Like Dionysus
BTS, Classics in K-Pop, and the Narcissism of the West
This article is part of our music special. Courtesy of ARMY translators, it is also available in Spanish, French, and Korean.
Just get drunk, like Dionysus
In one hand, a drink, in the other, a thyrsus
Art sloshing in a clear crystal glass
Art is alcohol too, if you drink it you get drunk, fool— BTS, “Dionysus” (translation my own)
Watching BTS perform “Dionysus” for the first time, I felt like I was in a dream — in the sense that a dream can be a patchwork synthesis of disparate elements from your waking life. I was seeing my field of study, Classics, merge with the popular music of my country, known as K-pop; work and life colliding in an unexpected, unnerving way. The lyrics, set to frenzied, heady music, include lines such as “can’t you see my stacked broken thyrsus” (“thyrsus” not being a word that you hear every day in K-pop, or any kind of pop) and are illustrated by performances that make use of classical paraphernalia: columns, togas, and of course, a thyrsus. It was bizarre, it was awesome. I wanted to live in it, and I kind of already did.
If you’ve been quarantining under a rock, BTS (their English name, derived from their Korean one, Bangtan Sonyeondan, which means “Bulletproof Boy Scouts”) is a boy band that emerged from South Korea to reach international superstardom, and in doing so delivered on music’s greatest promise: to unite people across borders and across languages. The septet — RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook — writes, produces, and performs songs about subjects such as the struggles of youth and self-love; they find inspiration in areas ranging from literature to science, in Barack Obama’s mic drop at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and in the 52-hertz whale; they execute intricate choreography at the level of top dance crews (while singing live); they have a variety web series; they even have an alternative universe with a storyline that unfolds via music videos, short films, books, and a webtoon. They’ve worked with artists such as Wale, Steve Aoki, Nicki Minaj, Halsey, Ed Sheeran, Lil Nas X, and Sia. Their fan club, called ARMY, boasts millions of members from around the globe, including high-profile ones like John Cena, Ansel Elgort, and Maisie Williams. And it is BTS’s relationship with ARMY, characterized by unparalleled intensity and intimacy, that perhaps most sets them apart from other artists. ARMY, in turn, brings that love into the public: in June, they matched BTS’s one million-dollar donation to Black Lives Matter within a day, and were one of the fandoms that caused a police app to crash by spamming it with fancams.
Here’s an extremely abridged list of records that BTS has set and broken in the seven years that they’ve been around. In 2017, they became the first K-pop group to perform at an American awards show and be nominated for (and win) a Billboard award. In 2018, they became the first K-pop group to top the Billboard 200 with Love Yourself: Tear, which was quickly joined by Love Yourself: Answer and Map of the Soul: Persona — making them the first group to have three albums reach number one within a year since the legendary band that they are most frequently compared to, the Beatles, whose legacy they claimed in an homage performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Most recently, “Dynamite” became the first song by a South Korean act to top Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, while obliterating YouTube records for biggest premiere and most-viewed video in its first day. At this point, they are without question one of the biggest musical acts in the world, if not the very biggest.
All of this was so unlikely that if there had ever been a K-drama — a kind of show that often features fantastical elements such as mind reading and time travel — about a K-pop group taking over the world, everybody would have criticized it as unrealistic. Is it any wonder then that of all deities BTS was drawn to Dionysus — an improbable god, an outsider, a seducer, a myth-maker, an artist?
I want to analyze the classical references in BTS’s work not only because they’re interesting in their own right but also because it’s a way of taking the group seriously as artists. Despite BTS’s incandescent success, many people refuse to do so, preferring to reduce them to a cultural phenomenon — if they acknowledge their importance at all.
In the opening scene of the music video for “Blood Sweat & Tears” — a song about the loss of innocence through submission to temptation, and the lead single from BTS’s 2016 album Wings — the members irreverently pass through a hall of classical sculptures, reading, roughhousing, one even riding a bicycle. At one minute and eight seconds, Jungkook leans back on a swing, back fully arched, as if caught in a fall. Behind him is a painting also concerned with a fall, or rather, its aftermath: Herbert James Draper’s The Lament of Icarus, which depicts Icarus as dead and broken, framed by his colossal wings.
