bangtan

remixed Edited by Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho,

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez,
Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen,
and Yutian Wong

a critical bts reader

bangtan
remixed
 edited by
Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho,
Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez,
Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen,
and Yutian Wong

bangtan
remixed
A Critical BTS Reader

Duke university Press Durham anD Lon

LonDon 2024
© 2024 Duke university Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Project Editor: Michael Trudeau
Designed by Matthew Tauch
Typeset in Alegreya Sans by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ahn, Patty, [date] editor. | Cho, Michelle, [date] editor. | Gonzalez,
Vernadette Vicuña, [date] editor. | Neutill, Rani, [date] editor. | Nguyen,
Mimi Thi, [date] editor. | Wong, Yutian, [date] editor.
Title: Bangtan remixed: a critical bts reader / edited by Patty Ahn,
Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen,
and Yutian Wong.
Description: Durham: Duke University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: Lccn 2023047385 (print)
Lccn 2023047386 (ebook)
isbn 9781478030621 (paperback)
isbn 9781478026389 (hardcover)
isbn 9781478059615 (ebook)
Subjects: Lcsh: bts (Musical group) | Rock musicians—Korea (South) |
Boy bands—Korea (South) | Popular music—Korea (South)—History and
criticism. | Popular culture—Korea (South)—History—21st century. | K-Pop
(Subculture) | bisac: music / Genres & Styles / International | music / Genres
& Styles / Pop Vocal
Classification: Lcc mL421.b79 b36 2024 (print) | Lcc mL421.b79 (ebook) |
DDc 782.4216/3095195—Dc23/eng/20240429
Lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023047385
Lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023047386

Cover art: Drawing by Ameena Fareeda. Courtesy of the artist.

for the lonely whales
and outcast planets
contents

xi Note on Terminology and Romanization

xiii Acknowledgments

1 intro · On Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader — Patty

Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi
Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong

29

I “You Can Call Me Artist, You

Can Call Me IDOL!”
contexts, genealogies, and
aesthetics of performance

33 01 · Tradition, Transition, and Trends: Contextualizing BTS’s

Gugak-Inspired Performance of “IDOL” — Wonseok Lee

44 02 · Hustlin’ until Dope: How BTS’s Rap Line Cultivated Their

Hip-Hop Identities — Nykeah Parham

57 03 · “Life Goes On”: Social and Musical Space in BTS’s

Midpandemic Album BE — Stefania Piccialli

68 04 · Blood, Sweat, and Tears: BTS, Bruegel, and the Baroque

— Marci Kwon

79 05 · Martha and the Swans: BTS, “Black Swan,” and Cold War
Dance History — Yutian Wong
91

II “Mikrokosmos”
the universe of bts

95 06 · The Platformization of K-Pop: From Weverse to NFTs

— Dal Yong Jin

107 07 · Under the Same Sky: Synchronicity in BTS Media, Online

and Offline — Despina Kakoudaki

120 08 · Bridging the Senses: Medium and Materiality from

Music Videos to Graphic Lyrics — Andrew Ty

133 09 · Sweet Chili and Cajun: Tasting the Power of Language

with the BTS McDonald’s Meal — Melody Lynch-Kimery

144 10 · Fragmentary Redemptions: ARMY, RPF, and the AU at

the Heart of the Bangtan Universe — Regina Yung Lee

157 11 · “Black Guy Reacts to BTS for the First Time”:

Provocations from a Black ARMY — Jheanelle Brown

169 12 · “Your Story Becomes Our Universe”: Fan Edits,

Shitposts, and the BTS Database — Jaclyn Zhou

180 13 · Jung Kook’s Button, or the GIF That Keeps on Giving

— Mimi Thi Nguyen

191

III “Not Today”

geopolitics and activism

195 14 · Empire Goes On: Transpacific Circuits of Care Work

— Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

206 15 · Like a Criminal Undercover: Love, Hate, and the

Performance of Inclusion — Rachel Kuo

221 16 · Recoding the Bot: ARMY and Digital Transgression

— Andrea L. Acosta

viii ♡ C O NTENTS
229 17 · Break the Structure: BTS ARMY Digital Activism and
State Surveillance in Indonesia’s Omnibus Law Protest
— Karlina Octaviany

241 18 · From Purple to Pink: The Filipino ARMY for Leni and the
Fight for Good Governance — Allison Anne Gray Atis, Noel Sajid I.
Murad, and Hannah Ruth L. Sison

254 19 · “Yoongi, Can You Hear Me?”: Demanding Justice for

#Melisa and ARMY Activism in Turkey — Alptekin Keskin and
Mutlu Binark

264 20 · “Spring Day”: Nostalgia, Pop Mediation, and Public

Mourning — Michelle Cho

279 interlude · “Magic Shop”: So Show Me,

I’ll Show You (My Fanart)

plate 1 My Universe — Rosanna Hall

plate 2 Crimson Blooming — Carolina Alves
plate 3 <Archive for Bangtan Universe—YET TO COME> — JIN Youngsun
plate 4 “Spring Day” — Yuni Kartika
plate 5 Diary of Youth: “Justice” — Maria Mison
plate 6 Cultural Rebellion Pt. 1 — Kaina “Kai” Bernal
plate 7 Minority without a Model — Johnny Huy Nguyễn
plate 8 BTS Stands for Bisexuals, Trans Folks, & Sapphics — Havannah Tran
plate 9 Namjooning — Ameena Fareeda
plate 10 Namjoon and the Sirens — Amanda Lovely
plate 11 Being cute / Pays mah bills — Prerna Subramanian
plate 12 Learning Radical Love through BTS — Gracelynne West
plate 13 BFFs (Butter Friends Forever) — Sophia Cai
plate 14 Light It Up Like Dynamite — Inez Amihan Anderson and Mimi Thi Nguyen
plate 15 Gifts — Yutian Wong

C O NTENT S ♡ ix
285

IV “You Never Walk Alone”

fandom and community

289 21 · The Skinship Diaries — Sara Murphy

299 22 · “Gender DOES NOT Exist Outside of Patriarchy”:

Flower Boys, Gender Envy, and the Radical Possibilities of
JIMIN GENDER — S. Heijin Lee

313 23 · Permission to Desire — Rani Neutill

322 24 · Fifty Shades of Butter: Consensual Nonconsent in BTS

Fan Fiction — Raymond San Diego

335 25 · Bangtan Scholars and the Ethics of Care

— Courtney Lazore

345 26 · Sincerely Yours, ARMY: Exploring Fandom as Curatorial

Methodology — Sophia Cai

357 27 · The Digital ARMY-Ummah: Faith and Community

among Muslim BTS Fans — Mariam Elba

368 28 · “Let Us Light Up the Night”: BTS and Abolitionist

Possibilities at the End of the World — UyenThi Tran Myhre

379 outro · For Youth — Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuña
Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong

385 Bangtan Glossary

389 Contributors
399 Index

x ♡ C O NTENT S
note on terminology
and romanization

Throughout the book, “bts” is treated as both a singular and plural noun, as is
common in fan and media discourse of the phenomenon (e.g., “bts is a South
Korean band”; “bts’s songs reflect their exploration of a wide range of topics”).
army refers to both a singular fan and the collective fandom. Where plu-
ralized as a group of individuals, the use of armys may be preferred by indi-
vidual authors.
Hangeul words have been romanized in multiple ways. Proper nouns such
as names follow no standard romanization system and are presented in the
ways they have been spelled on albums or other published work that circulate
in print and online (e.g., Seo Taiji, Shin Joong-hyun, Kim Namjoon). In other
cases, the Revised Romanization system has been chosen over the McCune-
Reischauer Romanization system for the former’s ease of use and jettisoning
of typographically complicated diacritical marks. In some cases, authors have
chosen to include Hangeul text in lieu of romanization.
acknowledgments

