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As Korean pop culture went increasingly mainstream in the West — remember when Korean sheet masks suddenly became ubiquitous? — everyone started to calm down. This reprieve lasted about from about 2017 to 2019. Finally, I was free to do things I wanted, like chase chickens around a French monastery and write a murder mystery involving Chartreuse.
Then came BTS.
In April 2019, the month BTS released the album “Map of the Soul: Persona,” it became the first group since the Beatles to have three No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 chart within a 12-month span. Suddenly, people wanted me to talk only about BTS. And not just BTS, but specifically how — according to some — BTS members were basically golems made by the South Korean government for the purpose of public diplomacy.
BTS has some 70 million followers on Instagram. Were these millions of people real or bots, people wanted to know. What is this mysterious group of superfans that calls itself the BTS ARMY (an acronym that may or may not stand for “Adorable Representative MC for Youth”)? Why does it have half a million dues-paying, literal-card-carrying members? Who is recruiting them?
Conspiracy theories came to a fever pitch in June 2020 after Donald Trump held a rally in Tulsa, Okla. With the aim of trolling Mr. Trump and his supporters, K-pop fans on TikTok had joined forces to hog tickets, leaving seats empty at the rally. It may have worked: A Florida politician tweeted that the incident was “foreign propaganda.” He accused Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, K-pop agents (what are those?), and BTS (which he said stood for “Big Time Socialists”) of “conspiring” to “undermine” Mr. Trump. That’s when I realized the extent of BTS’s cultural clout: You’re nobody in America until someone calls you a socialist.
It gets better. Last year, a rumor went around that the new McDonald’s BTS Meals had something to do with sex trafficking, and it’s because a chicken nugget was shaped like a video game character. That is as much information as I can bear without screaming.
The rumor I helped call into existence has given me grief. At least it is truer than it was before Dec. 13: As army conscripts, BTS members will indeed be in the service of the Korean government. And with that, I may finally find the peace I have been seeking.
Euny Hong (@euny) is the author “The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture.”
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Euny Hong
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