Can the K-pop boyband BTS … save the world?
I wrote this essay for The Guardian on the South Korean megastar boyband BTS. Their sunny pop-optimism and ‘Army’ of fans are giving millions of people hope – and may even be luring some people away from the far-right.
Abattle is raging in front of our eyes, but this is no ordinary war. While the combat may be bloodless, no one should be fooled. This clash is fierce and unforgiving, representing the ideological struggle of our age. On one side we find men wearing animal horns and dressing in furs. On the other are legions of devotees draped over their computer screens. This contest of wills is the ultimate postmodern showdown. I’m talking, of course, about the fight for our future, namely, the legendary battle of far-right conspiracy theorists v K-pop.
And the good news is that, in this war, K-pop – that globally renown, highly engineered, synthesiser sounding, toe-tapping, arm-snapping, bubblegum pop music – keeps winning.
The latest evidence landed a few days ago with a post on Reddit, where one Redditor wrote that her “liberal left-wing QAunt” had “descended down the rabbit hole of Qlore from cabals who eat kids to democrats/Hollywood celebs trafficking people to Epstein island.” Then, the poster explained, “it all just … stopped. She stopped sharing Q stuff, stopped believing in it, started talking about liberal stuff again like it never happened. I was baffled. Did she have dementia? A stroke?”
The answer, my friends, is right there, plain for everyone to see. Her aunt’s saviors? BTS, the seven-member megastar boyband from South Korea.
“She started getting into K-pop as soon as Dynamite was released,” the redditor wrote, referencing BTS’s 2020 hit and their first song completely in English, “and dear lord, now she knows their names, their mom’s names, their favorite food, etc. From what she told me, they inspired her to be a better person. They would make donations to BLM, rally for accessible mental health for all and promote self-love and compassion. She is now an ARMY and I guess … That’s that?”
For the uninitiated, ARMY stands for Adorable Representative MC for Youth. (I cringed when I learned that, too.) Adorable aside, BTS’s ARMY is a formidable global force for good. As the post indicates, ARMY takes BTS’ message of “radical poptimism” and parlays it into global fundraising campaigns to “heal the world”. Made up of millions of young and admiring fans across the planet, ARMY has raised money for everything from helping rape survivors in South Africa to planting trees in Ecuador.
Most donations are relatively small and, like the band, not overtly political, but when BTS took a stand against racial discrimination by donating one million dollars to Black Lives Matter in 2020 (which seemed only appropriate considering they draw so heavily on African American music), ARMY rallied its own fundraising campaign and matched the million dollar donation in a quick 25 hours.
In other words, if you thought K-pop was all hair gel and dance moves, you’ve got another thing coming. K-pop fans are not to be underestimated, and they are inventing community everywhere they go. In the United States, at least, that community has an increasingly political bent. US K-pop fans are young and energetic, highly literate in all kinds of social media, and lean heavily toward socially progressive causes. This has translated into a kind of Covid-era activism from the home computer.
In June 2020, K-pop fans in the US took over a white supremacist hashtag on Twitter, spamming the hashtag with either nonsense messages or anti-racist posts. When the Dallas police department asked people to send them videos of protestors that same month using an app called iWatch, K-pop fans quickly crashed the app by bombarding the system with content from their favorite K-pop stars. Also in 2020, K-pop fans, along with TikTok users, were credited by many with registering for thousands of tickets for Trump’s 19,000 seat-rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma and then deliberately staying home to ruin the event.
Genius. And here I was thinking the appeal of the music was in the beat.
K-pop activism is about more than melodies and personalities, and it moves in stark contrast to the social isolation that marks so much of our society, especially during our contemporary Covid era. K-pop activism is about belonging and the common good. As one 18-year-old BTS fan from California told Good Trouble magazine, “I wasn’t in a great place when I became ARMY. Having music that makes you feel a little less alone helped me a lot. The more I listened, the more their message resonated.”
For that reason, maybe K-pop’s counterpoint to far-right extremism isn’t so hard to understand. Both movements may offer subcultures to belong to, but those subcultures couldn’t be more different from each other. Another K-pop fan, a 43-year-old man from Cincinnati, told Good Trouble magazine that the “opposite of the toxic brew of ugly Trumpist nationalism happening in the US” is something inherently positive. “BTS has created a virtuous cycle of infectious hopeful optimism that crosses every language, cultural, or age barrier.”
This fan’s description of the BTS world seems like a far cry from the nether reaches of the dark web, where much of the far right exists. Understanding the difference seems important at this moment. Reputable research on extremism warns us that people join extremist groups not because of commitments to any particular faith or ideology or because of personality type.
Rather, social isolation, economic insecurity, and extended loneliness are among the real vulnerabilities, and all kinds of radicalizations thrive when people fall into this state. As the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right puts it, social isolation “exacerbates already existing grievances, leaving individuals vulnerable to extremism”. It’s no wonder that wacko conspiracy theories have thrived under Covid lockdowns.
Read the rest here.