Two of the most most consumed products in the world are food and music. In a time when Americans eat avocados from Mexico, use phones made in China, and drink chai from India, it follows that their popular music should also be imported. In 2021, the most influential music act in the US, and indeed the world, is the South Korean septet, BTS.
BTS debuted in June, 2013 under the label BigHit Entertainment. Their fans, the Adorable Representative MC for Youth (ARMY), were named and claimed by BTS in July, 2013. The almost simultaneous debut of BTS and the fandom…
Ruminations from an ARMY Documentarian on BTS’ 2021 Grammy Nomination, Dynamite, and the Future
This article has been written in response to August Brown’s article in the Los Angeles Times: “Did BTS Get Robbed of a 2021 Grammy Nomination?” First off, it is relatively uncontroversial to say that BTS were robbed of not a 2021 Grammy nomination, but six. As the title states, the author of the article you are reading is an ARMY (a BTS fan) and a documentarian. She does not claim to be a music critic or music historian. …
This article was written in response to the Bloomberg Businessweek article whose title alone (“No One Fights QAnon Like the Global Army of K-Pop Superfans”) ought to have alerted readers that even for 2020, the forthcoming arguments would be ludicrous (a war between white American anti-pedophilia conspiracy theorists and fans of Korean pop music? Come now).
But before we debunk the claim that the “Kpop stans” have been successfully “trolling” the Right, let us first quickly review who the Kpop stans in question are, why Western Media outlets have decided only now to pay attention to a seven year old…
