BTS are one of the biggest pop culture phenomena to emerge in the 21st century, a fragmented era where one struggles to name similarly hegemonic icons. Perhaps only the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Harry Potter have had a similar reach and staying power. BTS have transcended their original (and already sufficiently lucrative) market of South Korean idol pop, collaborated with western radio mainstays such as Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, and become megastars—only recently fragmenting into solo careers as the members face South Korea’s compulsory military service. For the band’s legion of fans, who refer to themselves as ARMY (this is singular too, a fan can refer to oneself as an ARMY), they need no introduction.
The editors of this, the first academic book on BTS, contextualize the group in terms of Korea’s deliberate policy of exporting popular culture to leverage soft power. While this is to be expected in a book of this kind, the introduction also takes in the Japanese idol system that Korea borrowed so much from. The editors also portray BTS as relative outsiders in their industry: their label Big Hit was small fry at the time of the group’s debut, and BTS are much more willing, they argue, to engage with fans in casual livestreams where they tone down the pop star posturing and appear unguarded.
Bangtan Remixed feels almost too packed with ideas to summarize. It is split into several sections: the first attempts to contextualize the group in different ways, such as their use of hip hop, traditional Korean aesthetics, and the group’s references to dance and art history. The second considers the “universe” of BTS: the multimedia nature of the group’s activities. The third section considers BTS in the context of soft power, but also in the various ways that ARMY have been politically engaged. There is a brief interlude containing images of BTS fanart, and the fourth and final section considers BTS’s multifaceted fandom.
A few main themes emerge from the book, independently of the way the sections are organized. First, the romantic idea of the heroic rock star as author is a particular, culturally-determined Western-centric concept that BTS fans and academics are actively opposed to. In BTS fandom, meanings are generated by the fans, who pour out their fantasies and aspirations, which are then reinterpreted by the band in their future output. BTS were originally formed as a typical idol group, and are a collaborative effort: the seven members plus choreographers, producers, songwriters, and others. Despite this, they have a good deal of autonomy over their lyrics and image compared to other idols, and two of the members were unsigned hip hop artists before joining the band.
The second, and for me, more striking impression the book makes is that BTS represent a new kind of transmedia storytelling. The full meaning of BTS isn’t grasped in hearing “Dynamite” blasting out of the speakers at a coffee shop. It’s found across music videos, lavish artist-created photobooks that give songs alternate stories to those seen in the music videos, in video games, and BTS’s cartoon ‘tiny tan’ avatars. There is a BU (Bangtan Universe) and an AU (an alternate universe). BTS put out a mind-boggling amount of content in many media forms. As suggested above, the story is open-ended, allowing fans their own contributions or interpretation. A more cynical approach might be to say that BTS’ content is sufficiently vague to allow fans to project their own hopes and desires onto it.
Finally, this book is as much about the collective entity of BTS’s fandom as it is the group. ARMY reject the idea that online space is necessarily mediated and “fake”. Such fans use social media to connect with like-minded individuals across national and other boundaries. In this context, Big Hit’s parent company Hybe created Weverse, a dedicated platform for artist-fan interactions. Sharing fan videos of concert footage, or fan-made videos or texts, is to ARMY what trading live tapes of The Grateful Dead is to American baby boomers: interacting with a network of like-minded and supportive fans and sharing personalized and customized content. BTS fans have at times come together to protest diverse causes such as neoliberal labor laws in Indonesia and domestic abuse in Turkey.
These points may be obvious to fans and scholars deeply immersed in the world of BTS and K pop, but such readers will likely find the detailed textual analysis of songs, videos, and promotional campaigns of interest. For example, Melody Lynch-Kimery parses the McDonalds BTS meal. I had occasion to sample this on its release in 2021, and can confirm that it consisted of little more than chicken nuggets in a light purple box. I had no way of knowing that a few years later I would be reading about this fast food promotion in connection with socio-linguistics. Lynch-Kimery argues that the promotion confronted typically homogenous places such as the American midwest with Korean culture and the Hangul script in particular, allowing Korea to gain an advantage in what sociologist Pierre Bordieu called the “linguistic market”.
The writers often step out of academic register and into the first person to share their personal stories, as I did in the previous paragraph. While it is often interesting to read individual fan stories, at times these can become unmoored from the argument being made. For a deeply-committed BTS fan, these passages might strike the right balance of personal and academic, but other readers may find it reinforces the stereotype of BTS fans as overly attached to their own parasocial fantasies. Some of the individual chapters can talk around a topic rather than advancing a thesis or presenting the results of a particular analysis. The overall effect of the book though, is to present BTS as an object worthy of study.
The book sometimes shows that the fandom itself can uphold its love for the band while still expressing criticism. In one particularly interesting chapter, author Jheanelle Brown is somewhat critical of the fandom itself: black BTS fans are often expected to endorse BTS’ hip hop credentials to give the group a certain kind of credibility, rather than enjoying them as other segments of the fandom does, or indeed criticizing the group’s occasionally clumsy borrowings from African American culture.
Readers may find themselves hit with a double whammy of obstructions: the gushing terminology of K-pop fandom and the arcane terminology of contemporary theory. There is a glossary of K-pop terms in the book’s back pages, however. For readers undaunted by this combination of fandom and academia, Bangtan Remixed will be a rewarding experience, and for outsiders to the world of K-pop, it serves as a reminder of how much popular music has changed in terms of how it is produced and consumed in an interconnected world.