The Epiphany: Leaving the Cult of Coolness… to Find Something Much Cooler (Contest Finalist)
There’s an illness particularly contagious among, though not limited to, adolescents. It’s the disease that made you throw away your flared jeans and buy them back again 10 years later. The sickness that had you backcombing your hair in 2012 and yanking it into a high horse’s tail in 2016. That chronic condition that had you Googling tips for staging #candid photos on Instagram. There are many names for this affliction, but it is best known as “coolness,” and it’s arguably the single most hypocritical concept of our society. To be “cool” is to know but pretend like you don’t, to be an insider and an outsider all at once. It also means to enjoy yourself, but not too much. To be different, but not too different. It takes a lot more work to be cool than one can ever let on.
As a teenager myself, I was no more enlightened. Sure, I had some eccentricities: I was a shameless tryhard at school, and I wasn’t afraid to stand out. But if you had asked me back then who my favorite artist was, I would have lied and told you about some obscure band from the 1970s who I’d heard once or twice from my friends’ tabletop record players (which, by the way, had a sound quality about as good as a cheap cassette player). Then I would go home, wiggle out of my white Urban Outfitters crop top and stick on my K-Pop YouTube playlist. K-Pop was not “in.” In many ways, it still isn’t, even though I am convinced that not one person on this Earth can watch BTS’s music videos and insist that they aren’t cool.
Fast forward to adulthood. In 2018, I found myself standing among a crying, swaying, exhilarated crowd decked in glitter and fuzzy character headbands, belting out unabashed singing in Korean at my first BTS concert during the Love Yourself World Tour at the O2 Arena. It was everything that the “coolness” I had known resisted. I had not “grown out” of my K-Pop phase as even I predicted I would; on the contrary: I was leaning into it like never before. I couldn’t help but wonder what that meant. Was I trying to compensate for years of repressing my secret passions for delightful pop and cute boys? Had I regressed into some kind of pre-teen phase out of fear for the impending doom of adulthood? There I was, surrounded by so much of what I had forced myself to bury away as a teenager: the hyper-excitement, the color, the innocence, the fun. I may have been walking around with a flashing light stick that looked like the kind of toy that had knocked one of my teeth out as a five-year-old child, but I felt more secure in myself than ever before. After much deliberation, I realized what it was: I had finally left the Cult of Coolness.
In my usual state of imagination and over-analyzing, that “epiphany” (see endnote) got me wondering: how come a group that appears slick and trendy like BTS is so often relegated to the (highly misogynistic) ranks of “guilty pleasure”? [1] Well, one explanation is because they try hard. The very essence of “cool” is passivity, in other words, a lack of any kind of intense emotion, whether it be positive or negative. BTS do not take their jobs lightly. Their performances are blood, sweat, and tears liquified and poured out over a glitzy, sprawling stage for all the world to see. The group brandishes effort like a weapon. Though in hits like “Silver Spoon” they may sing about being sick of the adult world and its demands on young people to simply work harder to live better, which is clearly a rebellious stance in line with the ethos of “cool,” they do it with unbridled power in their movements and emotive exasperation in their voices. Clearly, this attitude doesn’t fare well with the “in” crowd.
Upon writing this piece, I am reflecting upon how the group’s dedication to their craft attracted me to them in the first place. I have always been a pusher (no, Cady Heron, not that kind of pusher) and hard work has always been something I deeply admired in others. BTS care about what they do, and they care about their message too. Phrases like “unbothered” are often thrown around in the “stan” world (see footnote) to admire someone’s blithe lack of concern, but this group remains profoundly engaged with their craft as well as the world around them. [2] We see this dedication clearly when the members cry over minor mistakes on stage in documentaries like Burn the Stage, which follow the group on their worldwide tours and expose the good, the bad, and the ugly of superstardom. [3] Some people would pass such moments off as an overreaction, but to them, it isn’t. It hurts to miss the mark when you have dedicated your entire life to your art, and these scenes show a raw vulnerability that many artists lack for fear of letting the mask of aloofness slip. Personally, this is something I consider admirable and necessary for spreading awareness and facilitating conversations surrounding male mental health, in particular.
