<\/p>\n
Ten years ago, outside of Korea and Japan, fans of acts like BigBang and Loona were often seen as members of a fringe subculture. Not so today, when you can turn on the radio almost anywhere in the world and hear the K-pop artist Ros\u00e9, of Blackpink, harmonizing with Bruno Mars on \u201cApt.,\u201d a welcome burst of sugary fun amid all the maudlin weepers on last year\u2019s pop charts, or Jack Harlow starting off a verse with the line \u201cI\u2019m on my Jung Kook,\u201d shouting out BTS\u2019s youngest member. There are now non-Korean groups that are explicitly modelled after K-pop acts, such as the \u201cglobal girl group\u201d Katseye, a co-production between HYBE<\/em> and the American record label Geffen. BTS reflect on this shift on their new album. \u201cEverybody know now where the K is,\u201d raps the group\u2019s leader, RM, on \u201cAliens\u201d\u2014a song that celebrates their anointment as international pop stars while insisting on their particularity as Korean artists. They name-check the independence movement leader Kim Gu and remind you, in one of the album\u2019s occasional flashes of the group\u2019s old cheeky bravado, that this is their house, and you need to leave your shoes at the door.<\/p>\n Throughout \u201cArirang,\u201d BTS searches for their footing in a global pop landscape that they themselves, the conquering aliens, have terraformed. \u201cArirang\u201d is a centuries-old Korean folk song that has, as Joshua Minsoo Kim writes<\/a>, \u201clong functioned as a polysemic anthem\u2014of deep longing, collective resilience, even the reunification of North and South Korea.\u201d In BTS\u2019s hands, it acquires a more banal meaning. A sample of \u201cArirang\u201d hums in the background of the album opener, \u201cBody to Body,\u201d a pulsating club track about the desire for skin contact on the dance floor: a vision of unity, sure, but one you can find on almost any pop record. In \u201cBTS: The Return,\u201d a documentary (also a Netflix original) on the group\u2019s comeback, the members are palpably unenthusiastic about \u201cArirang\u201d as a guiding theme for the album. They squirm in their boardroom seats as a rough mix of the \u201cBody to Body\u201d interlude plays. \u201cIt feels like I\u2019m eating kimchi fried rice at Paris Baguette,\u201d RM says, in a sly reference to another global Korean brand. Will the fans think the group has gone \u201call in on the patriotism,\u201d wonders V, BTS\u2019s baritone crooner? Or will they see the \u201cArirang\u201d concept as a somewhat limp conceit that cannot obscure the music\u2019s greige placelessness\u2014which is to say, its Americanness?<\/p>\n \u201cArirang\u201d was mostly recorded in L.A., in collaboration with star producers from the States such as Diplo, Ryan Tedder, and Mike WiLL Made-It. These outsized musical personalities often leave more distinctive fingerprints on the songs than the BTS members themselves do. \u201cNormal,\u201d with its patterned chord changes and pinched chorus melody, is a classic bit of Tedder pop rock\u2014or rather, Tedder channelling the latest sounds in pop rock; there is more than a hint of Mk.gee<\/a>\u2019s downtuned guitar tones in those rumbling low chords. On \u201cFYA,\u201d RM and J-Hope rap over groaning metallic noises and a blown-out bass drum: the world\u2019s most expensive-sounding JPEGMAFIA-type beat. (Indeed, JPEGMAFIA, the rapper and producer, had a hand in the song.)<\/p>\n BTS\u2019s most engaging work often scans like bricolage: a song might have a rap-rock verse, a power-ballad chorus with a pounding four-on-the-floor E.D.M. beat, and a bridge with neo-soul chord flourishes. It is the ultimate post-genre music, assembled from disparate parts and then welded together, through the heat of sheer idol charisma, into a shiny pop assemblage. On \u201cArirang,\u201d BTS trudges dutifully between sounds\u2014including slick twenty-tens R. & B., antic posse raps, and moody indie-pop guitarscapes\u2014less in a spirit of experimentation than in an effort to cover all the bases. At one point in the documentary, Suga, one of the group\u2019s rappers, complains that there is too much English on the album. A company exec steps in to explain: all the English, a language only one BTS member speaks fluently, is necessary for the album to succeed in the \u201cglobal market.\u201d The record itself feels a bit like these boardroom scenes: the music is happening, the strategy is playing out, and the stars are more or less just sitting back and letting it all unfold.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ten years ago, outside of Korea and Japan, fans of acts like BigBang and Loona were often seen as members of a fringe subculture. Not so today, when you can turn on the radio almost anywhere in the world and hear the K-pop artist Ros\u00e9, of Blackpink, harmonizing with Bruno Mars on \u201cApt.,\u201d a welcome […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2348255,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[426671,23842,35137,21800,22149,306168],"class_list":["post-2348254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-boy-band","tag-k-pop","tag-korea","tag-music","tag-musicians","tag-south-korea"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/The-BTS-Machine-Lurches-Back-to-Life.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2348254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2348256,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2348254\/revisions\/2348256"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2348255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2348254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2348254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2348254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}