The coeditors would like to acknowledge Frances Gateward, organizer

of bts: A Global Interdisciplinary Conference II in 2021 at California State
University, Northridge, and an early supporter of the book. We are glad for
the opportunities to present on Bangtan Remixed at bts: A Global Interdis-
ciplinary Conference III in 2022 in Seoul, and at the 2023 annual meeting
of the Association for Asian American Studies in Long Beach, California. In
particular, we would like to thank Dr. JeeHeng Lee’s generous engagement
with our roundtable at the Seoul conference, and Dr. Jiyoung Lee for her
words of encouragement. Our work has been enriched by their prompts to
take seriously the geopolitics of knowledge production and the barriers that
researchers face when they are unable to publish in English. We, like other
Anglophone scholars of transnational Asias, bear responsibility to grapple
with this unevenness. We also thank our test readers for their feedback on
the manuscript, including Jennifer Cheng, Jens Richard Giersdorf, Kellee
Hearther, Alice Kim, Pearl Schultz, and Yujai Adrienne Tse.
We thank Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press for his support for
this book and Kate Mullen for seeing its details through to the end. We are
grateful to the in-house production team, including Michael Trudeau, Susan
Albury, David Rainey, and Matthew Tauch, who have attended to copyedits,
page proofs, art review, and design. Thank you to our indexer, Diana Witt.
We also thank our anonymous reviewers for the press for their insights and
enthusiasm for the manuscript. We want to recognize Ameena Fareeda for
allowing us to use her work for the cover.
Funding to support the publication was generously provided by the Center
for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and the Abigail
Reynolds Hodgen Publication Fund at the University of California, Berkeley.
Collectively, the coeditors would like to thank Inez Amihan Anderson for
their inspired cosplay and camera work, and Will Melton, Evan Anderson,
and Blake Wong, who each jumped in to buy concert tickets when we were
too overwhelmed by the Ticketmaster presale chaos. Mimi’s mother, Lien
Nguyen, housed a number of overexcited coeditors and fed them delicious
meals before the Agust D concerts in Oakland.
Patty Ahn would like to thank Gonji Lee, Nare Park, Jio Im, Haewon Asfaw,
Sophia Kim, Ara Kim, Nara Kim, and Kristin Fukushima for many wild text
threads filled with gifs, Twitter snapshots, and interpretations of lyrics. Also,
a special shout-out to their collaborator in crime, Grace Lee, with whom they
have embarked on an unforgettable journey through army history for more
than a year. They are especially indebted to their Spring 2023 undergraduate
army research group for their brilliance, diligence, and side-splitting senses
of humor. And much love to Vera Miao, Lulu Wang, and Barry Jenkins for an
unforgettable night at SoFi Stadium. Forever indebted to their former stu-
dents, Norman Hsieh and Nicole Moc, for infecting them with the bts bug
back in 2017 with their mv rendition of “Spring Day” for their K-Pop class. Most
of all, they want to express utmost gratitude to their unni, fellow K-Pop Stan,
and concert sugar mom, Helen Ahn. Being army with Helen has been a heal-
ing journey and one of the most special times of their life. It still hurts to close
this chapter, but they are so thankful that bts happened in our lifetime and
for all the memories and joy they gave us.
Michelle Cho would like to thank Moonim Baek, Yoon Heo, and Jinhee
Ryu—the editors of Femidology (2022) and researchers at the Yonsei Institute
of Gender Studies—for including her in the transcultural bts conversation in
South Korea; Robert Diaz, Vicky Pappas, and Shanon Fitzpatrick for being con-
cert buddies; Regina Yung Lee and the amazing students in her Transnational
Fandoms class for workshopping bts with her; Jesook Song and Yoonkyung
Lee for generative discussions about fandom and generational politics in
South Korea; Hae Yeon Choo and Janet Poole for institutional support and en-
couragement; and her many brilliant, inspiring army students at UofT.
Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez would like to thank Inez for converting her
into army, even if it was all a long game to get her to pay for lifetime concert
tickets and a sneaky way to have a cosplay partner, and Evan Anderson for al-
ways, always, always enabling. Big love to Jamie Bilog-Mina and Bryson Sato
for conjuring the tickets to the gateway bts concert in Los Angeles and her
army students and colleagues (Maria Chun, Angela Tachino) for their mutual
appreciation of ot7.
Rani Neutill would like to thank William Melton for his consistent support
and fellow love for bts (it makes being with you so much fun), Mercy Romero
for constantly guiding her through the insecurities of writing, Chanhee Heo

xiv ♡ AC K N OW LED G M ENTS

for her infinite knowledge, and the women of army over 40 and all her army
students who indulge and encourage her adoration for bts.
Mimi Thi Nguyen would like to thank fellow elder punks Yumi Lee and
Golnar Nikpour for introducing her to bts, and Yumi in particular for lend-
ing her niche jokes to our niche stickers (including Abolish Men Except bts,
and Bangtan Not Bombs). She would also like to thank Toby Beauchamp, Cyn
Degnan, Thomas Falk, Naomi Paik, and Thera Webb for listening to a lot—a
lot—of bts chat.
Yutian Wong would like to thank Kim Schwartz for hallway conversations,
Bruce Manning for sustenance, Blake for keen eyes and know-how, and her
colleagues in the School of Theatre and Dance at San Francisco State Univer-
sity for breathing life back to the studio after the year of online temps lié.
Finally, we thank army of all stripes, for shared commitments and
delight. We thank our students, for whom this book is written. Without them,
this book would not be. And here at the end, we also thank Kim Namjoon,
Kim Seokjin, Min Yoongi, Jung Hoseok, Park Jimin, Kim Taehyung, and Jeon
Jungkook. ot7 4eva <3.

AC K N OW LED G M ENT S ♡ xv
intro · On Bangtan
Remixed: A Critical BTS
Reader — Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuña
Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong

“Hey, do you know bts?” Before they were too famous to travel anonymously,
Jin, the oldest member of the world’s biggest band, would often pose the
question as a greeting to strangers—on the sidewalk, at a cashier’s register,
during an airport screening, or on the red carpet. While his fellow members
were in turn amused, embarrassed, or annoyed after one too many “Hey, do
yous . . . ,” Jin continued undaunted, though what he truly meant each time
is unclear. Was it invitation, self-promotion, or sly commentary on their
commodity-image, or all these at once? At the peak of their fame, the query
became a running gag for bts and its fandom, even as “Do you know bts?”
lingers as a question that each member confronts—as idols, artists, citizens,
celebrities, ambassadors, humans. For us, “Do you know bts?” is less about
who they are and more what bts illuminates about ourselves and the world
around us.
Conceived in 2010, bts is a South Korean pop group consisting of seven
members: Jin (Kim Seokjin), SUGA (Min Yoongi), j-hope (Jung Hoseok),
RM (Kim Namjoon), Jimin (Park Jimin), V (Kim Taehyung), and Jung Kook
(Jeon Jungkook).1 bts is an acronym for the group’s Korean name, “Bangtan
Sonyeondan,” which roughly translates as “Bulletproof Boy Scouts.” The name
is somewhat of a bait and switch, regarding the group’s complex and self-
reflexive relationship to genre or style, as it was often a source of ridicule in
their early days. Since their debut, bts, like other K-
K-Pop groups, has adopted
(and just as quickly discarded) a multitude of concepts and personae on stage
and screen. They have been bad boys in hip- hip-hop-inspired athletic gear and
thick chains or leather jackets and combat boots, but also boys-next-door
boys- in
preppy sweaters, schoolboy shorts, or overalls. bts have also graced the stage
adorned in pearls, pussy bows, sequins, embroidered robes, and slim-cut
suits, while their hair has traveled through all the colors of the rainbow and
multiple perms. And though each member’s skin appears uniformly flawless
in photoshoots, we see their bare faces and personal style (most often sweats
or tracksuits) in more casual livestreams and social media posts.
Part of the induction into bts’s fandom, army (Adorable Representa-
tive M.C. for Youth), is becoming familiar with the group through the cata-
loging of each member’s specific strengths as rappers, singers, and dancers
and their quirks as celebrities and reality television stars. In bts’s Rap Line (the
dedicated rappers in an idol group), j-hope is the energetically cheerful (and
seemingly boneless) street dancer, SUGA is the lethal “genius” composer and
producer, and RM is the group leader and resident intellectual, whose deft
and often philosophical lyrics are matched only by his reputation for clumsy
destruction. The Vocal Line (the dedicated singers in an idol group) includes
the team’s official Visual (or most conventionally beautiful) and unofficial
prankster, “silver-voiced” Jin; the conservatory-trained modern dancer and
countertenor, Jimin; the occasional oddball and baritone crooner, V; and the
so-called Golden Maknae (also spelled mangnae, or the youngest member of
an idol group or line of siblings), Jung Kook, whose perfect pitch and athletic
versatility endear him to his hyeongs (male elders) and army alike. But there
is so much more to track; bts members constantly slip between using their
stage names, nicknames, and birth names and proliferate as personae across
media platforms and merchandising.2 They appear as animated personalities
(TinyTANs), intergalactic beings (bt21), and fictional characters in a transme-
dia narrative (Bangtan Universe), which is all to say that bts is only seven, but
also a multitude.
As performers, bts members alternate between puppylike playfulness
and rockstar intensity. Their musical repertoire includes genres from pop
and rock to r&b and hip hop and at times incorporates traditional Korean
folk rhythms or instrumentation. They draw from urban dance to borrow ele-
ments of popping, locking, breaking, and freestyle and from concert dance
vocabularies sometimes fused with vernacular and folk-dance forms. In their
live concerts, bts cycles through a series of costume changes, large-scale
large- set
designs, and video projections that propel a musical and visual narrative
forward. Each show begins with theatrical spectacle, whether in the form of
giant inflatable gold leopards or a Jumbotron close-up of V slowly taking a
paperclip out of his mouth to unlock his handcuffs before thirty backup danc- danc
ers crawl over a jail cell erected on stage. In euphoric call-and-response,
call- army

