I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, particularly since ARIRANG came out and I saw some of the discourse surrounding whether the album was “Korean enough”, and even more so since the Grammy announced their new Asian Pop category, and just a little while ago, I came across a now-deleted post about BTS’s ongoing tour, and some of the comments about their use of English really disturbed me. So I figured I might as well get all my thoughts out here and finally post this write up, and apologies in advance because this has turned into a whole thesis.
Anyways, one thing I find so freaking weird about the way people discuss kpop artists is how entitled some people feel to dictate what makes them authentically korean, and how that authenticity is somehow always reduced to their own warped idea of what being korean means. As if Korean identity is this stripped down, one-dimensional, almost caricature like entity that exists solely for their consumption.
Like I have said in my opening, one example is the discourse surronding how “Korean” ARIRANG is, despite it being full of references to Korean culture, history, and the members’ own experiences as Korean men. You have “Body to Body” sampling Arirang, “Aliens” referencing Korean rhythms, language, and historical figures like Kim Gu, and “No. 29” featuring the resonance of the Sacred Bell of King Seongdeok. And that’s without getting into the songs that explore their own experiences growing up in Korea, navigating the Korean music industry, serving in the military, or existing as Korean artists in a global industry. And beyond the album, they’ve also been highlighting Korean artists, filmmakers, athletes, and other cultural figures throughout this era and a lot of the elements they incorporated in their tour are an ode to their culture and identity.
But even setting all of that aside, why should someone have to constantly perform the most recognizable aspects of their culture for an outside audience to consider their work authentic and why do we reduce racial and cultural identities to a collection of recognizable images, traditions, and signifiers? Being Korean isn’t just pansori, trot, hanboks, or incorporating the haegeum into your music. I’m currently reading Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (a great read btw), which satirizes orientalism, racial fetishization, and the ways asian identities become objects of western academic and cultural consumption, and it’s made me think even more about this. It also reminds me of the debates surrounding writers like Khaled Hosseini and whether certain representations of non-Western societies cater to an Orientalist gaze, and its also why I recognize the reluctance some of the members had when it comes to incorporating Arirang in Body To Body, with Tae commenting how, for Korean people, it may come off as them performing patriotism. These are obviously different contexts, but the underlying question of who gets to define, represent, and authenticate someone else’s culture is something I feel like we need to discuss within the context of K-pop as well.
And this brings me to the language discourse, which I find particularly insidious because it treats identity as something that can supposedly be diluted or tarnished by engaging with languages that are deemed “not foreign enough”. Korean acts ahve been making Japanese or Chinese albums for ages in the hopes of expanding more to these markets, but when they choose to speak or use English, suddenly it’s “not authentically them, and they want western validation”? And this take is ironic, when you see how English became the global lingua franca in the first place, and how colonialism, western political and economic power, and institutional hierarchies have made it the default language of international communication. But the very same people that are expected to navigate this English dominated global landscape are also subjected to scrutiny over when and how they choose to use it. Their native languages or languages that are “foreign enough” become reflections of their authenticity, while their use of English is interpreted as evidence of loss of cultural identity (or corporate manipulation and pressure in the case of artists).
In the same vein, framing attempts to engage with western audiences as a desperate pursuit of “western validation” also assumes that western recognition is central to the legitimacy of non-western art that merely participating in those markets becomes evidence of seeking its approval when its not seen as such when the same artists expanded to other markets, and it reproduces the very cultural hierarchy we are supposedly criticizing and opposing. And speaking of this supposed “western validation” and “westernization of kpop”, its funny how early gen kpop is treated as if it existed in this culturally pure space before western influences supposedly ruined everything, when huge part of the kpop sound people romanticize was already borrowing heavily from western pop, rnb, hiphop, and electronic music, particularly music pioneered and developed by black american artists. Yet somehow, those songs were considered more authentically korean because they were either sung predominantly in Korean, or because the styling, and occasionally quirky hooks and genre switches made them feel foreign enough to an outside audience. So western musical influences were apparently acceptable as long as they were repackaged in a way that felt exotic or unfamiliar enough to the listener, but when the same artists engage more directly with global pop conventions or sing in English, suddenly their authenticity is called into question.
And to be clear, people are absolutely entitled to dislike an album, a concert, or an artistic direction. But there’s a difference between criticizing someone’s art and projecting your own expectations of racial and cultural authenticity onto the people making it. I really wish people would realize that you can criticize kpop artists, their music, performances, companies, and artistic decisions without reducing them to infantilized figures who apparently need outsiders to tell them how to speak, how to navigate global audiences, and what constitutes an authentic expression of their own identities.
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