I admit I thought Gangnam Style was catchy, but I never really gave K-pop a chance beyond that. It seemed too far out of my wheelhouse. I’m too old. I’m too Western. I love pop music, but I’m also pretty selective about it and get obnoxious about things like production.

But then BTS appeared on my radar. And with some nudging from a friend, my transformation happened in three steps:

Step 1: The dance line. I am a former dancer who weeps at the ballet and goes on YouTube spirals where I watch 80s breakdancing videos for hours. (Incidentally, Beat Street still holds up, but more on that later.) The rundown is this:

J-Hope, the dance leader of BTS, is a master of popping and isolation, and he combines that smoothly with hip-hop and freestyle. He even dances with his face. He could wipe the floor on So You Think You Can Dance.

Jimin is a trained contemporary dancer, and he has some of the most fluid hip-hop dancing with the cleanest lines I’ve ever seen.

Jungkook, who trained in taekwondo, has a graceful power behind his dancing and what seems like a bottomless well of energy.

The remaining four members (Jin, Suga, RM and V) also dance to BTS’s intricate choreography, and they are no slouches either. It’s like watching a dance crew, only they sing and rap really well, too.

Step 2: The “DNA” video. The video for “DNA,” the first single from their latest comeback, is so visually appealing that watching it is like taking a soma holiday. Their choreography is compelling, and the art in the video is like the happy love child of Takashi Murakami and a pinball machine. It’s a reminder that art doesn’t have to be dark, that sometimes it comes from joy. (Plus, all seven members are really ridiculously good-looking, which doesn’t hurt.)

Credit: BigHit Entertainment

Step 3: Hermann Hesse. What does Hermann Hesse have to do with BTS? Well, their leader, Namjoon (RM), who taught himself English to a point of fluency, read lines from Demian by Hermann Hesse at the beginning of the band’s series of short films that correspond to their seven solo tracks on their Wings/You Never Walk Alone album. The songs showcase seven different styles of seven different people, but somehow manage to be cohesive. The films themselves are dark and thoughtful (much like a lot of their more narrative music videos), and the video for “Blood, Sweat, and Tears,” off the same album, is more enjoyable to me than the last three Christopher Nolan movies I saw. (I could probably write an academic paper on Nietzsche, existentialism, and the “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” video.) This is not just an American hip-hop ripoff or bubblegum pop. It’s art. And it’s an immersive experience that goes beyond music.

There’s an existential aspect to many of BTS’s songs and visuals, even the happy songs about love. They get that life is fleeting and you get caged in by the world or by your own demons, but sometimes you still feel free. Namjoon and J-Hope recently said in an interview that their music expresses the feelings of young people in their teens and 20s, as all the members are. But I’m in my 30s, and identity doesn’t come any easier for me. I’m still trying to figure out the same shit I was when I was a teenager. My entire adult life has been spent trying to recapture the sense of joy and wonder and possibility I felt in my youth, and failing miserably. Unfortunately, it requires denial to do so, and I’m stuck somewhere between being abjectly horrified at the world the more I learn about it and trying to reconcile how to live in accordance with what I believe in spite the world’s indifference. In a solo-produced track released earlier this year, RM wrote, “I live to understand the world / But why hasn’t the world ever tried to understand me,” and that is exactly my daily mantra.

If a K-pop group writing in a language I don’t know can get me to this point of contemplation/existential crisis, then maybe there’s something deeper here than what on the surface appears to be a shallow culture of celebrity — what a critical theorist might call an entertainment machine — that exploits the deep pockets of anyone with expendable income and gives impressionable young people unrealistic expectations for life, love, and beauty.

*~*~*~*

The whole genre of K-pop, including BTS, is still kind of troubling.

If you want to make money as an artist of any sort, you have to agree to being exploited. You still hear disdainful talk of “selling out,” but you cannot reasonably be expected to stay alive in a capitalist system unless you sell out in some fashion.

BTS writes and produces their own songs with some help, but their names are all over the credits. This apparently is rare for a K-pop group, but it gives a taste of the elusive authenticity that artists strive for. I mean, Suga wrote the song “First Love” about his piano. In addition to the existential themes (apparently also rare for K-pop — I listened to other groups while writing this, and so far nothing but a few Got7 tracks have clicked with me), there’s a self-awareness to BTS that pop music, especially Western pop music, doesn’t often have, making much of it generic and redundant. But BTS know they’re famous pop idols, and they don’t apologize for it or pretend they’re not. And maybe it’s a meaningless endeavor, but so is everything.

