New Releases

Should BTS's YouTube Record for "Dynamite" Even Count?

BTS ARMY made sure the new single broke records—whether it was the group's best song or not.

BTS arrives at the 62nd annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on Jan. 26, 2020. The South Korean boy band BTS HAS won a leading four awards including best song for "Dynamite" and best group at the MTV Europe Music Awards while Lady Gaga took home the best artist prizeMTV EMAs, Los Angeles, United States - 27 Jan 2020

Photo by Jordan Strauss/AP/Shutterstock

In April of last year, sensational K-pop girl band Blackpink broke a major YouTube record with the premiere of their music video for "Kill This Love."

The video garnered nearly 57 million views in its first 24 hours, narrowly edging out the record Ariana Grande had set several months earlier with her cringeworthy ex-smearing anthem "Thank U, Next."

But less than a week later, Blackpink's record was thoroughly smashed by the slightly more sensational K-pop boy band BTS with the video for their single "Boy With Love," featuring Halsey. The record that had taken more than 14 years of YouTube's slow, incremental growth to set, was—in a matter of days—surpassed by a wide margin.

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MUSIC

Hot Girl Quarantine: "Savage" Will Be the Song We Associate with Coronavirus Forever

As its dance goes viral and we're stuck in our homes, "Savage" will remind us of this dark time years from now.

Megan Thee Stallion - Savage [Official Audio]

Earlier this month, Megan Thee Stallion released her most vulnerable project yet, Suga.

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Music Reviews

Megan Thee Stallion's "Suga" Shows the Hot Girl's Soft Side

On her new project, the Houston rapper is more vulnerable than ever.

Megan Thee Stallion - B.I.T.C.H. [Official Video]

Just weeks before releasing her debut, Fever, Megan Thee Stallion lost her mother, Holly Thomas, to brain cancer.

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Meg Thee Stallion has been on an unstoppable tear for months now, and on her debut single off Suga, she uses the opportunity to speak to the people, particularly the men, that have continued to agitate her as a budding superstar.

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BTS at the American Music Awards

By Featureflash Photo Agency

Congratulations–you've survived 2019

We've been through haunting commercials, traumatically bad movies, and the fall of a favorite childhood author. But through it all, there's been Spotify, judging our music tastes like a disapproving boomer. And yet, we persisted. In alphabetical order, these are the top 50 musical lifelines of the 2010s. In the top 25 are the likes of BTS, Bon Iver, Kendrick Lamar, and Childish Gambino. Among the bottom 25 are FKA twigs, Tayor Swift, Julien Baker, and Charli XCX. Notably absent is anything by Ed Sheeran or Justin Bieber, because we don't believe bad listening habits should be encouraged. Happy listening in 2020!

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MUSIC

BTS' New Album "Map of the Soul: Persona" is Algorithm-Friendly Nothingness

Everything good about K-pop was left behind on this album.

Dymond/Thames/Syco/Shutterstock

An overseas phenomenon can only get so big before the greedy American market scoops it up, westernizes it to maximum marketability, and swallows it whole — think kimchi smothered in Big Mac sauce.

As such, K-pop's arrival in America was inevitable, and the pioneers of the western explosion of the genre are Bangtan Sonyeondan ("bulletproof boy scouts" in English) a boy band best known as BTS.

BTS has cultivated a staggeringly large fanbase — who ominously refer to themselves as an "ARMY"— and not just in South Korea and the US but in South America and Europe as well. The seven boy group is made up of RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook, who each hold ultra-specific roles. If you haven't heard of the band before, just ask any tween to fill you in. Their eyes will likely fill with a disturbing intensity as they rhapsodize on Jungkook's smile or RM's dance moves. They may also mention that in 2018, BTS became the first South Korean band in history to debut an album at No. 1 on the US Billboard 200 chart. They also sold out a world tour, collaborated with Steve Aoki, the Chainsmokers, and Nicki Minaj, and set a Guinness World Record.

Now, to the delight of K-pop super fans everywhere, the biggest boy band in the world has released a new album called Map of the Soul: Persona. The hotly anticipated album touches on themes of heartbreak and grief but, of course, still includes plenty of danceable beats and swoon-worthy love songs.

The boys' lyrics are primarily in Korean with occasional splashes of English, but regardless of the language of expression, they're notably boring. Each reads like a JV football player's English class sonnet project he hurriedly scrawled on the bus or, more generously, an Ed Sheeran Mad Lib. American music listeners have committed so whole-heartedly to music with the same tepid beat and canned sentiments over and over again, that its really beside the point that the majority of them can't understand Korean — not that they're missing much in terms of lyrical depth.

Meanwhile, the production of Map of the Soul: Persona lacks all of the explosive, intentionally over-the-top characteristics that make K-pop so delightful even to the non-fluent listener. K-pop itself is an exciting and widely appealing genre, with stirring theatricality, an exceptionally engaging performance style, and historically infectious songs. But on this album, the people behind the extremely lucrative product that is BTS — probably eager to further capture the western market — have sucked out every bit of the genre's soul and individuality in a bid to make it more palatable for American listeners.

Essentially, if you plugged every forgettable but mildly successful pop song from the last few years into an algorithm, added the diary entries of a thirteen-year-old girl, and hit "discover weekly," you'd get something close to this album. It's as if, recognizing BTS' growing western audience, the massive churning machine that is the K-pop industry decided to opt for Maroon 5-esque melodies, slap K-pop harmonies on top, and hope to appeal to literally every person who's ever listened to music. To further shore their bets, they added performances from Halsey and Ed Sheeran, two of the most non-controversially listenable artists in western music.

But instead of an album with unprecedentedly wide appeal, BTS created an album so wholly unremarkable and sickeningly algorithm-friendly, it disappears from your mind moments after you finish listening. If you were a BTS fan before this album, you'll probably remain one, and if you weren't, it will neither convert you nor offend you. It's meant to merely wash over you like the screams of so many crazed BTS fans sprinting from the void, feverishly groping for belief. But maybe we're overthinking it.


Brooke Ivey Johnsonis a Brooklyn based writer, playwright, and human woman. To read more of her work visit her blog or follow her twitter @BrookeIJohnson.


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