To ARMY, With Love: An Interview with the Bangtan Remixed Editors
Image by Amber Lee. Adapted from Frieze, 1820 (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Gift of Josephine Howell, Inc.) and Instagram (@criticalbtsreader) photograph of Bangtan Remixed editors at PTD LA, 2021.
BTS galvanized a new influx of English-language discourse on K-pop, particularly as pertains to its transnational circulations and receptions. This interview attends to BTS’s mainstream impact while also asking questions beyond the group: what is the state of K-media discourse today? Why does it matter in the context of contemporary culture? What do we, fans and non-fans alike, stand to learn from it?
We sat down with three of the editors of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader to discuss these and other questions. Michelle Cho, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong brought us the perspectives of scholars whose entry point to BTS was their strong love for the group. Equal parts fans and academics, enthusiasts and critics, they represent the kind of K-scholarship that begins from a deep attachment to the media itself. Energized by love, and guided by a feminist and decolonial praxis that motivates the BTS reader more broadly, their thoughts offer a useful model for our critical K-media conversations.
What was the process that led to the beginnings of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader?
Mimi Thi Nguyen: Among the editors, two of them were my best friends from early days—I’ve known Vernadette [Gonzalez] since graduate school and Yutian was at the same institution as I was in for my first job. During the earliest parts of the pandemic, somehow Yutian and I both separately got into BTS without talking to each other about it—which was weird because we talk to each other every single day about anything. But somehow, we didn’t talk about BTS.
Then, Vernadette’s oldest child became ARMY. Once we realized we were all listening to the group and consuming a lot of BTS content, we all got on a text chain about BTS. The text chain kept growing over the period of 2020–2021, and when Permission to Dance LA happened, Yutian, Vernadette, their child [Inez], and our friends Rani Neutill and Patty Ahn, who are two of the other co-editors, decided we were all going.
And then one or two days after the show, Vernadette messaged the text chain and asked: should we make a book? And we were like, yes, if you think it’ll work!
So Vernadette immediately sent an email to our editor at Duke University Press, and he responded right away: yes, we would absolutely love a BTS book. It was at that point that Patty brought Michelle onto the project because, you know, Vernadette, [Yutian], and I are not Koreanists. We don’t do Korean studies or Korean American studies—we do other things; we’re cultural studies and ethnic studies scholars, but we’re not Koreanists.
That’s how it started, and it went really quickly from there.
I guess you could say it came out of a pre-existing, informal network of academic friends and contacts?
Mimi Thi Nguyen: Yes, exactly!
Working as a team and soliciting all the pieces for the reader, were there any unexpected insights that the process generated for you? We might think about this as engaging with BTS in a way that differed, perhaps, from your previous fannish engagement. How did this process lead you to see BTS or K-culture differently?
Mimi Thi Nguyen: I feel like this is a good question for Michelle, because Michelle has been ARMY [for a long time] and working on BTS all along.
Michelle Cho: One thing that was really great about this particular configuration as a starting point for thinking about BTS was that we knew it had to be transnational and interdisciplinary. Before, it has been very, “Oh, you do Korean studies, you talk about Korean media, so you must explain this phenomenon from a cultural essentialist point of view. What is happening; what does it mean?” I always felt like, oh, let me look up the answer in the book of Korean secrets so that I can explain it all to you. [Laughs]
But that was the set of assumptions some people (and the media) were bringing to BTS. I got fascinated with BTS, though, because they were such an interesting fan phenomenon. They had this trajectory where they were not from the Big 3, but they were resonating so strongly with so many people, especially outside of Korea. Even a lot of folks who study Korean media and pop culture were kind of baffled by it. So, having a totally different angle, and not having to go through the ethnocentric route—not having “What is the Korean framework that explains this phenomenon” as the first question we had to confront—was really enabling.
