BTS Somehow Still Considered Political, Despite RM Literally Saying They’re Not Anymore.
Last year, when BTS was announced as performing at the Riyadh Festival for the Saudi Arabian kingdom, fans tried to mitigate the backlash of a concert that endorses a violent authoritarian regime with “they’re just musicians! not politicians!”. But six months later and it appears all is forgotten as fans are back to lauding BTS as social activists and political leaders on twitter.
Hunter Schwarz tweeted a link to ‘BTS Are on the Front Line of South Korea’s Generational Warfare’ with the caption “I had no idea how political BTS got in their music” and the replies are full of praises and links to their lyrics, performances and articles that seek to validate BTS as revolutionary leaders. Naturally the tweets in the replies are full of factually incorrect claims. One person thinks that BTS were blacklisted by the government for their performance of Spring Day.
Spring Day was released in 2017. The conservative government responsible for running the blacklist was in the process of an impeachment that had begun in 2016. Furthermore when the blacklist was actually revealed only one Kpop — 24K — group was named.
Funnily enough, no one seems interested in linking band leader Namjoon’s own words “BTS doesn’t talk about big issues like war or peace, or global poverty or starvation or things like that,” instead choosing to emphasise that group’s message is “loving yourself, as well as to look at the small things”. The quote comes from an interview with The Hollywood Reporter (released on the one year anniversary of Saudi journalist Khashoggi’s murder at the hands of the kingdom) where BTS justified their performance, at the request of a government responsible for some of the worst human rights violations in the modern world. Whilst some fans bury their head in the sand and maintain denial that the concert was “just for fans!”, South Korean president Moon Jae-In has officially gone on record saying that Prince Mohammad Bin Salman petitioned him to send BTS for a concert. Saudi Arabia has recently been using the arts and social media influencers, in an attempt to try and whitewash their atrocious human rights record and boost tourism. On the Korean government’s end, their benefit is an 8.3 billion dollar deal. By agreeing to perform BTS complied with being used as political pawns by their own government in order to help a genocidal kingdom try and boost their image.
In the lead up to the concert a section of the fandom who actually did believe in the socially conscious message BTS used to have, petitioned against the Saudi performance through the hashtag #BTSDontGo, but were met with silence from the mainstream media (who seemed only interested in criticising the performance after it happened), no response from Bighit or BTS, and cyber bullying on a mass scale from the remainder of the fandom. People were encouraged to be doxed, attacked, mass reported into suspension through abusing twitter’s poorly made reporting platform. Attempts to highlight how devastating a concert in Saudi Arabia would be for supporting human rights, were instead buried by propaganda that the country was becoming more progressive — The exact reason the regime wanted the band to perform, knowing the fandom of millions would help spread their agenda.
In the lead up to the concert ARMY’s widely spread pictures of homosexual Saudi social media star, Suhail al-Jameel, in an attempt to showcase the country as being progressive.
Less than two days after the concert al-Jameel was arrested for nudity after uploading a photo of himself in shorts. The Saudi government has a known history of using twitter to spy on citizens and it is not unrealistic to link increased web traffic, from BTS fans using al-Jameel as a “gotcha!” card, and his arrest less than 48 hours after the concert had ended. Funnily enough all of the people who had been trying to advertise the concert as helping Saudi Arabia become more progressive were too busy sharing false articles about a sold out concert (it didn’t sell out, it sold less than half the capacity), to bother caring about a gay man now being tortured in prison (where he currently remains). Somehow LGBTQI+ fans are meant to feel represented by a group that has never explicitly offered their support, and whose fans are indirectly responsible for a gay man being tortured in Saudi prison.
