BTSRecord-breaking K-pop group comprised of RM (Kim Namjoon), Jin (Kim Seokjin), Suga (Min Yoongi), J-Hope (Jung Hoseok), Jimin (Park Jimin), V (Kim Taehyung), and Jungkook (Jeon Jungkook). The boy group is part of Big Hit Entertainment and debuted in 2013. became the first K-pop group to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August 2020. It was an incredible achievement for the group and its fans, who worked hard to buy and stream “Dynamite”, a bright disco-pop song, to the #1 spot.
“Dynamite” was widely celebrated as a breakthrough for Asian representation in the US music industry. Before “Dynamite”, only two songs by Asian artists had topped the Hot 100 chart. As music critic Seongdeok Seo pointed out in Weverse magazine,Weverse is a web platform owned by Big Hit Entertainment, which manages BTS and several other K-pop groups. It began publishing Weverse Magazine in 2020, with articles that analyze and promote the music of Big Hit artists. BTS had already consistently entered the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, which established their US popularity. “Despite all this, ranking No.1 is important,” Seo wrote. “Then what is the difference between Top 10 and No.1? To BTS, holding the top spot is an outcome of transcending the complex barrier of discrimination, exclusion, and prejudice.”
For many, however, “Dynamite”’s victory was uneasy. “Dynamite” was BTS’ first song entirely in English (though the group, like most K-pop acts, has always mixed some English phrases into their lyrics). Many fans worried that it may create an expectation that BTS and other foreign artists who hope to achieve the same level of success in the US must perform in English. If that proved true, the US reception of “Dynamite” would seem almost like a step backwards into ethnocentrism and xenophobia instead of progress towards a future where talented artists succeed regardless of their ethnicity and language.
With this in mind, many fans hoped “Dynamite” would become a Trojan horse, an ebullient English hit that would convince the US public to finally listen to BTS’ “rich, varied, and top-tier discography in Korean.” The ultimate test of the “Trojan horse” theory came with the release of BTS’ new album, BE, in November 2020. The album was mostly in Korean (minus “Dynamite”, which was included as the outro) and just as “rich, varied, and top-tier”Tracks range from "Blue and Grey", a mellow reflection on anxiety and depression, to "Telepathy", an upbeat, funky song about not being able to see fans due to the pandemic (and my personal favorite). in terms of lyricism and music style as BTS’ other work. Fans prepared a massive streaming and buying campaign in hopes of getting each of the album’s seven songs onto the Hot 100 chart. They succeeded — all six new songs on BE debuted on the Billboard Hot 100.
After 2020, therefore, it seems like significantly more of the US public may finally be ready to regularly and seriously listen to music from another language and culture. But how had K-pop artists fared in the US before BTS’ singular achievements? What songs succeeded? And how important is language for artists who hope to break into the US mainstream?
To begin answering these questions, I collected all of the K-pop songs that have appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 chartI focus on the Hot 100 chart because it is the most widely accepted measure of how popular a song is within the US. As we'll see later on, the Hot 100 is especially useful because it combines multiple sources of data about how many people are listening to a song. and counted how many of their lyrics were originally in English. The data help illustrate how K-pop became a part of the US music scene.
:D
K-pop on the Billboard Hot 100
The above chart displays all K-pop songs that have appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, as listed by this Wikipedia page with a few edits.I’d like to thank Wikipedia editor Bonnielou2013 for maintaining this list. I verified the chart positions listed on Wikipedia using Billboard's public chart history lookup for each artist. I only verified artists listed on Wikipedia, so if the Wikipedia list does not include some K-pop artists who made it onto the chart those errors will be reflected here as well.Each circle represents a song, with the green shapes representing the percentage of lyrics originally in EnglishOr at least, written in roman characters — a few songs contain words in other languages as well.and the pink representing the lyrics originally in Korean. Most of the song lyrics were retrieved from Genius.I used the Genius API to retrieve lyrics for some songs and web scraped lyrics for others. If lyrics were not on Genius, I manually searched for and copied the relevant information from other lyrics websites.Each song is displayed at the date it debuted on the chart and the highest position it achieved. The grey lines connect songs released by the same main artist.