Letting on any hint of effort from one’s meticulously exhibited laissez faire persona was traditionally a one-way ticket to Loser Town, but in the era of hyper-productivity and “the grind,” perhaps it’s not so relevant anymore. In any case, we must also consider the group’s popularity as a contributing factor. By law, anything that is mainstream popular is slapped with an embarrassing red stamp of “uncool-ness.” BTS became the first K-Pop group to truly transcend into the mainstream pop sphere. They were the first Korean group to perform at the Billboard Music Awards in 2018, and since then have ticked off an endless list of firsts all the way up to a prestigious Grammy nomination for “Best Pop Group/Duo” in 2021. If this isn’t enough evidence, they have also won several, literal “Popularity Awards” at the Asian Artist Awards. One of the ways their popular success has affected their image can be seen in the fans who decided to stop listening to the group circa 2017 when they began to make big waves in the Western music market. As an underdog group coming from an obscure entertainment company, for several years BTS were a go-to group for K-Pop listeners who wanted something that wouldn’t compromise with their aesthetic for niche entertainment. As their popularity has expanded gradually over their career, these fans were inevitably put off and latched on to other, lesser-known groups, despite the relative massive popularity of the majority of K-Pop acts. This is a recurring narrative that can be found in countless other artists who made it big from Eminem to Coldplay (see, “I prefer their old stuff” t-shirts). Still, this micro-migration is barely a scratch on the surface of BTS’s massive global following. Certainly, some of the fans who remain may well be “bandwagon stans,” or people who transiently hop onto trends because of the hype, but in my personal experience, I find this kind of fan hard to come by. As I mentioned, in many social circles, it’s still not considered “cool” to like the group, and so most of their fans tend to be genuine, which is a plus for the rest of us.
There are countless other reasons that contribute to the perceived “uncool-ness” of liking BTS, but my point in delving into this undeserved tag is not to pick these hypocrisies apart, rather, to examine what it means for us fans who consciously chose to follow the group despite such connotations. Once upon a time, the two aforementioned stigmas would have been enough for me to lock away my interest in the group, but ever since I became a fan of them in 2016, I have become more and more open about my enthusiasm. Now, when someone asks me, “who’s your favorite artist?” I reply, without hesitation, “BTS.” “Who’s that?”, this unspecified person often asks, “oh, you don’t know them? They’re a super famous group from South Korea. You should check them out,” I reply. That’s right, it doesn’t embarrass me to call them what they are: famous. Well-known, popular, mainstream, because those accolades carry weight when you’re a group from South Korea from an obscure company who managed to make it in traditionally white, English-speaking music markets like here in the UK. To me, that is cool. It is cool that they empty their hearts on every stage, that they express powerful emotions without shame, that they preach messages that may seem corny like “love yourself” because they mean something coming from a group that has felt what it is to be looked down upon. In 2013, when members Suga and RM (then known as “Rap Monster”) changed from underground rappers to “idol” singers, the criticisms they received from the rap community were lethal. They were no longer “cool” in their eyes. In 2018, when BTS released “IDOL,” the title track of their Love Yourself: Answer album (a revealing title), they joyously proclaim their many opposing appeals: “artists” or “idols,” as the lyrics go, “No matter what you call me, I don’t care, I’m proud of it, I’m free.”[4] Now that is cool.
BTS taught me a life lesson that I believe many of us, unfortunately, are yet to learn, even as grown-ups. There’s an Einstein saying I have always loved, which is “what is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right,” but I find that, quite often, what is popular is actually not so bad. It’s popular for a reason, and if it makes me “uncool” to like it, “so what?”[5] Pretending otherwise would mean sacrificing a part of myself, a part of myself that has given me some of the best experiences of my life, from attending concerts to meeting and connecting with other fans, to simply playing BTS’s songs with the car window down on a packed summer afternoon. If you know me, chances are I will have slipped in a BTS song recommendation at least once, even in the most unassuming of conversations (and academic work, for that matter). I am not ashamed of it in the slightest. From the outside, it may appear that walking around in garishly purple merchandise and “fangirling” over a boyband is a symbol of lack of maturity. In fact, to me, being a fan of BTS is evidence of my maturation. To me, being a fan of BTS is cool according to my values, and realizing this has, in no small part, made me the woman I am today.
This essay was chosen as one of the finalists of the first BTS Essay contest hosted by The BTS Effect. Find out more here.
Endnotes and References
[1] In line with the ethos of this essay, I will offer no apologies for any BTS references made. “Epiphany” is a track that aptly encapsulates my personal journey with the group, as it does for many other fans.
[2] “Stan” is a term used among online fandoms for a dedicated supporter and does not necessarily denote a negative connotation now as it did in the past, but it is often used degradingly against enthusiastic fans, particularly female music fans. It originally comes from Eminem’s song, “Stan.” See, “Stan,” Urban Dictionary, <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Stan> [accessed 10 April 2021].
[3] Park Jun-soo (dir.), Burn the Stage: The Movie, (Trafalgar Releasing: 2018, South Korea), film.
[4] Various contributors, “IDOL” Genius Lyrics, <https://genius.com/Genius-english-translations-bts-idol-english-translation-lyrics#about> [accessed 10 April 2021].
[5] Another track to check out. BTS often perform this song near the end of their concerts and it allows for a moment of climactic release and celebration of the glorious moment of being in that crowd.
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