I say this as someone who genuinely enjoys BTS’s music (I was just at two nights in Baltimore). I’m not writing this to dunk on them. I’m writing it because I think the “let them live their private lives” defense I’ve seen growing is doing a lot of work it can’t actually carry, and because this isn’t a one-off.
Nobody’s disputing that grown adults get to choose their friends and their fun. However, BTS members aren’t your average private citizens, they’re brand ambassadors, UNICEF Generation Unlimited ambassadors specifically tied to anti-violence and youth empowerment messaging, and the public faces of a company that profits from a predominantly female fanbase. Visibility is the job. Who you’re photographed embracing is a public act, not a private one, the moment cameras and a stadium full of fans are involved.
The “they didn’t know the history” excuse doesn’t fly here either. Chris Brown’s history isn’t obscure- it’s one of the most publicized cases of domestic violence in modern pop culture, and he’s currently out on bail after pleading guilty this July to a bottle attack in a London nightclub, awaiting sentencing in October. Usher, gave a Forbes interview earlier this year calling Diddy “misrepresented” and saying he has “nothing negative to say” about him (this after the Cassie surveillance footage was public record). That’s the tour they chose to show up and sing along at.
And it’s not just Rihanna, though obviously that’s the one everyone knows. Chris Brown has a whole list of physical altercations with other men in the industry too. He got into it with Drake’s crew at a New York club back in 2012 and came out of it with a glass bottle to the face. In 2013 he punched Frank Ocean in a parking lot outside a recording studio over a parking space, hard enough that Ocean said he’d been jumped and cut his finger in the scuffle. Nothing ever came of it legally, no charges were filed, but it happened, it was investigated, and Ocean wanted to press charges at the time.
Here’s the part that’s head scratching. Frank Ocean is one of V’s favorite artists. J-Hope has talked more than once, in actual interviews, about how much he loves Rihanna’s music too, how he’s been a fan since he was a kid, how he keeps hoping she’ll finally drop her next album. You have a guy who publicly, repeatedly says he admires an artist Chris Brown assaulted, who then turns around and gets photographed laughing it up with that same man at a concert. I’m not saying he owes Rihanna or Frank Ocean anything personally. However, if you’re going to talk about how much you love someone’s music and someone’s art, you’d think there’d be at least a little hesitation before you’re seen embracing the guy who hurt them. The group has done a remix with Meg Thee Stallion and RM has a song with her. CB has been a vocal support of Tory Lanez, repeatedly calling for his release from prison (he was convicted for shooting Meg in the foot).
This isn’t a single incident, it’s now a pattern:
• The “Arirang” album teaser that recreated Howard University’s campus with almost no Black students visible, despite the video’s own premise being about Korean students Howard took in when almost nowhere else would.
• Jungkook wearing a “Make Tokyo Great Again” hat during J-Hope’s own tour rehearsal (a phrase with obvious colonial-era connotations in a Korea/Japan context) and later saying he hadn’t checked its meaning.
• The group’s increasingly visible embrace of AI in their marketing and content, with limited public reckoning about what that means for the people whose labor AI tools displace.
Individually, each of these has a plausible “management’s fault” or “isolated misstep” explanation. Stacked together, the pattern stops being about isolated bad luck and starts looking like an absence of anyone in the room asking “should we do this” before they do it.
There’s also the Grammys piece, which I think people are underrating. BTS has spent the last few weeks positioning themselves against the new Grammy award and rules, which is a fine stance to take. Chris Brown, on the other hand, has spent years publicly playing the wronged outsider the industry won’t forgive. Standing next to him, visibly, right now, doesn’t read as neutral to me. It reads like picking a side in a fight about who gets held accountable and who gets to be the victim of their own accountability.
What I’d want to see isn’t a public flogging. An acknowledgment, and (more structurally) a cultural/PR competence function at HYBE and all these KPop agencies that flag “hot topics to stay away from” before international travel and appearances, the way any global brand managing ambassadors this visible should already have.
If members are going to hang out with high-profile people, someone on the team should know enough to say “maybe not this one, not right now.”
RM, of everyone in this group, has built a reputation as the member who reads, who researches, who thinks about context before he speaks. That’s exactly why this one stings more. He’s the one person here who plausibly knew, or should have.
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