Being a K-pop idol isn’t just music and dancing. BTS are also filmed a lot — in behind the scenes videos, variety shows, guest stars on talk shows, even episodes that are reminiscent of Road Rules challenges.

BTS Gayo. Credit: BigHit Entertainment

There’s also the social media presence, selfies, livestreams, tweets — BTS provides so much free content to fans, which is how they’ve built an international following (for a USian, it’s mind-boggling). Fan signings are also important to connecting with fans. The trick is to make every fan feel like they are loved and a part of something. There’s a cultural difference in the way BTS talks about their fans, ARMYs. Fan culture in the US is generally less interactive. We still think celebrities owe us, though, but we tend to take it from them via invasive measures and intrusive digging into their personal lives.

Being a K-pop idol is actually being an idol, an image created for worship. BTS refer sometimes to their “characters,” which means that even when they are acting as themselves, they are aware that they are being filmed, selling a persona. Some of their video content feels like a reality show, except unlike reality shows in the US, they don’t pretend they aren’t on camera.

You can’t really “sell out” as a K-pop star, because you’re already an object for sale. And if the persona you sell is close to your real self, which it seems like it is for BTS given the personal nature of their music, then maybe they’ve answered the question, is being a pop star art?

I didn’t think being authentically a pop star was possible, because you have to authentically be a person and be a persona — real and vulnerable but also heavily stylized and propped up — but BTS somehow manage to do it believably. It’s almost as if they’re living, breathing performance art.

Art has been a commodity for centuries, and the debate rages on regarding what counts. I’m not sure something is less sublime if it also comes with a price tag. Nothing in the world can compare to standing on a mountain, but looking at Francis Bacon’s madness or Murakami’s beautiful but tragic murals are pretty good, too. It’s not hard to guess that I’m an Andy Warhol fan. One of my favorite series of artworks ever is his Screen Tests, close-ups of people’s faces that he filmed, then slowed down to 16 frames per second, for two and a half minutes of them just looking into the camera.

When it comes to music, and I know this is a contested claim, to me a good song is a good song, whether it was written by Paul and John in a graveyard or by a team of Swedish songwriters whose names you will never know or a group of Korean producers. Everything I love is tainted in some way by capitalism, and even Paul McCartney said, “John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool’.” And Paul McCartney is one of the best songwriters ever.

I’m glad that some people are able to make a living singing and writing and performing. I wonder sometimes how much good art, music, and film will never be shared because brilliant creators have to work nine-to-five jobs to keep roofs over their heads. It might not be fair that we have to pay money for experiences that we don’t really have time for because we have to work 40 hours a week while living paycheck to paycheck. But that’s how most of us relate to the arts. I have to take what I can get.

In capitalism, everyone is trying to make money off you. Even the laws you have to follow were probably bought by a lobby. The guilt-laden orange I eat in the middle of the summer came from South Africa and was spray-painted orange. The environmental harm to ship it is as egregious as I’m sure the minuscule amount the orange farmer was paid so a grocery store giant in the US can jack up the price to the consumer and not pay its employees a living wage.

It’s hard to enjoy anything in the twenty-first century. So why not enjoy the most authentically artificial thing I can?

*~*~*~*

But if it were only mere capitalism that makes me skeptical of K-pop.

Globalization has ripped the world open, for better or for worse, and we have to deal with it.

One of the benefits of global capitalism is cultural exchange and an exposure to new diverse perspectives on the world. Diversity often refers to representation, which is socially important, but a diversity of perspectives from a multitude of experiences is also epistemically important, because it increases our knowledge and gets us to a better understanding of the truth of the world.

The trouble is that a lot of times it looks like the West forcing its culture onto the East and the “developing” world. You see this with the ubiquity of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Elvis Presley (still in 2017, remarkable considering Elvis never performed outside North America and was dead before the internet existed). Imperialism turned into the perfect opportunity for capitalists to exploit the people they colonized. Capitalism aims to lift the peasant class up just enough to keep taking their money, at home and abroad. (And when things aren’t looking profitable in those distances places, the US just goes to war with them.)

K-pop is criticized for cultural appropriation, and that’s worth looking into.

Some appropriation can fall under the more acceptable category of cultural exchange, like eating hummus or sushi. Food isn’t automatically a bad form of appropriation — food is one of the best ways to share your culture with someone else. But it has to be shared. And so even this gets iffy when you have restaurants in the US run by white people charging exorbitant prices for Japanese street food or white food bloggers putting apples in guacamole recipes — please stop doing this, at the very least it’s offensive to good taste.