At three minutes and thirteen seconds, just before the beat drops again, the camera pushes into a lush blue room and through a door that opens up to a balcony with V perched on the balustrade, the view in front of him supplied by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. V, who is later revealed to be a fallen angel, smirks at the viewer and then falls into the painting, recreating its central action. The music video uses classical imagery, and the myth of Icarus in particular, to illustrate the theme of the song — a maneuver that BTS returns to throughout their work.
Icarus makes another appearance in “Boy With Luv,” the lead single from BTS’s 2019 extended play Map of the Soul: Persona, this time within the lyrics. Toward the end of the song RM raps the following verse (translation my own):
I’ll be honest
At times, without realizing, I became arrogant
The heightened sky, the widened hall
At times I prayed to run away
But your wounds are my wounds
When I realized this, I resolved:
With the wings of Icarus you gave me
Not to the sun, but to you
Let me fly
There are, I think, at least two potential interpretations of the Icarus metaphor. The “you” (which, as in many BTS songs, may be ARMY) could be read as an alternative to the sun that causes Icarus’s death, meaning that RM is choosing to let go of any self-destructive tendencies and embrace the love of someone who supports him. (This is, more or less, the interpretation on Genius.) But the “you” could also be read as a stand-in for the sun, in which case RM is accepting that love always comes with the possibility of destruction — and chooses it anyway. Either way, the lyrics become more interesting than if he had just said what he meant. As with the “Blood Sweat & Tears” music video, the allusion to Icarus, whose name evokes a story, adds a layer of meaning that is itself open to interpretation.
BTS folded most of Map of the Soul: Persona into their fourth album, Map of the Soul: 7, and both contain several songs with Latin or Greek titles: “Intro: Persona,” “Outro: Ego,” “Mikrokosmos” (it may be more accurate to describe the first two as psychological terms; “map of the soul” is itself a reference to a book about Carl Jung). But the clearest classical reference is the song I mentioned at the beginning, “Dionysus.” (Earlier this year, Johanna Hanink and I talked to MTV News about the significance of Dionysus in the song.) BTS imagines themselves as the god of wine (“my mic made from ivy and rough wood”), getting their fans drunk on their music while contemplating the complexities of art and fame.
But the most notable part of the song, for me, is not a nod to the classics but a distinctly Korean line at the end of the chorus: “playing the kkwaenggwari, sing ongheya.” Translation my own — except I didn’t really translate it, and you can’t neatly translate it in one go, because you need to explain that a kkwaenggwari is a small traditional Korean gong and ongheya is a working song for threshing rice. There’s a piercing delight in watching BTS — a group that has to balance appealing to the West and staying true to Korean culture, and is often criticized for getting the balance wrong — take on Dionysus, a fixture of classical mythology, a god who constantly reinvents himself, and turn him into a Korean folk figure.
Why does BTS reference the classics?
The simple explanation is that Western tropes have meaning and power in South Korea, as they do in an outsize number of other countries, due to not inherent superiority but the slog of colonialism. But when it comes to America and South Korea in particular, the explanation is never simple. What we have to contend with here is this: K-pop is a product of Western and specifically American imperialism, a calculated attempt to exercise influence over the country after the division of the peninsula by setting American culture as the standard and funneling it into all areas of life (Nikes, for example, were a status symbol when my parents were young). Hip-hop has strongly influenced K-pop not just because it’s incredible music, but because it’s American. One way to look at K-pop, therefore, is as an attempt to make something beautiful and distinctive out of the cruel, complicated history from which it emerged.
For this reason, it’s impossible to honestly discuss the story of BTS’s success without placing it within this larger context of imperialism, especially because the story itself reenacts the dynamic of America setting a standard that South Korea then tries to meet. Although BTS has met that standard more definitively than any other K-pop group, they are hardly the first to try. When I was in high school, the Wonder Girls disappeared from the Korean music scene at the peak of their career in order to try to break into the American market. They became the first South Korean act to appear on the Billboard Hot 100 when an English version of their song “Nobody” debuted at #76, but never quite regained their standing back home, so depending on whom you ask their move to America was either a career-ending mistake or an important step for the K-pop industry (perhaps both). While the Wonder Girls assumed that songs for an Anglophone audience had to be in English, a decade later BTS made, and won, a different bet: that language isn’t the important part, that when communicating with music, you have to communicate with music.