Wonder Girls
The first K-pop group to make it onto the Hot 100 was the Wonder Girls,The group's lineup changed multiple times. Members included Kim Yubin, Park Yeeun, Min Sunye, Lee Sunmi, Kim Hyuna, Ahn Sohee, and Woo Hyerim. a girl group formed by JYP Entertainment.JYP is one of the "Big Three" South Korean entertainment companies. It was founded and named after Jinyoung Park in 1997. Some of the most popular artists under JYP include god, Rain, GOT7, Twice, and Itzy. After multiple performances in the US, the English version of their single “Nobody” reached #76 on the chart in 2010. They would go on to star in a TeenNick movie, “The Wonder Girls”, in 2012. At the time, Patrick St. Michel observed in The Atlantic, “the smart money seem[ed] to be on Wonder Girls to have the best chance yet to finally break through and sustain success in America.”
The Wonder Girls were a powerhouse group within the K-pop industry for their ten year career, consistentlyreleasinghitsfrom their 2007 debut to their 2017 disbandment.Several Wonder Girls members continued to release great music after leaving the group. Hyuna joined 4minute, a girl group under another company. Yubin started her own entertainment agency and released music as a solo artist. Lee Sunmi and Park Yeeun, who performs as Ha:tfelt, also have solo careers and are some of my favorite performers — I highlyrecommendcheckingouttheirsongs. But they never achieved the US mainstream popularity that seemed possible in 2010. The group had multiple destabilizing lineup changes, including vocalist Sunmi leaving in 2010 to return to school, after which a planned English album was scrapped. Yet their early success on the Hot 100 chart still had a lasting impact. “It made the improbable seem possible,” Tamar Herman wrote for Billboard. “[R]ather than looming over the [K-pop] industry like a taunt, the Hot 100 singles chart became a goal.”
Psy
The next K-pop artist to make it onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart needs no introduction. “Gangnam Style” peaked at #2 on the Hot 100, just short of the top position, and stayed on the chart for 31 weeks. It likely would have reached the #1 spot if it had been released a year later, after Billboard changed how it counts digital streams. Unlike “Nobody”, “Gangnam Style” is mostly in Korean and wasn’t intended to break into the US market. The global popularity of “Gangnam Style” and its cheesy dance moves surprised everyone, including PSY himself.
PSY released his most popular songs as a soloist under YG Entertainment.YG is one of the "Big Three" South Korean entertainment companies. It was founded in 1996 by Hyunsuk Yang. Some of the most popular artists under YG include Sechs Kies, BIGBANG, 2NE1, and Winner, as well as two other artists who’ve appeared on the Hot 100 — CL and Blackpink. Though he introduced the world to K-pop, PSY was somewhat uniqueHe was a soloist, not a member of an idol group, and comparatively old at 35. within the industry. He was unusually willing to satirize aspects of Korean society — “Gangnam Style” mocked those who tried to emulate the residents of Seoul’s glitziest neighborhood.Gangnam is a recently developed (it was farmland in the early 70s) and very wealthy neighborhood in Seoul. It's home to many corporations and cultural institutions.
Adrian Hong, a “Korean-American consultant” quoted in The Atlantic, noted that “‘Korea has not had a long history of nuanced satire.’”Yet there has, of course, aways been Korean artists who critique their society. Seo Taiji and Boys, the early-90s group widely acknowledged as the pioneers of K-pop, were renowned for socially conscious tracks like "Come Back Home" and "Classroom Idea". BTS has also performed many politically aware songs, including “Am I Wrong” and “Silver Soon”.
“Gangnam Style” brought more exposure to K-pop overall, as YouTube data shows. Subsequent but increasingly less popular hits, like “Gentleman” and “Daddy”,"Daddy" featured CL, a female performer also under YG Entertainment and the next K-pop artist to appear on the Hot 100. showed it was possible for K-pop artists to have some sustained popularity in the US. Yet PSY’s reception in the US didn’t necessarily signal a move away from xenophobia to the extent that a chart-topping Korean song would seem to indicate. For most foreign listeners, “Gangnam Style” was just a weird song with even weirder dance moves that’s fun to play at parties. Socially conscious messages were there, but only if you took the time to research the song’s cultural context.
Obviously, it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to closely engage with the songs they listen to; many don’t even fully understand the messages of English pop songs. But the success of “Gangnam Style” wasn’t a purely positive reflection on the US music industry. As ethnomusicologist Stephanie Choi said in the South China Morning Post, “Despite his long career and musical talent, Psy was depicted in the United States as a hilarious, thus non-threatening, Asian male stereotype.”
CL
CL’s 2016 single “Lifted” peaked at #94 on the Hot 100. The all-English track was part of a coordinated attempt to establish the soloist, a former member of YG Entertainment girl group 2NE1, as a mainstream US artist.