That prompted all these different perspectives on BTS, not just from the North American or East Asian context but elsewhere. We’ve all known for a long time that BTS has this global reach, but what does that really mean? BTS is such a good example of a phenomenon that requires us to not only use the word “global” but really think about it in specific and new ways. The fact that we have contributors from Turkey, the Philippines, Australia, and Indonesia, among other localities, it really forced us to expand our thinking, and I learned a lot from that.
This brings up a question for you as people working in academia: how have you all seen the disciplinary boundaries around this kind of work shift over the past five to ten years? What did it used to look like, and how is it changing?
Michelle Cho: When I first got interested in talking about K-pop, I think around a year after I finished my PhD, I knew I didn’t want to talk exclusively about highbrow culture, cinema, or literature. At the time, though, there was this assumption that if you talked about popular culture, you were doing it in the context of a communication studies rubric, and what you were really talking about was culture industries and soft power.
There’s this idea of Korean “soft power” as something that’s consolidated; people believe in it somehow. But I’m like, this framework is really shaky! Culture isn’t just the flipside of military power, i.e., hard, coercive power. There’s a lot that needs to be interrogated about that entire framework—even though the Korean Culture Ministry might be really into that narrative.
Thankfully, there’s definitely been a change in people wanting to analyze beyond these frameworks—like how is technology involved? What forms of media are we talking about? We’re operating in a very entangled and interconnected web of relations that’s constantly developing, and audiences are not who you think they are. So these elements add complexity to how people are studying this topic.
I think we’re moving away from a strictly “Korean” framework. Now we can talk about these phenomena from different angles using a cultural studies lens, which is to say, a relational, intersectional, and social constructivist perspective. That’s how things are changing. You’re not asking for the “native informant” who can tell you what this phenomenon “means” because of some naive assumption that they know it because they are it, because it’s in their blood. I’ve always tried to resist the push for cultural essentialist explanations in my responses to questions about the growing global popularity of Korean popular culture, and, happily, I’m finding that this doesn’t require as much effort anymore.
Yutian Wong: In my field of dance and performance studies, there is a growing sense that K-pop is something we can’t ignore anymore. It’s similar, in some ways, to the process of trying to institutionalize other popular dance forms, particularly those that emerged from Black and Brown communities such as hip-hop, into the academy. Dancers are active in student clubs, but what students are interested in is not always reflected within university dance curriculum.
Mimi Thi Nguyen: Because it’s viewed as undisciplined?
Yutian Wong: It’s undisciplined . . . or it’s overly disciplined, right? K-pop has its roots in popular dance genres such as hip-hop, but “authentic” hip-hop is viewed as improvisational whereas K-pop is viewed as overly choreographed to the point of being inauthentic. K-pop is also perceived as solely frontal (presentational) without being “classical” like ballet or “introspective” like modern dance. And it’s not “traditional” or “avante-garde,” which is how performance forms coming out of Asia are often included in the academy.
On that note, and with respect to your different representative fields, how is Bangtan Remixed like or unlike a traditional reader?
Mimi Thi Nguyen: I’ll say a bit on this from the perspective of Asian American studies. My PhD is in ethnic studies, and I was in an Asian American studies department for a really long time. But I’ve always understood Asian American studies to be a very transnational formation.
Although there were a lot of arguments in the 1990s about what it meant to think about diaspora, Asian American scholars have learned to ask cultural studies questions about the transnational: questions that attend to the circuits and movements of migrants, markets, and images. So, to me, it makes a lot of sense [that the reader] thinks about BTS in these expansive ways.
What this reader also does so well is thinking about the implications of culture and politics together. Oftentimes, in fields like literary, performance, or music studies, there’s a lot of lineage around “form” and time spent thinking about form. Asian American studies has, on the other hand, sometimes been about a politics of representation, right? But increasingly, we’re seeing these traditionally distinct methodological inquiries brought together in new work over the last decades, and I think that’s very fruitful. The reader thinks about form and content together in really generative ways. It’s one of the strengths of the book and the collection; it’s a strength of a lot of the essays.