2 ♡ A H N , C H O, G O NZ A LEZ , N EUTI LL , N G U Y EN , A N D WO N G
punctuate the music with fanchants that thread through the voices of each
member, hugging every chord and beat.3 And while each evening might begin
with bts adorned in sequins or rhinestones strutting down eye-popping sets,
it always ends with the members on a bare stage dressed in concert merch
(tees, hoodies, hats, and cross-body bags). In these final moments, bts con-
ducts army-time, in which fans and their homemade signs and flags are illu-
minated by light sticks known as army Bombs, held by tens of thousands of
fans and synchronized to the music in chromatic waves or made to spell out
“bts” and “army.” When it is all over, throngs of people exit the stadium, and
the excitement of having just seen bts lingers in the air while army continues
to sing their music.
Since their 2013 debut with Big Hit Entertainment, a small label outside
of the “Big Three” management companies of the K-Pop idol industry, bts
has become the most popular music act on the planet, with a passionate
and unprecedented fandom.4 Their list of accolades is by now familiar, from
sold-out stadium tours, astronomical YouTube views, Grammy nominations,
Billboard hits, and enviable album sales, to South Korean Orders of Cultural
Merit, United Nations speeches, and a meeting with US president Joe Biden
to talk about anti-Asian hate. bts’s Korean-language tracks address gener-
ational economic precarity, emotional risk, and historical injustice, while
their 2020 and 2021 English-language pop hits (“Dynamite,” “Butter,” and
“Permission to Dance”) offer playful, universal messages catered to the Amer-
ican market. Mapped across their catalog, the beats of their underdog story
manifest as a triumphant bildungsroman, unfolding from an idiosyncratic
debut to proving their much-heralded artistic chops as songwriters, compos-
ers, and producers. “Hard work,” “suffering,” and “self-sacrifice” are common
themes in just about every idol group’s origin story. However, these princi-
ples are core values given pride of place in bts’s journey of self-development,
transforming all of the group’s achievements into hard-won victories that
signify their commitment to gifting army the best versions of themselves
and their talent. bts and their label bighit music generate, edit, and release
hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes footage of hard work and camarade-
rie, ordinary moments, and milestones. In dance practice videos, photoshoot
and music video sketches, and documentaries like Burn the Stage: The Movie
(2018), we see bts members at work in the studio, collapsed backstage from
exhaustion, or bitterly disappointed in themselves on tour. These scenes un-
derwrite claims of authenticity and sacrifice as part of their nearly constant
acknowl
idol performance and their own acknowledgments (in lyrics and interviews)
about its tensions.5

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 3

 It is daunting to reckon with bts. Instead of authoritative pronounce-
ments on what bts is, Bangtan Remixed looks at what bts makes possible
or perceivable, using bts as a lens for the study of history, aesthetics, eco-
nomics, culture, sociality, and geopolitics. How do we theorize through bts
to better understand the workings of affect, genre, soft power, masculinity,
performance, fandom, language, the global music industry, or a throwaway
gesture (a raised eyebrow, a flying kiss, or a wink)? The manifold nature of
bts—as corporate brand, fandom, marketing strategy, industry standard,
genre wrecker, global icon, cultural mediator, technological compendium,
paradigm, or fantasy—yields necessarily contradictory but also generative
tensions. As Michelle Cho observes, their oeuvre comprises a kind of com-
positional genius that marks the group as extraordinary, even if their work
traffics in pop culture cliché.6 In this way, bts is a remarkably rich intertextual
sensation, one that is so often invoked to explain other phenomena, includ-
ing how we might grasp the nature of how, as RM puts it, “you be a human.”7
Bangtan Remixed takes bts as a case study that animates many accounts of
our contemporary social and political cosmos. These accounts lie in the mel-
ancholic affirmations of “Life Goes On,” found on their pandemic-era album
be, or American music critics’ incredulous descriptions of their spectacular
success wrapped in racism, or fans’ wistful musings on a glance or a caress
between members. As a pop band and as a global sensation, bts produces
and provokes expressive works that tell us stories about the present moment
and the world.

“Come Back Home”: BTS, South Korean Youth Culture,

and the Roots of K-Pop

To fully understand bts’s impact on global music cultures, we must situate

the group’s unprecedented crossover success as an outgrowth of the K-Pop
idol system and the powerful youth market it helped to shape in South
Korea. bts, too, despite the compelling narrative of being outsiders to the
idol system, are produced in the network media, management, and talent
apparatuses that make up the vertically integrated structure of the K-K-Pop in-
dustry. In other words, idols are not born, they are made. From the initial tal
tal-
ent audition to intensive, yearslong in-house instruction in dancing, singing,
acting, and communication, “trainees,” as they are called in English (yeonseup-
saeng in Korean), compete for selection into a group, with very few enduring
until they can debut.8 Once launched, the ability for a group to survive and

4 ♡ A H N , C H O, G O NZ A LEZ , N EUTI LL , N G U Y EN , A N D WO N G
achieve commercial success depends on their ability to appeal to the broad-
est audience and carve out a unique identity through the virtuosity of their
dancing and singing, and the charms of their individual personas and group
dynamics.
While fans and observers might debate whether bts has outgrown the
K-Pop genre, there is no question that the norms of South Korean culture and
its media industries have shaped bts’s body of work—the aesthetic codes,
performance styles, distribution patterns, and transmedia integration that
characterize their creative and marketing concepts. At the same time, bts re-
defined many well-established industry conventions, amplifying the group’s
cultural brand into a cri de coeur of a generation of youth shaped by global
forces, including financial crises and the rise of social media platforms and
informatized daily life. Moreover, bts demonstrated that a narrative (and
performance) of authenticity and self-reflection resonates more powerfully
with international audiences than the sheen of perfection and infallible pub-
lic images.
When they first entered the arena of commercial pop in 2013, bts dis-
tinguished themselves amid a crowded field of idol hopefuls by underlin-
ing their debts to earlier groups. Their first single, “No More Dream,” opens
with a bass line reminiscent of the song “Warrior’s Descendant” (전사의 후예,
1997) by the mega-popular, first-generation idol group H.O.T., or High Five of
Teenagers. This first generation of idols emerged in the late 1990s to 2000s,
defined by the musical merger of Korean pop with American popular music
and urban dance choreography. H.O.T.’s fervent fandom across East Asia led
Chinese journalists to coin the term Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, likening the
powerful pull of Korean teen idols on young fans in Beijing to an ocean tide.
They also popularized usage of the term K-Pop to refer to the international fan
base emerging specifically around South Korea’s newest genre of pop music.9
bts are preeminent representatives of K-Pop’s third generation (which also in-
cludes exo, bLackPink, got7, Red Velvet, and twice), and their call for refusal
on the track “N.O,” from their second eP, titled o!rul8,2? (Oh! Are you late, too?)
released in 2013, paraphrased Korean idol pop progenitors Seo Taiji and Boys’s
infamous screed against the national education system in “교실 이데아/Gyosil
(Classroom) Idea.” With their nod to K-hip-
K-hip-hop pioneer Epik High’s 2007 hit
“Fly” on their second full-length album, wings
wings, in 2016, bts took their lyrical
inspirations straight from their seonbae (or seniors) to build their name, as they
declare in “Attack of Bangtan” (“선배들 등을 밟지 / stepping on the backs of our seon-
bae”).10 And, in 2017, coming off their historic win for Best Social Artist at the
Billboard Music Awards, bts marked the approach of the fourth anniversary

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 5

of their debut with the release of a new single, “Come Back Home.” This track,
a remake of a 1990s hip-hop song by Seo Taiji and Boys, commemorated the
twenty-fifth anniversary of Seo Taiji’s debut. “Come Back Home” also cannily
pointed to bts’s own triumphant homecoming after more than six months
of nonstop touring and twelve remarkable months of chart-topping, record-
breaking ascendance to heights previously not reached abroad by a Korean
pop music act. (And, in a boomerang effect, their accolades abroad grew their
fan base at home.) Their remake highlighted the group’s hybrid hip-hop roots
and elevated bts as the second coming of Seo Taiji—Korean pop’s vanguard.
This talent for remixing—for reinvention through repetition—and this
mode of intertextuality laced with self-reference, homage, appropriation,
and critique is a practice of worlding that continues to characterize the South
Korean pop culture landscape as much now as it did at the turn of the mil-
lennium. The strong influence of American pop culture is evident through-
out the K-Pop genre. Seo Taiji’s original “Come Back Home” borrowed heavily
from Cypress Hill’s 1993 hit “Insane in the Brain.” bts, like Seo Taiji, H.O.T., and
other 1990s hitmakers Sechs Kies and Shinhwa, follow from figures like Cho
Yong-pil, the Pearl Sisters, and Shin Joong-hyun, South Korean stars of earlier
postwar decades who began their careers performing for American troops on
US military bases in South Korea, where they also learned to adapt American
musical forms for local Korean audiences. These bases hosted large numbers
of US service members as part of the US-ROK (Republic of Korea or South
Korea) Joint Security Alliance that formed in 1953 and resulted in the con-
tinuous deployment of tens of thousands of US military personnel on bases
throughout South Korea to deter North Korean (and increasingly in the last
decade, Chinese) incursion. As a result, much of South Korean popular music
in the postwar era has been heavily influenced by American rock, jazz, folk,
country, and, in later decades, hip hop and r&b.11 Due to the power differen-
tial built into the US and ROK’s uneven partnership, with the US “defending”
a far weaker South Korea, American culture has long been viewed as the epit-
ome of global culture in South Korea. American cultural hegemony shores up
American military hegemony, which persists in large part because the Korean
War is not yet over. An armistice agreement was signed by North Korean, Chi-
nese, and American military leaders in 1953 (South Korean signatories are no-
tably absent), which put the war on pause until an official peace accord could
be negotiated. However, no such settlement has taken place; the conflict re- re
mains ongoing, which is why South Korean males are subject to mandatory
bts group activities went on hi-
conscription into the ROK military, and why bts’s
atus in 2022 so that the members could complete their military service.