Dance is a another potential vehicle for cultural exchange. We don’t think of ballet as something that has been appropriated, because it’s done all over the world. Most people probably don’t know it originated in the Italian Renaissance in spite of the use of French terms and the dominance of the Russians. The thing about dance is that we all have bodies and we express ourselves wordlessly through them, which makes dance emotional, human, and as universal as eating. But there are lines here, too. You wouldn’t appropriate a sacred or liturgical dance and re-package it for sale (which K-pop groups sometimes do, particularly dance from South Asian cultures), but I think it’s okay that I can at least appreciate the intricacy and precision of a Bollywood dance or that Alex Collins, a football player, has learned Irish step dance to improve his footwork.

Music, however, can clearly be appropriated. Music, especially popular music, is usually protected by copyright — another feature of capitalism making its mark. Free exchange is not really possible here from the get go. The social and cultural lines we draw with popular music are particularly contentious.

Was it appropriation when Joe Strummer used reggae riffs in Clash songs? Probably. It was a DJ named Don Letts playing reggae records in between punk sets at The Roxy who was responsible for reggae’s influence in British rock music. Letts also introduced Bob Marley to British punk. This is why Afro-punk exists, but isn’t that ultimately a good thing? Sure, pothead teenagers with posters of Bob Marley on their wall are lame, and not just anyone should go out and start a reggae band, but if you use a steel drum in “Jane Says,” to me that seems okay.

Don Letts and Joe Strummer. Source.

The trouble is that K-pop involves rap and hip-hop, a subculture that is generally thought to have originated in the Bronx in the 1970s with a group of Black and Puerto Rican socialists who threw neighborhood block parties with a partial aim in mind to break racial barriers. Out of this movement came beatboxing, DJing, breakdancing, street art, and it spread all over the world. The movie Beat Street was even influential in East Germany during the 1980s, precisely because of its political underpinnings about the ills of capitalism. Hip-hop is often political (see Questlove’s recent response to Keith Olbermann), and there’s something universal in criticisms of capitalism and anthems against oppression.

Korea certainly has a history of being exploited, particularly in the twentieth century, first by Imperial Japan (read about Korean comfort women sometime). Then it got divided as a casualty of the Cold War between the USSR and the US, which led to the Korean War, after which the US then backed authoritarian regimes in South Korea over democratic ones. South Korea didn’t become a democracy until the 80s. So, maybe the originators of modern K-pop, who grew up in the 80s during the transition to democracy, understood exploitation on a level where hip-hop spoke to them.

The rap that grew out of hip-hop (of course, rap’s precursors date back to ancient Egypt and to West African griots), however, isn’t just a style of music. You can’t talk about rap without acknowledging that it has a particular socio-political history in the United States that comes part and parcel with same society that fetishizes Black culture while silencing, exploiting, dehumanizing, and killing Black people. Capitalism makes rap interesting, because much of it is marketed toward white male teenagers (a huge part of the music-buying market), and so it’s packaged with a particular hypermasculine, stereotypical image that doesn’t necessarily reflect its content.

It’s pretty safe to say that rap is generally not written with me in mind, a white woman in her 30s, but I do enjoy some of it. Not surprising, that the hip-hop and rap I do like is political, and I have an inexplicable but undying love of Dr. Dre. (I wrote a significant portion of my doctoral dissertation to The Chronic 2001, which in theory is an album I should not like for the misogyny alone.) I get more of my political and protest music from my punk and folk leanings, but rap is another way of expressing these themes, usually from the point of view of a person with very different life experiences from me. But that’s what helps me understand new perspectives. That was the whole point of hip-hop, to give often silenced voices a voice.

There are obvious lines that shouldn’t be crossed, like when something is racist and exploits racial stereotypes. When style gets copied without credit or collaboration, that’s a problem — the very definition of appropriation. Using looks and styles that are stolen and manipulated by white people as another way to police Black bodies is downright offensive. (Or, say, when you see the dress of a different culture, especially one that has been the victim of genocide, and you think it’s “pretty” and as a white woman you start wearing feather headdresses and dashikis at Coachella.) When you take something, make money off it, and then in some way insult or dehumanize those you stole it from is where it really goes wrong.

It’s often white female pop stars who are guilty of this when they attempt to mimic Black singers, rappers, performers, and styles, but wind up missing the point, hypersexualizing themselves and then calling it a “bad girl phase.” Then they take the look off like it was a costume without acknowledging that this is their privilege given the way as a society we unfairly sexualize Black women.