As a talented rapper, CL was seen as “the Future of K-Pop in America” in 2016. She’d had incredible success with 2NE12NE1's 2011 hit "I AM THE BEST" was incredibly popular on its own and also featured on a Microsoft commercial, a short clip that also somewhat introduced many US listeners to K-pop. in Korea and signed with Scooter Braun, who also managed Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande. She reportedly had over 100 songs ready to release in the US, but her career fizzled after “Lifted” and a much-anticipated album never materialized. Many fans assert that CL was mismanaged by YG Entertainment and welcomed her departure from the company in December 2019.Since then, CL has released multiple new songs and plans to release a solo album soon. Her music is wellwortha listen.
BTS
BTS’ Billboard Hot 100 successesBTS Members performing as solo acts have also had songs chart on the Hot 100 (“Chicken Noodle Soup” by J-Hope and “Daechwita” by Agust D, aka Suga), and songs by other artists that feature BTS members have made it onto the chart as well (“Waste it on Me” by Steve Aoki). are just one chapter in the group’s meteoric rise from K-pop underdogs to international superstars. After “DNA” peaked at #67 on the Hot 100 in 2017, the group has been persistently rising through the chart. “Fake Love”, the title track for BTS’ Love Yourself: Tear album, reached the #10 spot in 2018, inaugurating the group’s reign at the top of the chart.
The title track for BTS’ March 2020 album Map of the Soul: 7, “ON”, set a new record for the group when it debuted at #4 on the Hot 100.Some fans of the group were skeptical of Billboard's calculations regarding "ON" and trended #BillboardRecalculate on Twitter to ask for a recount. Fans had noticed an apparent discrepancy between publicly available data about the song's streams and the numbers Billboard reported, raising concerns about accuracy that were heightened after Billboard made a mistake with the song's release date in a tweet. It isn't the only time Billboard has had to defend its calculations, but the incident highlights how closely many fans watch these charts. Several other songs from the same album made it onto the chart as well: “Black Swan”, which was released in January, and two solo tracks without accompanying music videosBut, as of BTS' October Map of the Soul ON:E concert, these songs do have live dance performances. They're both incredible and, though officially not available online, well worth your time if you happen to stumble across a recording. (“Filter” by Jimin and “My Time” by Jungkook).
The group finally reached the #1 spot with “Dynamite”. As mentioned earlier, it was the group’s first and currently only song entirely in English. With many, many performances on US television and a US-focused promotion strategy emphasizing that the song is not sung in Korean, “Dynamite” launched BTS to a new level of fame amongst the US general public.
The achievement clearly meant a lot to BTS — they included a recording of their celebration of “Dynamite”’s first week at #1 in their next album, BE. Yet it was also clear that they were mindful of the implications of “Dynamite” on the rest of their career. They have repeatedly described “Dynamite” as an unplanned effort to bring joy to fans in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, rather than referring to it as the strategic maneuver some observers frame it as. Over the past years, BTS have repeatedly said that they would not start making English music. BTS might eventually release more English songs, but they don’t want their international or US success to be contingent upon doing so.
Instead, while BTS members have learned more English, they’ve also asked their fans to learn Korean. Around the same time BTS released “Dynamite”, Weverse started selling “Learn! Korean with BTS” packages. The packages extended a series of educational videos launched in March 2020 that were seen as a response to fan complaints about the lack of translated subtitles for official content.BTS fans, like many K-pop fans, often have to rely on unpaid fan translators to understand their favorite artist’s music and other content. While the vast network of BTS fan translators is impressive, many have complained that Big Hit, BTS’ company, is not doing their part to make the group’s content accessible to their global fan (and customer) base. Most BTS fans probably won’t become fluent enough in Korean to not need subtitles. But almost all will pick up at least a few words of the language just by listening to song lyrics.
Whether or not the US general public will also be willing to pick up a bit of Korean remains to be seen. After “Dynamite”, BTS quickly reclaimed the #1 spot on the Hot 100 with a mostly-English remix of “Savage Love” featuring three of the membersJungkook sings multiple English verses and Suga and J-Hope wrote and perform consecutive Korean verses. alongside Jason Derulo and Jawsh 685’s “Laxed (Siren Beat)”. In another bittersweet victory, BTS received their first Grammy nomination for “Dynamite”, but the band’s Korean tracks from Map of the Soul: 7 were snubbed.Many fans (including myself) wish that "Black Swan" had received Grammy recognition for its depth and artistry. In another year, perhaps, the group’s Korean discography may finally get the institutional recognition in the US so many fans believe it deserves, but the moment hasn’t arrived just yet.