As BTS made their years-long climb up music charts worldwide, classical references have been one way to appeal to Western — and again, particularly American — audiences without compromising on the elements that they feel more strongly about, such as singing in Korean rather than English, a commitment that they stated multiple times before changing their mind with “Dynamite.” It’s one way out of many — the use of hip-hop is another (indeed, groups that draw upon hip-hop, such as Blackpink, tend to fare better in America and Europe than groups like Twice, which is more popular in Asia). In “ON,” the second single from Map of the Soul: 7, BTS uses the American trope of a marching band for both the track (that is, they got an actual marching band into the recording studio) and the first of two music videos. The music video for “Spring Day” features a motel called “Omelas,” likely a reference to the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin.
The appeal has worked by virtually every metric (in this piece and elsewhere, American metrics are the only ones that seem to matter): BTS has won awards at the American Music Awards, the Billboard Music Awards, and the MTV Video Music Awards, and regularly perform on American shows. But they have yet to be nominated for or win a Grammy — no doubt their next goal — and until recently, they couldn’t top the Billboard Hot 100, partly because it factors in radio play and American radio does not like playing non-English songs, no matter how popular they are.
“Dynamite,” the (English-language) song that finally cracked #1, is bright, catchy, uncomplicated — arguably what people need right now. It is also, as Aja Romano writes in a piece for Vox, a weird mashup of random Americana; uncharacteristic for a group whose lyrics are usually clever and complex. “It’s infuriating that BTS had to release a song that’s the most distorted, clichéd version of what Americans would expect a K-pop in English to be, simply because that’s the only way their label thought they could get radio play in the US,” Romano says, before pointing out that “by so effectively fulfilling the American industry’s demand for a song that caters to America’s worst expectations, BTS has essentially trolled all of us […] the band played the US music industry’s cheap game so well that they exposed its superficiality better than any other artist in recent memory.”
At the center of BTS’s success is this paradox: while American validation is invariably considered more valuable, what they have to do to receive it is, in my opinion, often less than what they are capable of. This is not a statement about BTS. It is a statement about America. Take, for example, their performance of “Fake Love” at the BBMAs: they look and sound great, the stage is fine, the camerawork is frankly annoying because of how it keeps panning to the crowd during key moments of the song. But compare it to any of their Korean award show performances and your standards will rise: their nearly forty-minute segment at the 2019 Melon Music Awards, for example, starts with RM rapping “Intro: Persona” in a vandalized classroom while the cameraperson toggles the lens to create a distorted, colorized effect, and ends with a rendition of “Dionysus” that includes introductory performances from each of the seven members, an intense two-minute dance break, giant inflatable leopards (because it’s Dionysus), and real horses. The difference in quality became especially clear to me during their recent week-long residency at The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. COVID-19 forced them to record in South Korea rather than in a cramped New York studio, which allowed them to perform at the main royal palace (twice), a furnished house, an abandoned cathedral, and a roller rink.
Of course, I am projecting onto them, as we do with celebrities, my ambivalence about my own relationship to Western culture, about the fact that I spent the beginning of my twenties pursuing its trophies and I am spending the end distrusting my decision to do so. I look at BTS and try to work out why I’ve been feeling cheated out of something that I can’t fully describe. How valiant those seven boys had appeared to me, fighting to stand on the Western stage. And how unworthy that stage seemed, once they arrived.
A recurring message from BTS is to “love yourself” — it forms the basis for an album series, a song title, song lyrics, and their first speech at the United Nations. The message of those who privilege Western civilization to those considered outside of its boundaries may in fact be the opposite: don’t love yourself, love something better, and let that be a way of reflecting on your inferiority.
In 2012, Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” which was only supposed to be another hit song from an established hitmaker, instead became an international sensation (it peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100). At the time, I was a sophomore at a college in the United States, where I never expected to hear K-pop; the possibility did not so much as occur to me. Then one day I found myself a bit drunk off dishwater beer, watching a bunch of white kids dancing on a lawn to “Gangnam Style,” and I felt like I was tripping on something stronger. This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, I thought, not knowing how weird the next few years would be. Gangnam is, incidentally, where I live, and for the first time in my expatriate life I experienced what it was like to have Americans recognize the name of not just my country, but my district. This acknowledgment seemed to make real a part of me that barely existed in abstractions once I turned away from it, as if I had lost my understanding of object permanence.