I don’t think K-pop passes all the tests, though, because from what I’ve seen there seems to be almost a fetishization specifically of a subset of Black American culture — for the love of god, stop putting K-pop idols in cornrows and dreads (and someone please stop putting J-Hope in braids. It’s culturally insensitive, and it’s killing my bias).* Being inspired by music, fashion, or a cultural response to oppression doesn’t have to end up in mimicry and fetishizing and exoticizing.

It’s probably unfair to expect people on the other side of the world to have a complete grasp of the history of and on-going anti-Black racism in the US. Most people I know from outside the US lump all of its culture together as “American. ” Not to mention, most white people in the US won’t even admit systemic racism exists. But it’s something you’d think the K-pop world should be able to understand given the effects of US imperialism, well, everywhere. And there are parallels to the way East Asian women’s bodies are fetishized in the West, how the Western entertainment industry tokenizes East Asian actors as bad guys with martial arts skills and whitewashes stories that originated in places like Japan and Korea. Or how people in the West lump together all East and Southeast Asian cultures. But then again, there’s colorism in, well, most parts of the world including parts of Asia (which is usually just another way to police women’s bodies in particular), so it’s iffy to me how these issues are approached in other parts of the world, including Korea.

BTS started primarily as a hip-hop group, though they’re now a solid mix of singers and rappers and their sound is far more cross-genre. As far as I can tell, their rappers are really good. I assume they’re even more impressive if one speaks Korean. RM is a poet — who has collaborated with Wale, Warren G, Krizz Kaliko — and his, Suga’s, and J-Hope’s speed and flow seem humanly impossible to me. But their early visual style was generic, American faux gangsta style that I don’t think was ever worn by anyone in an actual gang for the sheer impracticality — you know the look, Busta Rhymes with a twist of Scarface (which is a fetishization of the mafia/organized crime and has a whole lot to do with toxic masculinity — where so many subcultures overlap). There is a series of videos where BTS actually went to LA to learn about West Coast rap, but other than one of the dance battles, it’s too cringeworthy for me to watch (in part because it’s so staged).

There are also distinctly Korean elements to K-pop, BTS included. And Bang Si-Hyuk, who found BTS, has said that he would never want BTS to do songs fully in English just to appeal to an international market. Other K-pop groups, however, explicitly try to include members who are not Korean in order to have a broader international appeal. The musical style of K-pop is a mix of hip-hop/rap, electronica/EDM, R&B, rock, classical, even traditional Korean folk music. This sounds like a mess, but it works — all music starts from the same basic building blocks. And at the bottom of everything, the history of contemporary music is an interwoven story that owes as much to Edouard-Leon Scott, Thomas Edison, and Emile Berliner as it does anyone.

One thing I often ask myself is would we even have this talk of appropriation if people weren’t making a lot of money off it? Appropriation happens within the United States, of Black cultures, Latin American cultures, indigenous cultures, Asian cultures, you name it. It’s a mark of imperialism, colonialism, policing, ghettoization, and exoticization. And with global/transnational capitalism we can now all appropriate everyone far and wide.

The thing is, there’s no turning back from globalization. We can’t erase colonialism. We have to share the world with people who have different cultural backgrounds. So unless we want to isolate ourselves, we have to have acceptable forms of cultural exchange. Humans move, they migrate, they get invaded. Culture spreads, in some ways more sinister than others. Dystopian futures often portray homogenized cultures, but rarely do they dive into how that homogenization happened (there’s no demagogue greater than the almighty dollar).

The West pushes its culture and economics on everyone else, but it also takes things like yoga, Buddhism, the sayings of Confucius, even folk knowledge of medicinal plants, and turns it into something you have to pay for. It exploits people in every corner of the world. And all of this is gross, because thanks to capitalism wealth is kept in the hands of a few. The makers, sellers, and owners of popular culture are are mostly white, and whiteness unfairly dominates everything to the point where we have to talk about anything else as a subculture even though Western white people are a minority.

Music’s relationship to all of this is complicated. Is K-pop appropriation? Probably. But did the West force itself on Korea? Definitely.

*~*~*~*

K-pop is clearly a capitalistic invention. It isn’t just music. It’s a visual and multimedia-filled experience. You’re buying a carefully constructed package put together by a team of choreographers, designers, stylists, and makeup artists. The K-pop “comeback” is a reinvention of a look as much as anything else.

If you look too closely, you’ll see the impact of impossible beauty standards and overvaluing body image (BTS’s image is refreshingly not hypermasculine, at least not by Western standards, though I’m still not sure how I feel about K-pop girl groups — on a cursory glance, they seem both hypersexualizing and infantilizing beyond aegyo, in other words, made by and for the male gaze). Beauty and body standards have predated capitalism, but the obsession always seems historically to appear among the wealthy and the bored.

