The latest in a series of posts from Carl Lee.
BTS and the K-Pop wave
Back in June 2019 my youngest daughter shocked me by informing she’d bought a ticket to see the BTS show at London’s Wembley Stadium, costing a little north of £100. She wasn’t asking for a contribution as her job at Waitrose covered the cost but even so, a hundred quid for a South Korean pop band!
BTS (Korean: 방탄소년단; RR: Bangtan sonyeondan; lit. 'Bulletproof Boy Scouts')I was left scratching my head.
She went and she loved it.
I should have realised there was something more to this teenage fandom because now she has lived and worked in South Korea for almost two years. She is learning Korean and can negotiate her way through the social mores and culinary challenges of a society that is both familiar but intrinsically different from anything in Europe.
Earlier this year she was unable to get a ticket for BTS’s huge open air shows in front of at least 100,000 people outside Seoul’s Gyeongbokgung Palace in the heart of the megacity’s downtown area. The free tickets disappeared instantly they became available, with most of the rest of the crowd strung out along the linear Gwanghwamun Square connected by huge video screens that projected the highly choreographed hour-long show.
It was clearly the hottest ticket in town, or Asia for that matter, for that weekend probably the World.
When I visited Seoul in 2025 this square was the focal point of political demonstrations connected with the arrest of President Yoon Suk Yeol for insurrection as a result of his illegal attempt to impose martial law in December 2024. Highly amplified chanting was echoing around the high-rise offices that line its sides from both supporters of Yeol and his opponents.
The show’s backdrop was Gwanghwamun Gate built in 1396 in the reign of King Taejo, the first king of the Korean Joseon dynasty, although as is often the case with such culturally significant physical symbols of nationhood that monumental gate has been destroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries, the last time as recently as 2010.
There is no doubt that BTS are a global phenomenon.
Since their inception in 2010, and first album, Dark & Wild in 2014, the seven clean cut boys of BTS have danced and sung their way across the world to 140 million album sales and billions of streams. BTS’s clean-cut projection is often carefully curated against a more transgressive vibe with song titles such as ‘Hooligan’, and the track Normal with its lyrics.
“Kerosene, dopamine, chemical induced
fantasy and fame, yeah, the things we choose
Show me hate, show me love, make me bulletproof
Yeah we call this shit normal”
In a high trust, and still socially conservative society such as South Korea this is verging on fighting talk and is a long way from the more traditional folk sounds, although I suspect singing mostly in English rather dilutes its impact in a society where English is still not that widely spoken amongst older generations - even after more than half a century of partial occupation by US military forces.
Singing in English does however enable the global reach that has turned BTS into a multi-billion dollar economic phenomenon that can support a 70 date global tour crossing North and South America, Asia, Australia and Europe.
Their latest album Arirang, their first since they had a military-service enforced hiatus, sold just shy of four million copies on the day of its release. Arirang is the name of a Korean folk song that is so ingrained in Korean culture, north and south, that it has obtained UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status. It is song of departure, longing and regret.
It is a melancholy music, a lyrical style that appears perennially popular across the world whether Portuguese Fado or the blues of America’s deep south.
As the lyrics of Arirang state:
“The trees and the flowers will bloom for aye
But the glories of youth will soon fade away”
In the wake of BTS a host of other K-Pop acts have followed with BlackPink, Stray Kids and Seventeen leading the charge. This is a global dynamic that isn’t going anywhere other than upwards.
Critically you might be drawn towards arguing that K-Pop is derivative and formulaic and if you watched the BBC series “Made in Korea: The K-Pop Experience” you’d probably have such a perception confirmed, although it is worth watching if only for the scary record company bosses who cast their dismissive eyes over the five likely lads from Britain and their attempts to ply their melodies under the name ‘Dear Alice’. It borrows heavily from US hip-hop and rap, and European electro-pop.
Yet what is undoubtedly true is that the enthusiasm of these five British lads to emulate a band likes BTS is confirmation that K-Pop is an integral part of Hallyu, as the ‘Korean cultural wave’ is called, that has found has a sound foot-hold in the UK and elsewhere with food, cosmetics, fashion and film all playing their part. This is a textbook example of the concept of ‘soft-power’.
However, I think my daughter will prefer the authentic South Korea for some time more. She said to me recently “Dad, I love the place, it is so liveable”. I guess another visit out east is on the cards sometime soon.
P.S:
The most accessible book on the history of South Korea is ‘Shrimp to Whale' by Ramon Pacheco Pardo who is a Professor of International Relations at Kings College London.
Looks like a book worth reading...
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
There was also recent success at the Oscar's for K-Pop Demon Hunters, and the song that features in the film also won an Oscar.
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