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 While some K-Pop fans and commentators claim that South Korean youth
culture was born in the 1990s, this isn’t quite the case.12 Young South Koreans
were drawn to American pop culture, especially music, through the Armed
Forces Korea Network (afkn)—the US military’s broadcast radio and television
network—and in the illicit spaces of dimly lit dance halls, live music clubs,
and record lounges (eumak gamsangsil) where DJs would play requests pulled
from massive LP collections.13 In the ’60s and early ’70s, domestic acts like Shin
Joong-hyun and the Add4 and the Pearl Sisters adapted the sounds of psy-
chedelic rock, as did later groups like Sanullim and numerous other campus
bands.14 But given the domestic and geopolitical conflicts that heavily shaped
Cold War–era youth, namely, the Korean and Vietnam wars and the youth-
driven protests against authoritarianism from the 1960s through the 1980s,
youth-oriented music cultures were generally viewed with suspicion and often
suppressed in the decades following the Korean War. After declaring martial
law and rewriting the constitution in 1972, the president and former military
general Park Chung Hee viewed the influence of American counterculture on
politicized youth as a threat to his regime. Throughout the ’70s, he targeted
rock musicians like Shin Joong-hyun and folk artists like Song ChangSik of
Twin Folio and Kim Min-ki, whose song “Morning Dew” became an unofficial
anthem in the decade’s antiauthoritarian protest culture.15 (The crackdown ef-
fectively halted their careers until their revival in the 1990s, after the country
transitioned to democratic elections.)16 The ’80s, under the violent regime of
another military general, Chun Doo Hwan, were a syncretic decade in terms
of musical influences. Bands like Songgolmae fused the sounds of funk, disco,
and rock, and the latter half of the decade saw the rise of hard rock groups like
Boohwal and Sinawe, although the latter’s hair metal wasn’t exactly consid-
ered daejung eumak, or mainstream music. More successfully, pop artists like
Lee Sun-hee serenaded the public with melodramatic ballads that could be
enjoyed across generational lines. This aspiration to mass appeal by popular
musicians would continue to dominate the commercial music industry until
the media market was reshaped by an array of new consumer trends, not least
of which was the youth-targeted sound of ’90s idol pop.
After nearly four decades of authoritarian rule that followed the Korean
(
War—a civil war between the socialist North Korean state (under Soviet stew-
ardship following the end of thirty-five years of Japanese colonial rule in 1945)
and the US-led South
outh Korean state—–South
state—–South Korea underwent massive social
state—
reorganization from the late 1980s through the 1990s, embracing democratic
demo
reform, self-determination, and consumer choice, lauded as core tenets of a
uniquely American brand of liberalism. In 1993, South Korean policymakers

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 7

launched a national globalization project that would change the way that
the state and the public understood the diplomatic and economic role of
popular culture, giving rise not only to the K-Pop genre, but also to high
profile art and culture events such as the Busan International Film Festival
and the Gwangju Biennale. In the meantime, the media labeled ’90s youth
신세대/Sinsedae, or the “New Generation,” characterized by their rebellious
attitudes and enthusiasm for technological and consumer trends. Members
of the Sinsedae, with their seemingly limitless adaptability, were the unruly
offspring of South Korea’s consumer modernity. Uninflected by the political
tumult of student- and worker-led antigovernment activism of previous
decades, ’90s South Korean youth culture was explicitly commercialized, suc-
cessfully commodified, and subsequently exported. It was in this moment
that the rest of the world began to know Korean idol pop as K-Pop.

Idol Pop between Empires

While the form and global consumerist logic of K-Pop grew directly out of
the postwar influence of American military, political, economic, and cultural
forces in South Korea, the organizational structure of the idol system itself can
be traced to a broader imperial triangulation between the US and Japan.17 As
the region’s largest economic player that rebuilt its postwar economy most
quickly with American aid, Japan maintained a regional hegemony across
Asia, shaping many norms and conventions of business, cultural production,
and social life. South Korea and Japan “normalized” diplomatic relations in
1965, under strong US pressure, after which the South Korean government
and industry welcomed the transfer of Japanese industrial knowledge.
The assumption that K-Pop is merely American music, and specifically
Black American music, repackaged for Korean and regional Asian audiences,
sidesteps other critical regional influences and matrices of power that have
impacted K-Pop’s development. The roots of the idol system go back to the
Japanese uptake of American media and cultural influence amid Japan’s
postwar redevelopment. According to anthropologist Hiroshi Aoyagi, com-
modified adolescence emerged as a societal ideal and popular music and
entertainment genre in late-1960s Japan.18 For Aoyagi, the youthful per-
former of the aidoru (idol) industry was a direct analog for the American teen
idol of earlier eras, like the young Frank Sinatra or midcentury Mouseketeers
Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon.19 The teen idol phenomenon has thus
been an important marketing tool for an aspirational ideal of wholesome,

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optimistic adolescence for mainstream national audiences in both the US
and Japan, the world’s two largest and most crowded pop music markets. Idol
pop’s emergence as a commercial genre in Japan is said to have been inspired
by the local popularity of an obscure 1963 French teen caper film, Cherchez
L’idole, featuring cameos by French pop stars performing their hits within the
fictional narrative.20 This led to the formation of a new genre of popular enter-
tainment, in which the blurring boundary between pop star, actor, celebrity
persona, and “lifestyle model” catapulted adolescent stars onto the national
stage. This form of youth celebrity flourished in the 1980s, Japan’s peak years
of high growth economics and capitalist optimism.
Japan’s idol industry also produced pop music with tie-ins to broadcast
media, especially radio and television; indeed, the term aidoru, a Japanese
transliteration of the word idol, comes from the commercial media culture of
postwar Japan, where musical entertainers began to be recruited, trained, and
promoted for the purpose of cultivating a dedicated fan following.21 From the
early days of the Japanese idol industry, teen idols were promoted as television
acts. For example, 1971, the year that scholars of Japanese pop culture desig-
nate “the first year of the idol era,” saw the first televised idol talent competi-
tion show, Birth of a Star, thirty years prior to US television’s paradigm-shifting
American Idol. Dominating music charts, television screens, magazine covers,
and advertising campaigns, young idol performers were multiplatform art-
ists within a Japanese marketing system that magnetized fans’ attachments
to celebrities through tie-ins across media franchises and physical merchan-
dise. Korean idol management companies adapted this “media mix” strat-
egy in the late 1990s.22 In particular, sm Entertainment, led by Lee Soo Man,
adopted many of the practices and features of Japanese jimusho (performer
management companies), inspired by the monopolistic success of Johnny’s
and Associates, the Japanese company that has dominated the arena of male
idol groups since 1967. This is the highly centralized industry that bts was up
against as outsider idols, signed to the upstart management company Big Hit
Entertainment.
Japan’s industrialized idol production system has greatly impacted the
development of the K-Pop industry, particularly in the following areas: the
transmedia formats and domains for idol performers and their promotion;
the centralized management and systematized training, production, and
promotion model of the entertainment agency as a highly technical busi- busi
ness enterprise, replete with trade secrets; and, finally,
fi in the combination
novelty—
of familiarity through localization and novelty—often judged as facility with
Western musical forms, choreography, fashion, and attitude or “swag.” This

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 9

emphasis on novelty would push to the reaches of posthuman, gender- and
genre-bending fluidity and hybridization in the digital age, with initiatives to
integrate ai, virtual avatars, and game practices as K-Pop’s newest frontiers,
which Dal Yong Jin details in this collection.23
We contextualize bts’s emergence and ascendance to mainstream visi-
bility in the United States and Japan in this broader postwar history to show
the entanglements between geopolitics, culture, and everyday life. bts of-
fers a lens that makes visible the continuities and possible disruptions in
this history, despite the impression that they give of being utterly unprece-
dented and sui generis. Their popularity and fandom are consistent with new
inter- and intra-regional dynamics, especially in the shift to two-way traffic
between American mass culture and media and what have formerly been un-
derstood as peripheral and culture-bound media industries.