The standard feature of capitalism is exploitation, and K-pop is. The very concept of celebrity anywhere is exploitation, just as much as wage work, outsourcing, and skirting environmental protection laws are. I’m pretty sure that being a K-pop idol violates Korean labor laws. But it seems to be voluntary, and idols and celebrities make a lot of money, so they let it happen in Korea just like we do in the West. They even have training facilities for future idols. BTS is under Big Hit Entertainment, a small (though now extremely wealthy) entertainment company compared to the major hit factories that represent other groups.

But you can tell how much and how hard the members of BTS work. There are behind the scenes videos of dances that are learned and practiced and perfected for one small segment on a TV show. Suga and RM, who both produce a lot of music, basically live in their studios. They all scrutinize every aspect of their performances. They all talk regularly about how they need to work harder. They talk about wanting to keep their ARMYs happy.

They wear designer clothes (so much Gucci). They star in advertisements. There is official BTS merchandise, multiple versions of every album, clothing, posters, etc. They sell out arenas. They’re making a lot of money, and their fan base seems relatively young, impressionable, and probably without disposable income. It seems slightly less egregious than in the US, because apparently concert tickets in Korea are inexpensive, and BTS really does provide a lot of fan content for free.

You wonder what the endgame is, though, for producers of K-pop.

The real trouble with capitalism is that while it has actually increased the standard of living for many people, it has also irrevocably changed the way of life for others, exploiting the majority world, destroying livelihoods and creating an uninhabitable environment in its wake. Capitalism thrives on oppression. The truth is that it needs a peasant class, a working class to operate — and things like race and gender, social institutions with longstanding histories of oppression, enable this division. The consequences of the unbridled growth of capital aren’t equitable. “Trickle-down economics” was a phrase first used a joke, because it is one. And the increasing gap in wealth and income disparity is another tool used to oppress large swaths of the population while selling them the lie that they, too, can become wealthy in the free market if they “deserve” it.

At times I think pop culture is a sedative, used to make us docile consumers. A vehicle for advertising. A way to make us just comfortable enough to not fight back against all the ways in which we commoners are being screwed over. But pop culture is also weirdly uniting.

And it’s still art to me in the same way that Warhol made soup cans into art. There’s an element of mockery embedded in it. But then sometimes we mock superficiality as if everything isn’t already a complete fabrication. When people say they don’t like pop music or only listen to free form jazz, I wonder why those are the lines they have chosen to draw.

We ourselves are products — products of capitalism, cultural products shaped by identity categories that other people contrived and set for us. We’re told who we are by the way we are treated. It upsets people when their concept of their identity becomes fragile. But we’re also told there is an authentic self underneath it all. Demian was about destroying the world of illusion that other people have built for you, but the real trick is that you can’t. The only way to really know me would be to crawl inside me, but even then I don’t think you would get an answer. We filter everything through so many standards and norms and ideas that we were socialized to take as truth. I’m not terribly sure who I am, what I stand for, and if I’m even alive — and that’s on a good day.

Capitalism finds me routinely asking “is this real or isn’t it,” even though I’m pretty sure the answer is always, “well, yes and no.” When I was 18, I went through my “bullshit” phase where I could take anything in the entire world, including natural phenomena, and tell you why it was bullshit. I am still pretty good at ruining things that people enjoy. The only thing that really stumped me were trees (except Christmas trees. Christmas trees are bullshit. I love them. But they’re bullshit.) and the giant squid.

But it’s not that I’m simply an asshole or a Debbie Downer, it’s that I’ve been on a quest to find something meaningful my entire life, and the only thing I’ve ever found it in outside of nature are dancing, Wilco, the writings of bell hooks and Kafka, and apparently the blatant artificiality of pop art and pop music.

Yes, I’d like to dismantle global capitalism and abolish the outdated concept of the nation-state and the oppressive structures that come along with it, and I would sacrifice pop culture to do it. But I also can’t deny that popular culture, social media, novels, music, dance, have opened up worlds to me and exposed me to different people and perspectives and have made me a better, smarter person. At the end of the day, BTS makes me happy.

So, then again, maybe I wouldn’t.

— — — — — —

*In case there’s anyone reading this who wants to “but… but… the Ancient Greeks wore braids” me on this. Yes, yes they did. But Black people in the US can get fired or kicked out of school for having dreadlocks per company and school dress codes because society continues to police their bodies and call them “thugs.” So invoking the ancients isn’t an argument here. Idols are clearly trying to portray an exoticized image of Black Americans.