But since all tracks from BTS’ latest album, BE, charted on the Hot 100 when it was released in November, it seems possible that the group may be expanding its fan base at a rate that makes “non-fan” general public support irrelevant. In line with the “Trojan horse” theory mentioned earlier, “Dynamite” seems to have introduced enough new fans to the group so that “Life Goes On”, the mostly Korean lead single for BE, debuted at #1. The success provided new proof that for BTS and the community of fans surrounding them, at least, music transcends language.
Blackpink
Blackpink, a girl group under YG Entertainment, entered the Billboard Hot 100 with “DDU-DU DDU-DU” in 2018. The group has continued to climb up the charts, though they have yet to break into the top ten. Blackpink has succeeded in building a global fanbase and making history as the first K-pop group to perform at the Coachella music festival.
In my opinion, Blackpink’s popularity is the best indication that US listeners are becoming more open to music from other cultures. Both Blackpink and BTS have succeeded in spite of language barriers, but BTS are once-in-a-lifetime, generation-defining artists. It's hard to imagine the group’s authenticity and artistry not receiving widespread success once their career achieved a certain level of momentum. Blackpink, on the other hand, are incredibly talented performers, but their discography doesn’t have the depth or message that pulled many fans into BTS’ work — observers have noted that many of the group’s most popular songs follow one catchy formula. As Eve Barlow wrote after their Coachella performance, Blackpink’s popularity is ultimately “a heartening reminder of the universality of a hard-ass pop banger.”
Pinkfong?
“Baby Shark” has seemed inescapable since its release in early 2019. Yet while almost everyone (unfortunately) knows how to sing along to the chorus, few know that the company behind it — Pinkfong — is based in South Korea. As a result, it was included in the Wikipedia list of K-pop songs on the Hot 100, the basis for this data, though its presence has been debated by the page’s editors.
The inclusion of “Baby Shark” on this chart forces a reexamination of what “K-pop” actually is. If you want to take “K-pop” at face value, “Baby Shark” is undoubtedly included — it was created by a Korean company and is terrifyingly popular. Of course, it’s not in Korean, but neither are several other songs on this chart that seem more indisputably “K-pop”. The clearest difference between “Baby Shark” and the other songs mentioned here is that it doesn’t have clearly identifiable human artists behind it and isn’t a part of the idol industry that is often equated with K-pop. It’s success in the US says more about globalization and the terrifying power of toddler streamers than xenophobia or cultural representation. On that basis, you might justifiably decide to ignore “Baby Shark” Though maybe you would decide to include this impromptu live remix of "Baby Shark" initiated by BTS member J-Hope, which I just had to bring up somehow. in this chart. But it’s an important reminder that the boundaries of K-pop are blurry.
How do songs make it onto the Hot 100?
The Hot 100 is such a widely cited measure of song popularity because it combines data from multiple sources — sales, digital streams, and radio airplay. There’s no one way onto the Hot 100, and different genres and artists often develop their own blueprint for topping the chart.
What does that blueprint look like for K-pop songs? The following section answers this question by examining data about K-pop songs on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales, Streaming Songs, and Radio Songs charts. A song’s rank on these charts isn’t the same as the overall number of sales, streams, and radio plays it earned, but it still illustrates how these songs made it onto the Hot 100.
The below chart displays all K-pop songs that have appeared on the Billboard Hot 100, Digital Song Sales, Streaming Songs, and Radio Songs charts, as listed by this Wikipedia page with a few edits. Each circle represents a song, with the green shapes representing the percentage of lyrics originally in English and the pink representing the lyrics originally in Korean. Each song is displayed at the highest position it achieved on each chart. Hover over a song to reveal lines connecting all of its chart appearances; if no lines appear, the song only ranked on one chart. Note that the Digital Song Sales, Streaming Songs, and Radio Songs charts only list 50 positions.
This chart gives an overview of all K-pop songs that have appeared on the Hot 100, Digital Song Sales, Streaming Songs, and Radio Songs charts. The size of each circle corresponds to the number of K-pop songs that have made it onto the chart, and the average percentage of English lyrics for that chart is shown as well.
As the chart suggests, the short answer to how most K-pop songs make it onto the Hot 100 is sales. Thanks to dedicated fans, songs from BTS and Blackpink, the most popular K-pop groups in the US, are more likely to make it onto the Sales chart than the Hot 100. This includes songs with more Korean lyrics and more b-side songs, whereas we’ve seen that the Hot 100 favors English-heavy title tracks.