K-Pop’s Consolidation and Diversification

Changing global media flows and Hallyu’s presence outside of the Asian re-
gion offer a larger backdrop for bts’s success, but a more detailed overview
of the development and transformation of the Korean popular music indus-
try as a sector of the Korean wave brings bts’s contributions into sharper re-
lief. Following on the commercialization and transnationalization of South
Korean youth culture as a market in the 1990s, K-Pop developed as a formal
industry by incorporating elements of Japanese and US music production
modes. South Korean record producers adapted this image-driven model of
idol production for the local market, codifying a “trainee system,” in which
idols are recruited and developed by elite management companies to garner
a commercially loyal fanbase.
K-Pop’s largest companies prior to bighit’s 2021 reorganization as
hybe—sm Entertainment (sme), yg Entertainment (yge), and jyP Entertain-
ment (jyPe)—became known as Korea’s Big Three and led the development
of this system. Each devised a trainee system organized around a specific mar-
ket niche, narrowing the range of styles and artists each produced in order to
hone their formula. sme cultivated a reputation for its “polished” image and
Euro-pop sound, putting potential idols through a grueling seven- to ten-year
training period to ensure “perfect” execution. Meanwhile, yge and jyPe estab-
lished themselves as rap- and r&b-focused
ffocused labels, respectively. yge, which
aimed to project an image of rebellion and creative freedom, implemented
a trainee system that allowed time for the development of its artists. Unlike

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in the US, where “authenticity” and “individualism” are prized artistic values,
Korean entertainment houses explicitly promote their carefully orchestrated
systems as key selling points.24 While American media criticize K-Pop for
being overly “manufactured,” K-Pop’s founding fathers have claimed that this
controlled approach allowed them to edge out far more resourced Western
competitors from taking hold of South Korea’s media market while establish-
ing a regional media empire in Asia.
This centralized business model drew from Japanese jimusho, but con-
formed to the vertically integrated organizational structure of chaebol, family-
owned conglomerates in South Korea that drove the nation’s post–Korean
War economic “miracle.”25 Chaebol use the disciplinary ideology of Confucian
familism—with the corporate head as the metaphorical father—to develop
strategic export industries.26 Korean entertainment houses have mobilized a
similar rhetoric and familial structure through their trainee system in which
idol hopefuls submit to an excruciating disciplinary process as a matter of in-
debtedness and patronage. This structure has even become a key feature of
idol celebrity texts, emphasized in the narrative tropes of idol origin stories,
particularly in television formats like the idol competition shows through
which many groups are constituted and promoted. In this manner, neolib-
eral values underwrite a centralized corporate management structure that
continues to thrive on the precariousness and exploitation of its labor force,
especially its idol hopefuls.
sme, yge, and jyPe consolidated their power in part by cultivating long-
standing business partnerships with local television networks. Throughout its
history, South Korean commercial pop has been uniquely beholden to those
networks, for publicity and informal distribution. State investment in the
growth of local television outlets and production studios yielded a multichan-
nel landscape where variety shows and music programs reigned supreme,
acting as the country’s main music charting system until the Gaon Music
Chart was launched by the Korea Music Content Association under the Minis-
try of Culture, Sports, and Tourism in 2010.27 Most music television consisted
of live performance shows, a tradition that still prevails today in the local
broadcast industry; no less than five weekly live music performance shows air
each week, on which commercial pop artists are expected to tirelessly pro- pro
mote each new single and album release. These live television stages provide
a crucial platform within a tightly integrated apparatus.28 Every idol debut or
comeback release is accompanied by an aggressive cycle of media appear appear-
ances and performances
perf on nationally televised networks, which not only in-
in
creases the visibility of artists in a densely saturated music market, but makes

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 11

their fights for chart position an important site of investment and debate for
fans and the news cycle.
While K-Pop relies on a predictable and systematized formula, the in-
dustry has only grown and survived through relentless experimentation and
the diversification of concepts and revenue streams across multiple plat-
forms and markets. Since the early 2000s, the industry has pivoted toward
an international-facing business model. sm Entertainment began globaliz-
ing its trainee system after its first idol group, H.O.T., saw unexpected success
in the Chinese-language market in the late 1990s. The company soon after
debuted a female r&b singer named BoA in both Japan and Korea, marking
the first time a Korean idol was recruited and trained with the intention of
reaching local and overseas audiences. sme integrated this approach into its
idol group formula when it debuted Dong Bang Shin Ki (Dbsk, also known
as tvxq! or Tohoshinki), originally a five-member boy band featuring South
Korean members who performed and recorded albums in both Korean and
Japanese. sme not only developed a strategy for breaking into Japan, which
remains K-Pop’s most important secondary market, but also effectively cre-
ated the blueprint for how Korean entertainment companies could expand
their global influence.
Idol concepts are now almost always devised with an eye toward reach-
ing multiple markets, especially outside of Asia. Group acts have been key
to this strategic shift. sme again pioneered strategies like the formation of
megagroups that could be broken into subunits tailored for specific national
markets, and the inclusion of non-Korean members to broaden their appeal.
As a result, the size of K-Pop groups has grown considerably across the board,
not only expanding their potential for drawing transnational fans but also
heightening the visual spectacle of live and on-screen performance. By 2011,
the industry had fully integrated YouTube as a centerpiece of its globalization
plan, including inroads in North America. By 2012, the fateful meeting of K-
Pop and YouTube resulted in the biggest viral video hit to date, “Gangnam
Style,” by the comedic pop music performer Psy, then represented by yge.
Large-scale synchronized dance routines became a key ingredient for creating
spreadable media and K-Pop’s larger promotion strategy. This shift to a social
media–driven strategy was the result of a strategic partnership forged with
K-Pop’s Big Three by Silicon Valley, which saw South Korea’s web-driven media
culture as a major piece of their expansion plans. Google and YouTube led the
charge when it began pursuing sme in 2008. Twitter followed by launching
a localized version of its platform in Korea in 2011 that allowed Korean users
to type in Korean script or Hangeul. Although it took several years for Korean

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entertainment companies to build a comprehensive social media strategy,
their eventual integration of US-based platforms dramatically globalized
fan engagement with artists and each other. Whereas sme had long been
the vanguard of K-Pop’s technological savvy, bts’s innovative use of Twitter,
in particular, made Big Hit Entertainment a new player within the industry’s
oligopoly.
From the late 2000s into the 2010s, when bts debuted, the K-Pop industry
was a crowded field of competing groups racing to initiate novel configura-
tions of multimember, single-sex music and performance groups (we know
them in the West as boy bands and girl groups). The figure of the “beast
idol” (jimseungdol) emerged in the 2010s as an image that played with the
way that young male performers’ status as visual spectacle was inherently
gender-bending—feminizing the performer while also acknowledging the
androgyny of male adolescence (see S. Heijin Lee’s contribution in this vol-
ume, chapter 22). This gender fluidity already characterized idealized mas-
culinity in various domains of East Asian media targeting a young female
audience, namely “girls” comics (shōjo manga in Japan; sunjeong manhwa in
Korea). The primary visual characteristic of the beast idol was the dualism of
youthful, androgynous facial features and hypermasculine, “hard” muscula-
ture. In this field of male idol group concepts, bts’s hip-hop image mediated
regional tastes, appealing at first more to non-Asian fans, in contrast to Asian
audiences, whose preferences at the time were met by fellow third genera-
tion, modular, multilingual group exo (split into subunits exo-k [Korean] and
exo-m [Mandarin]) managed by sme.29 A growing emphasis on rap in idol-
pop, which had functioned previously to offer sonic variety and verse inter-
ludes for less vocally adept group members, distinguished bts in their early
years as an iconoclastic hip-hop idol group.30
bts is often cited by fans and critics as a much-needed antidote to K-
Pop’s highly “manufactured” system. Their image as super-earnest acolytes
of hip-hop history and aesthetics, coming from a scrappy, small company
on the verge of bankruptcy, both confirmed and departed from the industry
by the time of the group’s debut. While moving across the industry’s genre
and gender landscapes, bts nonetheless displayed a fierce commitment to a
youth cultural ethos beyond commercial motives. Along with their embrace
of social critique, bts and Big Hit Entertainment built on fan-
fan-artist commu-
nication modes that had previously been tightly managed and orchestrated
by company-run and moderated fancafes (proprietary web forums) and of- of
ficial fan meetings. While their social media strategy was borne out of the
need for free promotion, their choice to open up fan-artist
fan- engagement on

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 13

transnational and multilingual platforms like Twitter and YouTube proved
prescient, as the K-Pop industry took their cues from bts’s practices. To take
just one example, their @bts_twt Twitter account was established in 2012,
before the group’s debut, while their rivals in the industry exo, managed by
then industry leader sme, lacked a Twitter presence until 2017. This five-year
lag—an eternity by the standards of social media trends and the digital news
cycle—shows how little regard the K-Pop establishment had for bts until they
were legitimized in North America with their Billboard Music Awards, and
how thoroughly the group pushed the industry away from the sedimented
practices of limited and company-controlled fan engagement.

Race and K-Pop: Diaspora and Localization

bts’s group concept and unifying message are rooted in their interpretation of
hip hop. In their early years, bts endured resistance and even ridicule in some
quarters of Korean pop criticism and the independent music arena, since hip
hop’s antiestablishment ethos and idol pop’s commercial mandates seemed
mutually exclusive. But, in anchoring their work as homage to pathbreaking
popular artists from earlier eras, bts also underlined the debt that South Ko-
rean popular music has to Black American musical forms, as Nykeah Parham
and Jheanelle Brown detail in their chapters for this collection (chapters 2 and
11, respectively).31 While K-Pop’s influences have diversified over the last two
decades beyond the initial transposition of r&b, rap, and new jack swing, the
influence of Black American music on the industry’s forerunners like Seo Taiji
and Boys, H.O.T., Sechs Kies, g.o.d., S.E.S., Fin.K.L., 1tym, and Shinhwa is unmis-
takable. In the case of bts, their studious references to their musical roots in
American hip hop accord with the genre’s history as a cultural idiom of social
critique from below. These elements make up the core of bts’s star text, which
encompasses a classic, coming-of-age narrative that runs through their body
of work.32
bts’s engagement with Black American popular music also brought them
criticism from some fans and observers for what are perceived to be acts of
cultural theft. In the context of North American K-Pop K- fandoms, fans have
been the first ones to call out K-Pop artists who don cornrows or dreadlocks,
or perform in blackface while claiming ignorance of the racist connotations
of such gestures. Often, fans direct their ire at the management companies,
whose styling and marketing decisions result in these distressing images.
Fans then become industry monitors, protecting the performers who are

