The BTS Machine Lurches Back to Life

Ten years ago, outside of Korea and Japan, fans of acts like BigBang and Loona were often seen as members of a fringe subculture. Not so today, when you can turn on the radio almost anywhere in the world and hear the K-pop artist Rosé, of Blackpink, harmonizing with Bruno Mars on “Apt.,” a welcome burst of sugary fun amid all the maudlin weepers on last year’s pop charts, or Jack Harlow starting off a verse with the line “I’m on my Jung Kook,” shouting out BTS’s youngest member. There are now non-Korean groups that are explicitly modelled after K-pop acts, such as the “global girl group” Katseye, a co-production between HYBE and the American record label Geffen. BTS reflect on this shift on their new album. “Everybody know now where the K is,” raps the group’s leader, RM, on “Aliens”—a song that celebrates their anointment as international pop stars while insisting on their particularity as Korean artists. They name-check the independence movement leader Kim Gu and remind you, in one of the album’s occasional flashes of the group’s old cheeky bravado, that this is their house, and you need to leave your shoes at the door.

Throughout “Arirang,” BTS searches for their footing in a global pop landscape that they themselves, the conquering aliens, have terraformed. “Arirang” is a centuries-old Korean folk song that has, as Joshua Minsoo Kim writes, “long functioned as a polysemic anthem—of deep longing, collective resilience, even the reunification of North and South Korea.” In BTS’s hands, it acquires a more banal meaning. A sample of “Arirang” hums in the background of the album opener, “Body to Body,” a pulsating club track about the desire for skin contact on the dance floor: a vision of unity, sure, but one you can find on almost any pop record. In “BTS: The Return,” a documentary (also a Netflix original) on the group’s comeback, the members are palpably unenthusiastic about “Arirang” as a guiding theme for the album. They squirm in their boardroom seats as a rough mix of the “Body to Body” interlude plays. “It feels like I’m eating kimchi fried rice at Paris Baguette,” RM says, in a sly reference to another global Korean brand. Will the fans think the group has gone “all in on the patriotism,” wonders V, BTS’s baritone crooner? Or will they see the “Arirang” concept as a somewhat limp conceit that cannot obscure the music’s greige placelessness—which is to say, its Americanness?

“Arirang” was mostly recorded in L.A., in collaboration with star producers from the States such as Diplo, Ryan Tedder, and Mike WiLL Made-It. These outsized musical personalities often leave more distinctive fingerprints on the songs than the BTS members themselves do. “Normal,” with its patterned chord changes and pinched chorus melody, is a classic bit of Tedder pop rock—or rather, Tedder channelling the latest sounds in pop rock; there is more than a hint of Mk.gee’s downtuned guitar tones in those rumbling low chords. On “FYA,” RM and J-Hope rap over groaning metallic noises and a blown-out bass drum: the world’s most expensive-sounding JPEGMAFIA-type beat. (Indeed, JPEGMAFIA, the rapper and producer, had a hand in the song.)

BTS’s most engaging work often scans like bricolage: a song might have a rap-rock verse, a power-ballad chorus with a pounding four-on-the-floor E.D.M. beat, and a bridge with neo-soul chord flourishes. It is the ultimate post-genre music, assembled from disparate parts and then welded together, through the heat of sheer idol charisma, into a shiny pop assemblage. On “Arirang,” BTS trudges dutifully between sounds—including slick twenty-tens R. & B., antic posse raps, and moody indie-pop guitarscapes—less in a spirit of experimentation than in an effort to cover all the bases. At one point in the documentary, Suga, one of the group’s rappers, complains that there is too much English on the album. A company exec steps in to explain: all the English, a language only one BTS member speaks fluently, is necessary for the album to succeed in the “global market.” The record itself feels a bit like these boardroom scenes: the music is happening, the strategy is playing out, and the stars are more or less just sitting back and letting it all unfold.