Conversely, it’s also clear from this chart that almost all K-pop songs become popular despite their radio airplay numbers. Thanks to DJs’ reluctance to give non-English songs a chance, most K-pop songs could never come close to mainstream US songs in terms of radio plays.
The overall takeaway is that the recent success of K-pop in the US is due mostly to intense fan support rather than passive listening, though there are certainly some people who listen to K-pop songs casually. Scroll down for a more detailed look at how K-pop songs have fared on each chart.
Digital Sales
Sales are where most K-pop artists and the fans supporting them have the largest impact. Many K-pop fans don’t think twice about buying their favorite artists’ music upon its release, making it possible for them to outsell mainstream Western performers with more passive audiences. Both BTS and Blackpink fans regularly crowdsource funds to support their favorite artists’ releases,Many large fandoms fundraise like this. BTS fans on Twitter, at least, do so on a much larger scale — the two most popular BTS funding accounts have over 180,000 combined followers. a practice that boosts chart performance and allows fans with less disposable income to purchase music. As the graph shows, many K-pop songs perform much better on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales charts than the Hot 100.
Almost every song from BTS’ most recent Korean albumsBE (released November 20, 2020), Map of the Soul: 7 (released February 21, 2020), Map of the Soul: Persona (released April 12, 2019), and Love Yourself: Answer (released August 24, 2018). has charted on the Digital Song Sales chart. Every track from the most recent solo mixtape produced by a BTS member, D-2 by Agust D (who performs as Suga in BTS),Given that Suga is my BTS bias (my favorite member), I have to add that this mixtape is incredible and well worth a listen. “Daechwita”, the lead track, is, for lack of a better phrase, straight fire. “What do you think?” is a great diss track that predicts their Billboard success. And “People”, a fan favorite, is a softer reflection on change and acceptance. also made it onto the sales chart, an especially impressive accomplishment given that the entire album was available to download for free. Many who bought D-2 did so solely to support Agust D’s work and promote his music.
“Normally, Hip-Hop and R&B songs dominate the Hot 100 with streams while Pop and Rock songs seek their way onto the chart via radio airplay,” music critic Seongdeok Seo noted. “Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande are some of the rare artists who don’t play by this rule. But now we can say that BTS found its own breakthrough by digital song sales.”
This trend also holds true for most of the Blackpink songs that made it onto the Hot 100. Like BTS, the girl group’s dedicated fans regularly buy their music, though their US fanbase, at least, isn’t quite as large or powerful. Only the title track from Blackpink’s latest album, “Lovesick Girls”, made it onto the Hot 100 and Sales charts, despite intense anticipation from dedicated fans.Called simply THE ALBUM, it’s the first full-length album from Blackpink, who debuted in 2016. Blackpink has released songs at a notably slow rate, especially compared to BTS and other successful K-pop groups. YG Entertainment maintains that this is done to ensure the songs they do release are high quality, but fans protested the lack of music and what they see as other indications of poor management in 2019.
Streaming
Similar to Digital Song Sales, many K-pop songs make it onto Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart in large part thanks to dedicated fans. Many fans strategically alter their online behavior to maximize the streams recorded for the song. Yet, because listening to music on digital platforms is generally much more common than buying songs, K-pop artists have fiercer competition on this chart and less songs make it to the top.
In addition to Billboard and other official music charts, YouTube view counts are a common goal for K-pop fans — BTS fans worked hard to give “Dynamite” a record-breaking 101.1 million views in its first 24 hours. Perhaps as a result of this, all of the K-pop songs that have made it onto the streaming chart have music videos.
Before 2013, however, Billboard didn’t include YouTube views in its streaming numbers. The breakout success of “Gangnam Style” was one of the reasons the rule changed, with an immediate impact on the types of songs that made it into the charts. After the modification, “Harlem Shake”, another video-and-dance-trend-fuelled viral hit,Almost everyone who was alive and connected to the internet in 2013 participated in the "Harlem Shake" dance trend — including predebut BTS.reached #1 on the Hot 100, an achievement “Gangnam Style” fell just short of prior to the update.
