervading this podcast episode. According to John, Jungkook's album is “a shiny artifact”: inoffensive Top 40-style pop that any American artist could have put out. He goes so far as to say that “we don't need Koreans doing generic American pop,” and my first question is, why not? Why should a Korean singer be limited by your expectations of him? Why should he be required to do the special cool thing you think is all his country's music scene is good for? It's clear you think K-pop is more interesting than mainstream American pop, but you don't get to decide how its artists move.
Golden is an obvious pastiche of Western pop styles, a tasting menu of the kinds of music Jungkook grew up listening to and admiring. Every track required something at least slightly different from him vocally, and his technique and artistry had to develop to accommodate the demands. As a fan of BTS and Jungkook, I enjoy the album as a vocal exploration. Not everyone has to like it, and it's fine if you missed the point. But it's a mistake to hold this album, and Jungkook by extension, up as some kind of bellwether for the industry as a whole. It's a mistake, and frankly racist as hell, to see one person choosing to make an all-English pop album in collaboration with American songwriters and producers as a signal that K-pop as a unique artifact is irrevocably compromised.
John gives lip service to the truth that “an RM album is not going to sound like a V album is not going to sound like a Jung Kook album.” Despite this acknowledgement, this podcast episode cherry-picks and catastrophises minority examples as though they represent the prevailing wind. It comes off as clickbait, and it's disrespectful to both its subject matter and its listeners.