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thought to be innocent of negative intent and merely in need of education,
and calling for changes in the industry’s top-down structures.33 However, it is
important not to conflate Korean and American pop culture industries and
fan-industry relations. Instead, we should return to the history of race and
racism in South Korea and in Korean American communities, which do con-
firm the global scope of anti-Blackness, but which are also a result of complex
power dynamics and influences, among them American pop-cultural hege-
mony and the colonialism of the English language.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modernizing East Asia
directly adapted concepts of race from Euro-American scientific racism,
which, combined with Korean Confucianism’s existing colorist and caste
hierarchies, resulted in South Korea’s dominant ideology of ethnonation-
alism.34 Nadia Y. Kim explains that this notion of hierarchized hereditary
traits was reinforced by Korean immigrants’ experiences in the United States,
where they were targets of anti-Asian racism, while also students of the anti-
Blackness of American society.35 While Korean society at large and many
Korean Americans have internalized anti-Black racism, the history of these
beliefs is refracted through a painful and violent experience of colonization,
first by the Japanese—who were thought to be “closer” to white Europeans
in the global racial hierarchy because they were also colonizers—and then
through American military occupation. The United States incorporated South
Korea into the Cold War as a strategic ally and protectorate, and many South
Koreans still associate modernity with American ideas and cultural influence.
Persisting alongside a self-denigrating notion of South Korea’s belated (and
still incomplete) modernity is also a defensive ethnonationalist chauvinism
that developed under Japanese colonial occupation, when every domain of
Korea’s culture, language, and identity was threatened by official assimilation
policies intended to transform Koreans into ideal colonial subjects. South Ko-
rean ethnonationalism, in other words, the “pure blood” claim that Korea is a
monoculture, already reflects the transnational impacts of scientific racism
and eugenic thought.
Thus, the function of race in South Korea is both traditional and foreign.
Racism and racialization in Asia are multilayered, with social Darwinist con-
cepts of ethnoracial hierarchy affirming racist judgments of winners and
losers in a regional contest of national development.36 Given this unique
conjuncture of relational and intersectional forms of race-thinking,
race- K-Pop
artists who seek to adopt the sonic and visual styles of Black American popular
culture primarily relate to the Americanness of these cultural forms and the
artists who developed them. As Kim explains, “Much of Korean society . . . is

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 15

simultaneously and begrudgingly attuned to Black Americans’ significant
power over Koreans as agents of the American occupational forces.”37 In this
way, the pursuit of access to the eyes and ears of American fans by a group
like bts still plays as an underdog story, compared to Black American musical
artists and celebrities who are more often idolized by Korean artists, espe-
cially those who engage with musical forms like hip hop and r&b.
bts’s approach to Black culture often contrasts, however, with common
attitudes found in the Korean American diaspora and the South Korean pub-
lic, which has historically looked to white America for cues on how to be suc-
cessfully modern and capitalist, including the anti-Blackness of the model
minority stereotype held among whites and Asians alike. However, in K-Pop
celebrity cultures, groups like bts have made concerted efforts to center Black
American culture as American culture writ large. Criticisms of the K-Pop in-
dustry on the part of fans are generally warranted, and are a way for fans to
register both their agency and their investments in their favorite groups. Yet
when cultural appropriation debates turn to arguments about how K-Pop or
Korea aren’t “ready” for the global spotlight, or sufficiently modernized to be
consumed in North America, what gets reactivated are theories of progres-
sive development rooted in colonial perspectives and hierarchies of civiliza-
tion. As K-Pop travels more widely, this history helps us avoid reductive claims
about racism in K-Pop and better understand how bts and K-Pop’s popularity
are transforming conventional ideas about race and culture.

ARMY: The Adorable and Representative

Eighth Member of BTS

The first major media tour in the United States for bts took place after they
won the Billboard Music Award for Best Social Artist in 2017. During their
guest spot on daytime television host Ellen Degeneres’s eponymous show,
Degeneres commented on the large crowd of armys who greeted bts on ar-
rival at Lax, and teased them about “hooking up” with fans (she assumed that
the members would understand American slang). bts, however, refused to
pathologize their fandom as crazed fangirls or to sexualize them as manip-
manip
ulable groupies. army’s love for bts—repeatedly noted in English-
English-language
media stories focused on the mystifying enthusiasm of their American fans—
was often compared to Beatlemania, a signal case for moral panics over the
vital energies of fans subsequently characterized as feminine hysteria. But

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the idol system out of which bts emerged displays a careful deference toward
fans—prioritizing fans’ responses and affective investment in their favorite
groups—that is absent from most American fan cultures. In the face of US
media’s misogyny toward boy band fandom, bts’s attitude was both refresh-
ing and indicative of their status as cultural outsiders.
The deference to fans, common in the sphere of Asian idol pop, became
much more visible with the changed context of bts’s popularity and recep-
tion in the American pop music and media market. Although the group is con-
ventional in many ways—assembled using a trainee system and developed
using a transmedia strategy incorporating a core metanarrative of underdog
status—bts targeted worldwide audiences by foregrounding their singular-
ity in a global media landscape. With the odds stacked against them in the
face of the Big Three’s dominance, and as themselves youth facing down
the demands for conformity and institutionalized hierarchy in schools,
workplaces, and neoliberal Korean society at large, bts’s struggle resonated
translocally, radiating far beyond the customary sites of K-Pop reception. Fur-
ther, the group deviated from the most conservative aspects of the Korean
idol pop industry, unleashing social media’s forces of digital intimacy (instan-
taneous connection, liveness, and fan-networking), and linking their own
experiences of precarity in the idol industry to those of their fans and gener-
ational peers. The group’s success despite their refusal to accept the industry
status quo, particularly the collusion between the Big Three and the domestic
broadcast apparatus, led to increased scrutiny of the industry by fans across
the globe and resignified K-Pop fan culture as a site of participatory interven-
tion with progressive political stakes.
These currents were amplified during the coviD-19 pandemic, during
which the K-Pop industry quickly pivoted from large-scale, global tours to
remote live performances facilitated by mass digital streaming technolo-
gies. As South Korea gained praise as a model state for its virus-containment
measures, its government initiated an industrial development campaign to
limit human contact yet boost service sectors. The awkward name for this
technological sector is untact, a gesture toward the paradox of intimacy
without physical contact, as in telehealth, online shopping, or robot baris-
tas.38 Untact became the K-Pop industry’s key assignment during pandemic
lockdown, and bts and Big Hit Entertainment (which restructured and
rebranded as hybe during the pandemic, in March 2021) were no exception.
The group held two remote concerts that each drew hundreds of thousands of
fans for a fully produced online event, captured for a livestreaming platform.

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 17

While falling short of the in-person concert experience, these remote con-
certs made possible the temporal convergence of a truly global fandom
(with the caveat that uneven internet infrastructure maintains digital di-
vides in many regions).39
In contrast to the technocapitalist priorities of untact initiatives, army’s
activities during the pandemic era took an unanticipated turn toward collec-
tive action, often bringing fandom into the domains of either mutual aid or
political organizing. Just as bts have exceeded the genre conventions and
expected influence of commercial idol pop in Asia, army around the world
have channeled their fandom energies beyond the limited sphere of ardent
consumption, embracing new roles in antiracist activism, democratic political
organizing, and other forms of collective action in the name of both progres-
sive politics and army affinity as described in the chapters by Karlina Octa-
viany, Alptekin Keskin and Mutlu Binark, and Allison Anne Gray Atis, Noel
Sajid I. Murad, and Hannah Ruth L. Sison.
In June 2022, on the ninth anniversary of bts’s debut on the global stage,
all seven members gathered around a table to enjoy a “family” dinner on
vLive, a livestreaming app launched and operated by South Korean internet
giant naver. RM, the team’s leader, bemoaned how much the group’s mete-
oric rise had taken a toll on their physical and mental well-being. The group,
which had expected to take a hiatus after their 2020 Map of the Soul tour, in-
stead encountered a period of unprecedented fame during the pandemic,
catalyzed largely by the release of three chart-topping English-language
singles and the innovative use of web platforms that facilitated social connec-
tion during a time of prolonged isolation. Staying with their critical take on
the crushing pressures of the K-Pop industry for young artists, RM and other
members remarked on how much they had lost a sense of self under such
duress. They proceeded to make a formal announcement that they would be
taking a break from group activities in order to focus on their personal growth
and pursue solo projects, to ask who they are beyond bts.
While armys took to Twitter and Instagram to mourn the end of the
group’s historic run, many also began to reflect on their own participation
in a system that had seemingly broken the hearts and spirits of seven boys
who had come to feel like family. We, as army and coeditors, see this as
precisely the moment to reflect on what bts has meant to us personally and
for global culture broadly. We see this reader as a necessary pause, a long,
deep breath with which we might ask, “What is K-Pop,K- and who are army,
without bts?”