Yutian Wong: I’m a dance scholar and that’s my disciplinary training. There’s this hierarchy [within dance and performance studies] between high art and popular culture, where it’s only okay to study popular culture if you’re framing popular culture as something that is resistant to some kind of hegemony or if you’re critiquing it as a commodity. At other times, the popular is just treated as something that will attract students or as a way to make money. That’s its value: as a response to the market.
For me, it’s been interesting to be doing work with this collective where [the reader] didn’t have to navigate those frameworks to be able to talk about BTS. With K-pop in performance studies, most of the work I was coming across was either focused on K-pop cover dance and identity or about the relationship between dance and technology. Those were the two framings of the performance element of K-pop. But there is so much room, so much else that there could be scholarship about!
Who is your imagined audience for the reader? How does this audience overlap, or perhaps differ, from that commonly associated with K-culture or hallyu?
Michelle Cho: When I first began teaching after my PhD, I was tasked with teaching an extreme Asian cinema course because it was starting to become visible and popular, especially with a certain kind of white male audience that was coming to Asian cinemas through other conduits and routes, including anime, gaming, and related fandoms. There was this ready-made sense of a trajectory [for K-culture reception], and it was racialized and gendered. There was an initial assumption that K-pop was Girls’ Generation and that it had a male—like a straight male and often white—audience that was into a certain kind of Asian femininity, right? But K-pop’s trajectory since the early 2010s busts that wide open.
I think one of the most interesting and promising areas of discussion that K-pop is introducing is thinking about how reception is such an integral part of any attempt to analyze what this object even is. The audiences in the North American context are not who they were thought to be. There are new solidarities and alliances that are important to pay attention to. When we’re talking about subcultures, what do we mean? And how do we think about how subcultures relate to other axes of identity, political orientation, and all of that?
Mimi Thi Nguyen: We also told our editor that ARMY is one of our main audiences for the reader. Running our Instagram account, we already knew that ARMY loves to do deep dives into BTS: thinking about their relevance, how they can illustrate this and that, how they’re good case studies of x, y, and z. A lot of ARMY are very, very excited about the book.
I would say that our other audience is undergraduate students because teaching undergraduates is primarily what you do with a reader. So we really thought about undergraduates across different disciplines. I know Vernadette is already teaching a BTS class in the fall using the reader, Yutian has also put together a syllabus for teaching K-pop, and, of course, Michelle has taught on K-pop as well.
We’re specifically aware that, sometimes, it’s a challenge to assign a 30-page journal article in an undergraduate class. So I think one of the ways we’ve curated this reader is by paying attention to the length of the essays. We feel they’re rigorous, but they’re also shorter at 4,000 words. This makes them not only easier to assign but good models for more focused student papers. All the chapters are basically 10-page papers on a very specific aspect of BTS that the author wanted to write about, so it makes the chapters good models for different kinds of student writing.
Yutian Wong: I would add that we also thought about people who are not familiar with K-pop or BTS but want to incorporate material about BTS in their teaching. Where is there a resource? The reader can be that.
Building on that broader readership, why does a BTS critical reader make sense at this cultural moment? We know BTS has been used as a marker of K-culture’s success in the US, alongside Parasite and Squid Game, but is that a useful framing? Have we entered a “post-” era, or are we still in that moment?
Michelle Cho: Well, those three markers of success all date to just before or during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, this framing is very presentist, right? K-Culture used to be hallyu, and the markers were Rain, Winter Sonata, and Old Boy, so there have been other touchstones. But they didn’t have this kind of mainstream ubiquity, perhaps. BTS was everywhere and on every television station, on the cover of every magazine, and at the top of the Billboard charts. It was like there was some threshold that had been crossed. Parasite swept the Oscars, and it won not just Best Foreign Film but Best Picture—that was an unprecedented feat.
So yes, I feel like these markers of K-culture do signal something about how we’re not talking about the margins anymore. These Korean media objects are now at the center of many media categories, and that’s an important thing to register.
