If you’re supposed to be in touch with pop culture as part of your professional life, there’s not much that can sharpen the lines of your ignorance like having teenage kids. Of course, not everyone can know or like everything, especially not in this era of unimaginable abundance. But my kids reaching the age of proper fandom has really brought me up on how I’ve lazily treated huge sections of the global mainstream as homogenous blocs, when musically and culturally they are really anything but. This has particularly been the case with the arena rave sounds of American EDM, and with the factory-farmed, globe-conquering K-pop sounds of South Korea.
It’s all too easy to do. As with EDM, K-pop can seem, especially to ageing ears and eyes, like a never-ending barrage of surface level flash and gloss, everything turned up to 11 all the time, every colour saturated, every movement choreographed with inhuman precision, its figureheads so styled and slathered in makeup as to seem like characters in the East Asian cartoons and comic books that teens also hoover up. But looked at through the prism of an enthusiastic 13-year-old’s descriptions, it starts to look a bit more complex.
The scandalous stories of the talent hunts and gruelling boot camps, the various spats and cancellations, the representations of shifting social attitudes in a very unfamiliar world all give it a soap opera addictiveness. Also musically, a lot comes into relief – discovering the higher energy songs of girl groups like LOONA and Red Velvet makes a lot of recent US / Euro “hyperpop” exemplified by Charli XCX make more sense. And more recent adoptions of the real club grooves of proper house and UK garage, and high fashion, high art visuals, notably by remarkable “genderless” group XLOV really help to place the sound and style of the brilliant UK megastar PinkPantheress.
That said, lots of it is still baffling, and the biggest stars of all BTS most of all. They’re one of the biggest acts in the world, with many billions of streams to their names, and obviously they have earned it with their impossibly drilled live shows and relentless hustle and vastly expensive productions. But on their comeback album after a six-year break, it’s as hard to find a comprehensible musical personality as ever. The backing music is truly extraordinary: versions of trap beats and moody rock built up with war-machine precision and impact that make Lady Gaga sound like The Andrews Sisters. But the aggressive stringing together of strained yearning, domineering chants and slick but ultimately excruciating rap gives nothing to get hold of. It's like an LLM doing sexy talk. There’s a lot that’s fascinating in isolation here, but even after repeat plays, as a whole it leaves me wondering if in some cases ignorance isn’t bliss.
Watch an advert for BTS's own-brand light stick:
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