18 ♡ A H N , C H O, G O NZ A LEZ , N EUTI LL , N G U Y EN , A N D WO N G
“Love Maze”: Overview

This book is indebted to the work of Jiyoung Lee’s bts, Art Revolution, JeeHeng
Lee’s bts and army Culture, and Youngdae Kim’s bts: The Review; A Comprehen-
sive Look at the Music of bts. Following Gilles Deleuze, philosopher Jiyoung Lee
theorizes the relationship between bts and army as well as bts’s work itself
as a rhizome to characterize the necessity of decentered methodologies for
interrogating bts as a cultural phenomenon. Cultural studies scholar Jee-
Heng Lee documents the multiplicity of army culture and ethnomusicol-
ogist and music critic Youngdae Kim details the contexts and aesthetics of
bts’s extensive discography. Together, these works have opened up space for
an interdisciplinary reader focused on critical perspectives on bts in relation
to art, geopolitics, and community.40
Bangtan Remixed takes its cue from the practice of separating the compo-
nent parts of an original composition and adapting, altering, and rearranging
those materials into a new object, whether a track, a poem, a painting, or a
video. In other words, a remix comprises a singular and specific event from
which we might observe or gauge movement or change from an original.
bts remixes all the time, repackaging whole albums with previously un-
heard B-sides or Japanese-language vocals, staging and re-creating canonical
European artworks for the “Blood Sweat & Tears” music video, adapting Mur-
ray Stein’s Jung’s Map of the Soul to riff on psychoanalytic concepts of persona,
shadow, and ego, and releasing seasonal remixes of their English-language
hits “Butter” or “Dynamite.” Fans also remix multiple media to create new
works, including gifs, video edits, bootleg DvD rips, fan cams, stickers, song
covers, and prints featuring lyrics or original art based on photographs or
performance stills. Such acts often allow fan-creators to establish both a
principle or foundation for an original composition, while also facilitating its
further transmission. Our reader unfolds in a similar fashion, as each individ-
ual chapter remixes and riffs on a lyric, a music video, a concept, or a fleeting
moment, to provide insight into what bts constellates through their multitu-
dinous product and presence.
The study of bts is necessarily interdisciplinary because the band itself
emerges from histories that require grappling with a myriad of aesthetic
knowl
genres, institutional practices, cultural geographies, and domains of knowl-
edge. Our authors are artists, scholars, journalists, activists, and fans (and
some combination of these all at once), working from a wide range of disci- disci
plinary perspectives, methodological approaches, and personal commitments.

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 19

Despite the important presence of contributors from other parts of the world,
we note that this volume comprises works entirely composed in English, and
is skewed toward North American perspectives, which reflects the continuing
asymmetries that exist in structures of academia and fandom. Indeed, bts’s
initial struggle to be taken seriously in Western markets mirrors some of the
obstacles and biases (around language or industry connections) that have
likewise created absences in this reader. We hope that these shortcomings are
taken as provocations and invitations for others to add to the existing body of
work about bts.
For our part, this collection is driven by questions about how bts as a band
and as a phenomenon address certain norms about “success,” gender, labor,
and desire, among other things, that shape their trajectory. Many of our con-
tributors examine how the multiple texts and media platforms that bts uses
shift personal and collective sensoria; in their chapters and art, they consider
how bts is a multisited phenomenon, situated simultaneously within South
Korea and global flows of culture and capital.41
The second half of bts’s nearly forty-minute performance at the 2019
Melon Music Awards (mma), which begins with a lone figure onstage draped
in a Greek tunic blowing a large, curved horn, is a case study of bts as master re-
mixer.42 In turns, each member of bts is featured in a solo dance performance
before RM walks downstage to the prelude of “Dionysus,” where he grabs
and drives Dionysus’s thyrsus into the ground. Two giant inflatable leopards
flank the stage as a line of female attendants strew flowers on the floor and a
regiment of soldiers and horses form a procession to the theater of Dionysus
where bts—embodying the Greek gods and goddesses—hold court. The act
comes to a climax as bts members repeat the chorus of the song, while danc-
ing faster and faster until returning to their seats, this time on top of a table,
to look out onto an ocean of light illuminating a euphoric crowd.
Invoking the ecstasy of losing oneself in music and dance, bts’s references
to rituals, rites, and mysteries are hard to miss. This stage performance calls
forth the Greek god of theater who represents not just chaos, rebirth, and
debauchery, but the artifice and duality inherent to the actor’s body. SUGA’s
line, “Born as an idol, then reborn as an artist,” signals how this duality lies at
perf
the heart of performance. This staging of bts as both subject and object of
Dionysiac rituals places the members at the imagined historical moment in
which rites and rituals are transformed into institutionally recognized forms
of music, dance, and theater. If ritual is that which is culturally valued as the
originary practice of authenticity, and the classical is aesthetically valued as
“
the originary practice of sanctioned authenticity, the “popular” encompasses

20 ♡ A H N , C H O, G O NZ A LEZ , N EUTI LL , N G U Y EN , A N D WO N G
too many categories—the folk, the masses, the resistive, and the appealing.
At the 2019 mma award show, they return to the center of Western art, the-
ater, music, and dance history, which has long been assigned as the point
of reference dictating all hierarchies of cultural production, and reframe
this troubling legacy on their own terms. In this modern-day incarnation of
a Greek amphitheater (a stadium) and ritual competition (mma), bts would
go on to sweep all four daesangs (grand prizes) of the night, in perhaps the
biggest art flex on the planet. Holding Dionysus’s thyrsus, RM stands center
stage with bts as the embodiment of the ritual, the popular, and the classical
brought together without concern for aesthetic hierarchies between these
references and their rearrangements.
We linger on this singular performance as exemplary of bts’s own prac-
tice of remixing aesthetic genres and incorporating distinctive genealogies of
performance. Along with “Blood Sweat & Tears” and “Black Swan,” “Dionysus”
is part of a triptych of songs, music videos, and live performances that places
bts at the center of theater, art, and dance histories. Part 1, “ ‘You Can Call Me
Artist, You Can Call Me iDoL!,’ ” considers the place of bts’s work within the
aesthetics and genealogies of performance. The chapters in this section map
the interrelationships between the aesthetic vocabularies from which bts’s
music, choreography, and scenography draw sense and sensation.
Part 2, “ ‘Mikrokosmos,’ ” turns to the wider universe of bts and the mul-
tiple transmedia platforms that hybe, bighit music, bts, and army create
and share together. The chapters in this section highlight the technologies
of intimacy and parasociality spurred by bts. From music videos, reality
television shows, video games, graphic novels, brand endorsements, fan fic-
tions, fan edits, memes, gifs, and so much more, bts generates “seven billion
different worlds / shining with seven billion lights.”43 These “seven billion
lights” are scattered widely, and to that end, part 3, “ ‘Not Today,’ ” explores
the geopolitical landscape of bts as a planetary phenomenon traversing both
well-worn and new paths for migrants, militaries, and monies. As perform-
ers, tourists, ambassadors, and “seven normal boys,” bts illuminates circuits
of capital and campaigns of care, each enfolding global histories of race and
gender in changing constellations.
In the interlude, “ ‘Magic Shop,’ ” we include fanart (included in the plates
section) that engages the multidimensional nature of bts’s presence—as
commodity, muse, or something else—in the lives of army. Navigating what
it means to love a commodity-image, fans stretch their imaginative powers
and transform these original materials through their labors. Without army, as
bts says, who would they be? Consequently, part 4, “ ‘You Never Walk Alone,’ ”

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 21

further considers the fruits of their star performances found in proliferate fan
labors and personal reflections. The chapters in this section illuminate how
bts—or attachments to bts—facilitate sites of love, desire, friendship, safety,
lust, communion, and hope.
Ultimately, our focus is less on bts as a singular phenomenon than on
the encounter with and the desire for what bts might be said to stand for or
against. We might click an aspirational “follow” on the luxury brands modeled
by the members; compose feverish fan fiction to explore our deepest long-
ings; fill our social media feeds with art and nature to solicit reflection, what
army dubs “Namjooning”;44 offer love and support to strangers, which might
readily be translated as mutual aid, as we imagine bts does or seems to do;
or rest in a time of uncertainty and build social forms that allow life to go on.
Come here, I’m your paradise, hello, my alien, we are each other’s mystery, at that
moment the tuna asked me, Hey, what is your dream? A good house, a good car, will
these things bring happiness? Why are they killing us before we can even try? I’m now
in front of the door to the world, I know what I am, I know what I want, set every-
thing on fire, bow wow wow.45

Notes

1 bts members’ stage names are listed from oldest to youngest, with birth
names in parentheses.
2 Some bts members also have separate monikers for their solo projects:
SUGA has produced work as Agust D, and RM is an evolution of Rap
Monster and Rap Mon.
3 Fanchants are a regular feature of live K-Pop performances. See the
glossary.
4 The Big Three consist of sm Entertainment, yg Entertainment, and jyP
Entertainment, companies that, until bts’s rise, dominated the field of
Korean idol pop, which has been defined by its integrated corporate pro-
duction model of talent scouting, training, in-house content production
and distribution, live performance schedule, new release cycles with
broadcast-centered promotion, and ancillary merchandise sales. While
bts’s management company, hybe, has risen to the status of industry
leader, the historical importance and industry influence of the Big Three
remain discursively and materially significant.
5 Jin has spoken frankly about how the performance of access is still a
performance,
perf commenting during a vLive—a livestream that purports
to offer a slice of life window into the members’ daily routines—
routines—“I don’t
need to be honest here, actually.”