Radio
Radio stations have largely refused to play even the most popular K-pop songs because they aren’t in English. As a result, the only K-pop songsThe Wikipedia list includes the BTS remix of "Savage Love" among K-pop songs that have charted on Billboard's Radio Songs chart. After independently verifying that most of the airplay for the song went to the version that did not include BTS members (and the Korean verses they added) and that the song is not listed on BTS' Billboard Radio Songs chart history, I removed it from my data. to have charted on Billboard’s Radio Songs chart is “Dynamite”, an English track by the world’s biggest boyband, and “Gangnam Style”, the hyper-viral exception.
“A radio programmer wants songs that the listener is going to sing along or rap along with,” pop critic Chris Molanphy told Now This News in an article about why BTS is absent from Western airwaves. “They want engagement from the listener. Call it xenophobia, that's certainly part of it. But when you look at the scant history of non-English language hits over the years, the fact that BTS would be facing this challenge is not all that surprising.”
Awareness that their favorite artists are effectively barred from radio (and other music industry institutions, like the Grammys) is part of what motivates many fans to invest in streaming and buying K-pop songs. Fans are often criticizedCriticisms I've seen online include disappointment that fans aren't mobilizing to support charities instead (though many do), frustration that self-organized K-pop fan activities are somehow unfair to other artists, and the notion that fans have mindlessly fallen into a capitalist trap (this belief is not only misogynistic and condescending towards young female K-pop fans, but also ignores that many K-pop fans are very aware of what they are doing). for such coordinated buying and streaming campaigns, but it’s important to note that these actions are how fans assert their agency in an industry prone to dismissing them and the artists they love. While there are many reasons why fans stream and buy music, a major one is the need to make up for exclusion from the traditional US music industry — like lack of radioplay — with grassroots support.
We’ve seen that the K-pop songs that chart on the Hot 100 tend to have more English than Korean lyrics. While US fans of K-pop groups have shown their willingness to buy and stream music across language barriers, radio stations and other gate-kept institutions have consistently reinforced the centrality of English.
Time will tell if Americans’ attitudes towards non-English songs have truly shifted and what new artists and songs might have a better chance at popularity here as a result. What’s certain, however, is that listeners miss out on so much great music if they refuse to give it a chance only because they can’t immediately understand it.
Who am I?
I’m a white college studentBut soon to be graduate and aspiring data journalist — if you liked this piece, hire me! who was born and raised in the US. I definitely don’t speak Korean, but I can read HangulThe Korean alphabet. and know enough basic vocabulary and grammar to understand many Korean song lyrics without translation.
I started listening to K-pop when I became a fan of BTS in the summer of 2017. I decided to check them out after I stumbled across some tweets analyzing their “Blood Sweat & Tears” music video.There is a huge community of "theorist" fans who produce often brilliant and always complex analyses of BTS' intertextual works. The first song that really pulled me in was “Save Me” then “Spring Day”, which quickly became my favorite song and remains so to this day. Like so many other beginner BTS fans, I decided that I wanted to learn the names of each member. After closely studying the “Dope” music video,This music video is useful for learning the members’ names and voices because they perform in easily distinguishable uniforms. and working my way through their entire discography, I knew both every members’ name and that BTS was well worth my time.
I started listening to other Korean artists around the same time (including K-indie and K-hip-hop singers), largely thanks to Spotify and YouTube’s recommendations. If you need proof that I really have listened to a wide variety of Korean songs, here’s a random selection of my favorite songs by artists other than BTS: “BBIBBI”, “Gang Gang Schiele”, “TWIT”, “Icy”, “Crooked”, “Luvproof”, “TOUCH”, “haPPiness”, and “Organic Life”. In the fall of 2018, I studied in Seoul for a semester, which introduced me to more K-pop artists and strengthened my limited understanding of Korean. I listened to many new K-pop songs as they were released, but I wasn’t plugged into the social media communication networks that keep hardcore fans updated on artists and fandom conversations.
That changed in the spring of 2020 when I, like so many others, decided to create a stan Twitter”Stan Twitter” simply refers to digital communities of fans of BTS and other artists on the platform. account to escape lockdown boredom. I knew exactly when “Dynamite” and BE would be released, what the collectively-decided charting goals were for each, and played a very small part in achieving those goals by streaming and buying music.
I also looked up the translations for every track on BE as soon as they were available and regularly revisit translations for my favorite songs. With songs by BTS and other artists who mostly don’t perform in English, I either completely ignore the lyrical meaning or take the time to read through it line by line and commit it to memory. My personal experience engaging with music across a language barrier, therefore, is similar to what Ellie Bate described in an article for Buzzfeed: “the language barrier actually works as a means to encourage fans to look deeper into the group's music and analyse translations of their lyrics.”