But that kind of forces one way of thinking about value. There comes to be a preoccupation with whether, for instance, anything will ever top Squid Game on Netflix, or whether anything will ever top BTS’s accomplishments. Is total market domination all that we count anymore? Is that the only kind of disruption of status quo we recognize?
The idea of a “post-” era, or a post-BTS era, has to do with what one understands K-pop to be. Like so many transnational phenomena, globalized pop music is both so integrated and yet so fragmented—why would we even call K-pop something different from pop music per se if the production practices for K-pop are the same as for, like, Ariana Grande? Yes, there are certain distinctions of performance and fan sociality in K-pop, but the music commodity is increasingly the same.
For instance, what is HYBE? It’s basically the same kind of monolithic corporate entity as Sony or Columbia; it’s not meaningfully different in its aims or function. So I think positioning K-pop in our cultural moment today requires a kind of reorientation or reckoning.
Your point about K-success being framed as market domination rings very true. That framing has a noticeable effect on how fan identity is constructed: a good fan is a certain kind of consumer, and good fandom goals involve hitting certain levels of market consumption. We’ve seen the effect of this framing in fan pushback to the boycott for Palestine.
Mimi Thi Nguyen: Yes, I think we’re dealing with that reckoning right now. So much of ARMY identity is tied to mass streaming and buying—and organizing that mass streaming and buying—to the extent that a boycott ends up challenging people’s sense of self. There’s also this attachment to an underdog narrative that’s not really reckoning with the fact that HYBE is a major corporation now, like any other corporation that has pursued market domination. There’s something very romantic about their underdog story, right? But what does it mean to reckon with that origin story and how freaking huge they are now? It’s not the same; it’s not going to be the same [as dynamics were in the past].
With the boycott now, we’re seeing a critique of consumerism as the core of fan identity. People on ARMY Twitter are also having discussions about this—about whether you’re just streaming and buying tracks instead of reading the lyrics, if you’re just consuming or if you’re actually engaging with or reflecting on the lyrics. The fans organizing the boycott are asking a very basic question: what is it that we really do as fans? It’s been interesting, and disturbing as well, to see the kinds of conversations that are happening about fan identity, around the boycott, and around Palestine.
Yutian Wong: What is going on with the boycott is happening in other art spaces as well. There are similar calls for boycotting public performances by other artists and venues. What is happening with the boycotting and its pushback, the doxxing of Palestinian ARMY, is the same thing happening in other spaces in our lives.
As a final question, what is the value of Korean popular culture or BTS for publics who don’t necessarily care about K-pop or about BTS? How does Korean pop culture speak in useful ways to our contemporary moment?
Mimi Thi Nguyen: To start answering, I’m really glad to hear that ARMY for Palestine is also going to be in this issue. I’m a cultural studies scholar, but the main focus in my work has been war and empire, humanitarianism, and aesthetics—and how they all play out together. Vernadette, our co-editor, works on militarism and tourism. So for me, what I think is relevant about BTS and Korean popular culture writ large is the fact that BTS and K-culture circulate along routes that tell us so much about histories of war, empire, and aesthetics. These histories are absolutely informing the way the world looks right now and how we engage it.
Everything down to how ARMY is grappling with the boycott, to thinking about the members in the military, to the fact that it’s a mandatory draft because the Korean War is still not over . . . it’s all connected to these longer histories. There just are so many threads to pull. Looking at BTS basically prompts us to ask other questions about circuits of money, militaries, images, and markets. You ask, how did we get here? Why are there war games being played by South Korea and the US together in the Pacific? Why is South Korea blasting BTS songs over the DMZ into North Korea?
Korean popular culture tells us something about our contemporary moment. It tells us about histories of war and capital, and of racialized bodies: the routes these bodies travel, or don’t. What does it look like when we engage these bodies, or these cultures, through consumerism? What does it look like when we engage through building solidarities? We’re seeing in this moment all the different ways we can start to ask new questions about how we can connect.
People are unpacking this moment through BTS, and through Korean popular culture, for good reason. Ə
Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader is available for purchase from Duke University Press.