22 ♡ A H N , C H O, G O NZ A LEZ , N EUTI LL , N G U Y EN , A N D WO N G
6 Cho, “Nostalgia for Nostalgia.”
7 RM, “Yun,” featuring Erykah Badu, Indigo (2022).
8 Shin and Kim, “Organizing K-Pop.”
9 See Jung-Min Mina Lee, “Finding the K in K-Pop,” on the term K-Pop origi-
nating outside of Korea.
10 bts’s later album map of the soul: 7 references not only Carl Jung but
also Epik High’s 2003 album Map of the Human Soul.
11 Shin and Kim, “Birth, Death, and Resurrection.”
12 Noah Yoo’s review of Seo Taiji and Boys’ self-titled 1992 album errone-
ously claims that Seo’s work constituted “Korea’s first homegrown youth
music.” As influential as Seo Taiji and Boys were to the development of
the idol pop industry, there was youth culture in Korea before the 1990s.
Noah Yoo, review of Seo Taiji and Boys, July 5, 2020, Pitchfork, https://
pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/seo-taiji-and-boys-seo-taiji-and-boys/.
13 Shin and Kim, “Birth, Death, and Resurrection,” 279.
14 See Shin and Kim, “Birth, Death, and Resurrection,” 287–93, for an
account of the rise of campus bands, and A. Park, “Modern Folksong,”
for a fuller account of the role that the genre of p’ok’eusong (the Korean
transliteration of “folksong”) played in 1970s South Korean youth coun-
terculture movements.
15 See “Song Chang-sik: A Life Immersed in Music,” Korea JoongAng Daily,
February 22, 2015, https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2015/02/22
/etc/Song-Changsik-A-life-immersed-in-music/3001101.html. See also
Hwang, “Kim Min-ki.”
16 Kim and Shin, “The Birth of ‘Rok.’ ”
17 The end of the Japanese empire in 1945 reorganized, yet also preserved,
existing power structures in the region. As Lisa Yoneyama explains, with
Japan’s war defeat in 1945, “nations that formerly were subjected to
Japanese domination in the subsequent cold war fell under the economic
and military aegis of the United States.” Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces, 7.
18 Aoyagi, Islands of Eight Million Smiles.
19 Aoyagi, Islands of Eight Million Smiles, 4.
20 Aoyagi, Islands of Eight Million Smiles, 5.
21 Aoyagi, Islands of Eight Million Smiles. See also Galbraith, “ ‘Idols’ in Japan,
Asia and the World.”
22 For information about the history and industry context of “media mix,”
see Steinberg’s Anime’s Media Mix.
23 Since the late-twentieth-century golden age of national idols, Japan has
seen the development of an extensive idol subculture linked to content
industries like manga and anime. A controversial twenty-
twenty-first-century
outgrowth of the convergence of media forms is the “virtual idol,” or
humanoid, animated figure voiced by vocaloid pro processing software,
the most famous of which is Hatsune Miku. In K- K-Pop, the convergence

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 23

 of digital and live idol performance is a recent phenomenon, target-
ing audiences among gamers and vr enthusiasts through the virtual
K-Pop group k/Da’s performance at the World Competition of League of
Legends in 2018—a promotion strategy for the k/Da skins introduced to
the game. sme’s group aespa has tried to further the mainstreaming of
virtual idols with its core concept as a group consisting of live members
and their ai avatars.
24 The respective founders of Korea’s Big Three are perhaps the biggest
stars produced out of these systems. G. Park, “Manufacturing Creativity.”
25 Shin and Kim, “Organizing K-Pop.” Chaebol are a localized form of
Japanese family-owned conglomerates or zaibatsu, which dominated
the Japanese economy until the zaibatsu system was broken up during
the Allied occupation of Japan after World War II.
26 Moon, “Begetting the Nation.”
27 The Gaon Chart has been renamed the Circle Chart: https://circlechart.kr.
28 For an extended overview of the codependency between K-Pop and the
television industry, see S. Kim, K-Pop Live, and Jung-yup Lee, “Broadcast-
ing, Media, and Popular Music.”
29 A subunit is a smaller group formed of members in a larger group.
Subunits allow for members to explore other genres, languages, and
concepts than in the larger group.
30 Groups like Block B, whose central concept and most popular members
were rappers with existing reputations in the underground hip-hop
scene, offered bts an example to emulate. Arguably not an idol group,
mfbty, the collaboration between K-hip-hop artists Yoon Mirae, Tiger
JK, and Bizzy, also debuted in the same year as bts, offering a bridge
between idol pop and the language of hip hop’s social critique. At the
same time, however, hip hop was being incorporated into the Korean
commercial media landscape of televised competition programs with
the premiere of the cable music station Mnet’s rap competition show,
Show Me the Money, in 2012.
31 For an informative account of this history, see Anderson, Soul in Seoul.
32 bts is especially prolific, with five Korean and four Japanese studio
albums, six ePs, four world tours, six reality tv series—three broadcasts
on Korean cable outlets Mnet (Rookie King, American Hustle Life) and jtbc
(in the soop), and three web series produced and distributed by naver
vLive, a now defunct celebrity livestreaming app recently acquired by
hybe and merged with its proprietary fan- fan-artist chat platform Weverse
(bts Gayo, Run bts!, and bts bon voyage seasons 1–4), and thousands
of short video clips, vlogs, and social media posts on their bangtantv
YouTube channel, Twitter, TikTok, and Weverse.
33 Fan debates that have arisen since the resurgence of Black Lives Matter
(bLm) activism and antiracist, police abolition protests after the murder

24 ♡ A H N , C H O, G O NZ A LEZ , N EUTI LL , N G U Y EN , A N D WO N G
 of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 have directly linked the anti-
Blackness of global K-Pop fandoms with the anti-Blackness of US franchise
fandoms, including Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For
further discussion of fan debates about bts’s relationship to Black
American culture and issues of anti-Blackness in K-Pop fandom, see Cho,
“bts for bLm.”
34 Tikhonov, “Discourses of Race and Racism in Modern Korea.”
35 See N. Kim, Imperial Citizens.
36 Writing on similar remappings of race and colonialism in Thailand
under the influence of contemporary inter-Asian media flows, anthro-
pologist Dredge Byungch’u Kang-Nguyȇn explains that the desirability
of racialized features like light skin reflect not a desire to look Caucasian
but, rather, a desire to pass as “white Asian,” Kang-Nguyȇn’s term for
a “new racialization of Asianness associated with light skin, economic
development, and modern lifestyles.” Kang-Nguyȇn, “The Softening of
Butches,” 20.
37 N. Kim, “The United States Arrives,” 275.
38 The World Economic Forum reported on “untact” in 2020: Rosamond
Hutt, “ ‘Untact’: South Korea’s Plan for a Contact-Free Society,” World
Economic Forum, August 11, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda
/2020/08/south-korea-contactless-coronavirus-economy.
39 “bts: 100 Million Fans Watch Virtual Map of the Soul on:e Concert,” bbc,
October 11, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/54497760. Ikran
Dahir reports in Buzzfeed News, “ ‘I have no religion,’ RM said, ‘but I thank
God that we live in 2020. I’m so glad we have this technology.’ ” Dahir,
“bts’s Virtual Concerts Connected People on a Global Scale Not Seen
before the Pandemic,” October 15, 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews
.com/article/ikrd/bts-map-of-the-soul-one-concert-experience.
40 Jiyoung Lee, bts, Art Revolution; JeeHeng Lee, bts and army Culture;
Y. Kim, bts: The Review.
41 See Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; Grewal and Kaplan, Scattered
Hegemonies.
42 bts, “Persona+Boy In Luv+Boy With Luv+Mikrokosmos+Dionysus,”
November 30, 2019, YouTube video, 34:00, https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=BVqLzxNMTXM; bts, “Full Performance (view from 4th flr)
/ Kath Parungao,” November 30, 2019, YouTube video, 38:42, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x6rITXDans; bts, “Intro: Persona (Boy
In Luv)+(Boy with Luv)+Dionysus @2019 mma,” December 25, 2019,
YouTube video, 12:27, https://www
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-0v1fNVdas;
“[bangtan bomb], ‘Dionysus’ Special Stage ((bts focus) @ 2019 mma,”
November 30, 2019, YouTube video, 7:07, https://
https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=lQswxVHDo8U.
lQswx
lQswxVHDo8U.
43 LLyrics
Lyr ics from “Mikrokosmos,” from the 2019 album map of the soul: per-
sona, translated by Genius English Translations, April 12, 2019, https://

I NTRO: O N BAN GTAN REM IXED ♡ 25

 genius.com/Genius-english-translations-bts-mikrokosmos-english
-translation-lyrics.
44 RM coined “Namjooning” to describe his activities while on vacation
in 2019. Sandy Lyons, “bts’s RM Explains ‘Namjooning,’ Here’s How the
Word Came to Be,” March 30, 2021, Koreaboo, https://www.koreaboo
.com/news/bts-rm-namjooning-definition-history-origin/.
45 Lyrics from the bts catalog, including “Pied Piper,” “Friends,” “Super
Tuna,” “No More Dream,” “N.O,” “Dope,” “Dionysus, “iDoL,” and “Fire.”

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