BTS, Arirang and emotional integrity in the mainstream
Following my holiday I felt the same way as Lorde. Sad news for her, the feeling only lasted about a week. Now I’ve fallen SO DEEP back into the inner kingdom that I can tell my husband is considering sending in a search party.
There are many things I’ve consumed in the past few weeks that I have thoughts about (Stranger Things 5! Ed Sheeran’s LOOP Tour! Heated Rivalry! Eras Docuseries!) and even more things I’m very excited about that are coming soon (BTS! Bridgerton! Harry Styles! F1 2026! Project Hail Mary! Lorde’s Ultrasound Tour!).
Unsurprisingly, of all the things clamouring for attention in the SOTM segment of my mind… BTS are at the top. They are the reason my daily screentime is averaging 7.5 hours.
My favourite Koreans’ long-awaited new album will be released on March 20. They’re backing it up with a 79-stop world tour. There are no NZ dates but they are heading to Melbourne, and yes, I will be doing everything I can to get tickets.
The reason I haven’t finished anything or slept much since the announcement is because ARMY is in overdrive, and I’ve never experienced the full mania of a BTS comeback before. It’s intense. My Tiktok is wall-to-wall performance flashbacks and ‘BTS ticketing bootcamps’ where old ARMY explain to new ARMY how to enter the Ticketmaster trenches. There are also a lot of very earnest instructions about how to correctly pre-save and pre-order the album so that it counts toward chart performance. This fandom is an unbelievable hype engine, BTS barely need to do a thing.
I’m a veteran of the Eras tour so I think I should be able to cope with the ticketing trauma. We’ll see. I only ended up getting tickets to Eras because my husband built me a bot that auto-bought tickets from the official Ticketmaster reseller platform. Truly the most romantic thing he’s ever done? A dreamboat.
In the aftermath of my deep distrust of the new Taylor Swift album, I have been a little nervous that I’ll be similarly disappointed by BTS. I’ve realised the thing I value most in an artist has little to do with the art itself or even the genre. It’s artistic honesty. Integrity. Sincerity. This is best articulated by a Korean concept I’ve written about before: 진정성 (jinjeongseong) which roughly translates to emotional integrity. Being real. The opposite of cognitive dissonance.
In my view, Taylor Swift’s music has always had this quality. Even during her most candy floss pop eras (think Lover and 1989), I could find a thread that felt authentic to her experience — something both hyper specific and broadly relatable. The Life of a Showgirl doesn’t have that. The only song that comes close is probably Honey, but my favourite review of the album rightly pointed out it’s just a less compelling version of her earlier song Lover, sentiment-wise.
The rest of the album is, at best, a once-true sentiment that’s been warped into mainstream pop by virtue of cynical writing, or, at worst, the musical equivalent of clickbait. It feels like the lyrics have been written purely to illicit a reaction and feed the media machine. The thing I don’t understand is: Taylor is already so polarising she doesn’t need to rage bait — her haters are always waiting to pounce. Why did she try so hard?
The most annoying thing about all of this is that the lack of emotional integrity in TLOASG has had no bearing on its success. It’s her biggest and most successful album ever. The Fate of Ophelia was her longest running #1 lead single. She’s killing it. She’s a mastermind, but this time she hasn’t tried to combine her knack for understanding ‘pop’ with any attempt at cultural nourishment, or a desire to use her music to unite rather than divide. She has provided us with a bag full of candy, and we’re all gonna eat it till we spew.
I’m reading a book of essays on writing by Phillip Pullman and in one he talks about the responsibility of writers towards both their readers and their stories. He says emotion from an audience is a gift that must be earned, and that a writer should never aim to jerk tears or anger from their readers. Feelings should follow an experience of empathy for characters. Narratives that borrow inauthentically from history or culture to elicit a reaction for notoriety or profit are breaking an unspoken artist-audience contract.
I fell in parasocial admiration with BTS precisely because of their 진정성, but while they’ve been on hiatus the K-pop industry has changed and no doubt so have they. It’s fair to say that K-pop has been influenced by western pop and vice versa. The distance between the two pop kingdoms has narrowed. K-pop groups are doing more and more English songs and global tours. American pop creations are increasingly made in the image of K-pop groups (think KATSEYE). It’s not unreasonable of me to be concerned that Bangtan Sonyeondan would feel pressure to go broad and safe with their comeback. They reached their peak in the west in 2020 with 3 English singles, after all.
But then they announced their new album is called Arirang and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I didn’t know what Arirang meant at first, the relief was there because it’s a Korean word. It suggests they aren’t trying to recreate the success of Dynamite and Butter, or following their peers with album names like “Deadline” (BLACKPINK) and “The Sin: Vanish” (Enhyphen). The number of ARMY crying tears of joy about the name on social media right now confirms I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I’ve since learned that Arirang is Korea’s most famous folk song, almost like an unofficial national anthem. It’s a repetitive refrain with hundreds of different melodies that all share a similar sentiment. The song represents separation, loss and longing. It’s an anthem of endurance, hardship, patience, and hope. In Korea’s history it was a song of resilience and quiet resistance during Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910-1945, when their culture was suppressed.
The BigHit press release said that when the 7 reunited after their time in military service and shared their experiences from the last 3 years, they felt that ‘Arirang’ best described what they wanted to share with ARMY through their new music.
They’ve since reiterated this during a WeVerse live:
RM: When we got together, we thought a lot about what truly defines us and we wanted to show where we started. All seven of us are Korean, and we thought it would be good to incorporate something that symbolises Korea. We ended up bringing in Arirang. Arirang, after all, can be interpreted differently by different people, since the lyrics are abstract, right? It’s a story about wistfulness, longing and love. I thought about that a lot when I was in the military. I found myself thinking a lot about the past, and then I thought a lot about performing. I missed everything: society, the world, the BTS members. And so, since Arirang embodies all the joys and sorrows of life, we thought that this concept could effectively tie together our experiences.
J-hope: Arirang felt like the most authentic version of us, something that felt like our roots, and something that can showcase who we are.
RM: Something that can tie us together.
J-hope: When I saw it I was like “oh!”
RM: I saw our Arirang performance from 10 years ago at KCON Paris. We’re finally back with our own Arirang.
JK: It’s crazy.
The performance he’s talking about is a medley of different versions of the folksong that BTS performed in 2016 at a Korean cultural showcase. The timing is funny because there’s a 2016 throwback trend happening on social media right now — did BTS invent it, or are they just blessed by the internet spirits? Since the album name was released, the 10-year-old clip has gone viral.
What a breath of fresh air this cultural deep dive has been, especially this week. Due to my BTS fixation I’ve been even more extremely online than usual, and it’s bleak out there. We’ve had a bunch of celebrity drama causing an exhausting rage tornado (see: the Beckham’s, Blake & Taylor vs. Justin Baldoni, and Queer Eye). We’ve been graced with more unhinged ‘leadership’ from that narcissist across the sea. We’ve had terrifying weather and terrible things happening right here at home.
But I’ve had my head in the (digital) sand, getting amped about 7 dudes making pop/hip hop/edm/disco (who knows? Who cares?) music that reflects who they are. And hopefully getting to see them live. That’s my arirang for 2026.