In 2016, I offered a friend my right earbud as we drove through the French countryside. As I listed our listening options, he stopped me at “K-pop”; he had never heard any before, and he was curious. So I played a medley of chart-toppers such as Big Bang, Hyukoh, and IU until he turned to me and said, “I think this can be as big as ‘Gangnam Style.’” I laughed and assured him that “Gangnam Style” was a fluke. It wouldn’t happen again.
This episode, which I’ve thought about a lot in the past year, now conjures up a gnarl of contradictory feelings: I am stunned, I am humbled, I am ecstatic that I was wrong, I am, above all, ashamed that I did not believe in the value of my own culture even when someone explicitly pointed it out to me. In retrospect, I must have felt a need to justify my life decisions to myself. These days, watching the United States buckle under the weight of fascism and the pandemic, I am heartbroken, but I am also furious: I think, if you were going to turn out to be this pathetic, what was all my self-loathing even for?
For most of my life, I did not think that K-pop could be competitive with, or better than, American pop. The idea did not compute. To a lot of people, it still doesn’t compute. Even BTS, the world’s most famous K-pop group, faces endless discrimination; comments that they’re the domain of teenage girls, that they themselves look like girls, that they look gay — from people who don’t get that not every culture’s definition of masculinity requires men to look like absolute shit. (K-pop groups tend to have extremely acrobatic critics who manage to be racist, xenophobic, ageist, sexist, and homophobic simultaneously, all in the span of a few sentences.) In 2019, Seth Abramovitch scored a coveted opportunity to profile them for the Hollywood Reporter, which he used to talk about how he couldn’t be bothered to research their history and greeted them with cheap gifts that he had picked up at the airport. In February, a Howard Stern Show staff member claimed that BTS was carrying the coronavirus. When BTS finally got radio play with “Dynamite,” a radio station host mocked their English pronunciation on air.
In September, BTS gave their second UN speech; Anne McElvoy, a senior editor at the Economist, retweeted a news item about it, saying “Please no.” When fans explained why her tweet was insensitive, with some sharing moving stories about how the speech affected them, British television personality Anne Hegerty chimed in, “All this about a little Korean boy band that’s fundamentally not important?” before going on to say that her own country, unlike South Korea, doesn’t have a mental health epidemic, and advised us to figure out how to kill ourselves less instead of relying on a boy band. McElvoy and Hegerty have since deleted the tweets, but I still think about the audacity, or maybe the banality, of Hegerty’s statement: a little Korean boy band that’s fundamentally not important. What that meant was, you’re fundamentally not important. When I read stuff like this — which is every day that I’m on the Internet, which is every day — I want to shove K-pop down everybody’s throats until they like it. I want to take it all away, forever.
But mostly I think about my Korean American friends and especially my young Korean American cousins, who, in no small part because of this one boy band, get to grow up with a bit of dignity in a country that will constantly try to take it from them — dignity being a form of self-love. This wasn’t possible even a couple of decades ago, when I spent nearly eight years of my childhood in America. Back then, it wasn’t uncommon for people to not know anything about South Korea, although they usually knew things about China and Japan. It’s a peculiar kind of racism: you hear that you don’t exist, so you erase yourself to make your identity align with your reality. I look at my fifteen-year-old cousin, with her encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary K-pop, and realize that she’s had a very different childhood from mine.
I wish that Western validation didn’t matter. It doesn’t, and it does. You can’t really beat someone with power at their own game, because they’ll just change the standards so that you don’t: if your music is cleaner than theirs, they’ll say that you’re unsophisticated, if your music is more complex than theirs, they’ll say that you don’t know the value of simplicity. To a certain extent, for an indefinite period of time, we need to play their game anyway, but it is not pointless; it can be in turns loathsome and thrilling, it can produce something meaningful. In my mind, the story of BTS is the story of a K-pop group that, out of a necessity constructed by history, went after Western validation and in the process became something greater, for BTS’s influence goes beyond the West, and their legacy will be about more than collecting its rewards. In the end, the people who lose out will be those who were fortunate enough to live through a moment of significant cultural change but were too mired in narcissism to see it, let alone appreciate it.
In 2020, I was walking down a street in California when I heard a familiar song wafting from the rolled-down window of a car waiting in traffic. It was BTS’s “Boy With Luv.”
Yung In Chae is a writer and the Editor-at-Large of Eidolon. She received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University and an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She is the author of Goddess Power, a children’s book about goddesses in classical mythology.
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