But facts don’t matter in the purple heart world of ARMY twitter. Valid criticism is decried as “Xenophobic!”. Pitchfork’s 6.3 review of Map of the Soul 7? “Racist!”. A Korean translator criticising BIGHIT’s twitter account endorsing a thinly veiled racist article that reinforces offensive stereotypes against Asian artists to promote BTS as a model minority? Bully her off the platform! Meanwhile the fandom regularly targets all other Korean pop acts and fans (known derogatorily as “kpoppies”) with racist stereotypes of ‘machines’ and ‘robots’. Artists such as NCT, SuperM , MonstaX and BLACKPINK have all been accused of using artificial methods to buy their success, whilst BTS are supposedly ‘organic’. Because apparently a western country is only capable of liking one Asian act at a time and BTS are the only acceptable option because all those other Koreans are fake… so actual xenophobia.
The methods being used to push this BTS agenda of ‘socially conscious’ are scarily comparable to Trump. Much like Trump’s stranglehold over Fox News, ARMYs have begun infiltrating actual journalism spaces. Through biased fan opinions being published under official outlets such as Rolling Stone or WallStreet Journal, other fans are then using this to claim that as the standard for reporting. The “journalists” regularly use their platforms to slander other groups. Ikran Dahir and Ellie Bate, both ARMY accounts on twitter, used their platform on Buzzfeed to falsely accuse SuperM of artificially inflating album sales to chart on Billboard.
Even after Billboard released an official statement with their Nielsen statistics, proving Super M’s chart position as legitimate, neither writer has issued an apology and the article still remains up on Buzzfeed — now with three corrections
On March 12, Pauline DeLeon wrote a piece for HypeBae that was supposed to be a translation of the Korean website’s post on BIGBANG renewing their recording contracts with label YG. In her original article DeLeon claims “fans don’t seem to be taking the news [of the contract renewal] well”, links a false accusation against band member, Daesung, which has been legally cleared, and quotes ‘one social media user’ (like that’s a legitimate source for anything) calling the group “a unique group of ex-convicts”. DeLeon goes on to refer to ex-band mate Seungri’s criminal accusations of prostitution and rape as a “mishap”, before ending with a link to BTS’ latest music video.
The article has since been edited to a straightforward translation of the Korean version, removing the links to the BTS music video, Daesung, and replacing the allusion to Seungri with a proper sourced article that acknowledges his removal from the group. However, much like the aforementioned Buzzfeed article, no apology has been made to the respective group who was slandered, and no disciplinary actions taken against the reporter.
In an era of clickbait journalism where fandom slander is treated like gospel, all other journalists or facts that go against these ARMY narratives are decried as “fake news”. Gate keeping accounts exist on twitter to monitor all things that are written about BTS and tell fans whether it is acceptable to click on the article or not. “Receipt” accounts keep track of all dissenting members of the fandom, posting out of context screenshots to target them for mass harassment. Furthermore when a gay Arab man by the name of Enzo dared criticise a BTS fan journalist of not covering the Saudi concert, he was then targeted for harassment and bullied off the platform.
Activism isn’t a badge you can pin on and take off whenever you feel like it. You can’t perform for a regime responsible for the worst oppression of women in the modern world and then claim to care about ending violence. You can’t have a fandom full of conservative Republicans and still claim to be socially conscious. People who actually care about a progressive future are not interested in fostering a pleasant environment for people of the opposite view. Uniting people with music does not exist. I do not wish to be “united” with people who believe that gay people do not deserve to live, that one race is superior to another, or that women should be beaten the way they are in Saudi Arabia. The reality is if BTS wish to be considered socially aware they need to take a consistent stand, but Namjoon himself said he’s not interested in doing that. “BTS don’t talk about big issues like war or peace”. So with that it mind the fact of the matter is they’re apolitical. They don’t actually care about a genuine message, they just perform for the highest bidder.
Update, March 16 2020:
Twitter response to this post has been an interesting insight into how hypocritical the fandom is.
Telling fans to mass report an article that talks about the fandom mass reporting and bullying dissenting thoughts… (even with screenshots and citations provided for all claims)
Criticising this article for being an unsavoury portrayal of the band – claims the members to be philanthropists… Next tweet gleefully imagining the members violently assaulting someone and being bailed out.
And yet people wonder why I wrote this.
Update, March 17 2020:
BTS performing at the request of the Saudi government is somehow comparable to soldiers invading Nazi Germany to free Jewish prisoners
