.jpg)
In this op-ed, writer Jiye Kim explores the question some fans are asking—is the BTS album Arirang Korean enough?—and how we think about cultural identity.
Last month, a friend of mine asked how I’d celebrated Seollal. There was an underlying assumption that I would have gone about the Lunar New Year in the traditional way: eating tteokguk (rice cake soup), playing the traditional board game yutnori, and dressing in hanbok to do sebae to my elders. I had, in fact, lain listlessly on the couch through a heat wave, contemplating whether to finally finish Stranger Things. Did this make me a bad Korean—or less of one? Would this lack of practice diminish my cultural roots to the point I had nothing to pass down to the third generation?
Such questions returned while listening to BTS’s latest album released on March 20th. It was a long-awaited comeback, having closed their first decade with the anthology album Proof three years and nine months ago before sliding into a hiatus to enlist in mandatory military service and enjoy solo activities. (So, an eternity, in fandom years.)
The album’s title, Arirang, harkens back to Korea’s most beloved folk song, with its thousands of lyrical, melodic, and contextual variations representing both the “han” (sorrow, yearning, and unresolved pain) and “heung” (spontaneous exuberance) of its people. In a monumental embellishment of the traditional theme, the septet performed their comeback stage in front of 104,000 fans on the “King’s Road” connecting Gyeongbokgung, the premier palace of the Joseon Dynasty, to its main gate Gwanghwamun, cementing their place as Korea’s pride.
And yet, Arirang contains more English than Korean. The greater number of its star producers and songwriters are international, with BTS and their in-house producer Pdogg joined by names such as Diplo, from the United States; El Guincho, from the Canary Islands; and Kevin Parker (Tame Impala) from Australia. Traditional Korean music samples are incorporated into a wild medley of genres that have emerged from elsewhere throughout the fourteen tracks: hip-hop, funk, pop-rock, R&B, and EDM. The music video for the title track, “Swim,” has its protagonist in Lilli Reinhart, an American actress of European descent. Their comeback stage was directed by the British Hamish Hamilton of Superbowl and Olympic fame, and streamed on Netflix, rather than a local streaming site.
So what does it mean for an album to be titled in such a fashion and for the first performance to hold court over the jewel of the capital city, but—dare I say it, only hold a minority of specifically Korean elements?
.jpg)
Well, to borrow the album’s byline proudly billowing over 20,000 square feet of Kyobo’s Gwanghwamun headquarters, it means that BTS is “born in Korea” and will “play for the world.” BTS is the Korean element. Yes, they’re Korean, which is why they perform the likes of “IDOL,” “Ddaeng,” and their newest addition, “Body to Body,” with its overt Korean traditional themes. But a Korean artist does not have to be limited to using their country’s traditional instruments and speaking in their own language to be a Korean artist, just as much as I do not have to eat certain foods and wear certain clothes on a certain day of the year to be Korean.
In fact, being welcomed to collaborate with the world’s best outside their own nationality and culture only uplifts the normalization of a people that were long-considered alien. It is what allows others like them to also dream of playing for the world. The boys tossed around titles such as Squid Game and K-Pop Demon Hunters in their Studio Notes as examples in the past year that have contributed to the increasing relevance of South Korea on the global stage. RM appreciates that he’s not asked anymore whether he’s from North or South Korea as a result—a sentiment that I can empathize with wholeheartedly.
Their country’s soft power is celebrated in track 3, “Aliens.” RM’s confident enough to cheekily wonder how Kim Gu (1876-1949), a revered leader of the Korean independence movement, would feel about the current state of the country now that “everybody know now where the K is.” Although they may still “look too funny” for some, witnessing them on stage would shut up any haters and accept them as their “new honey.” They would do so with eyes too big—assumedly because they’re so astonished, though it also slyly flips the narrative on the racist taunt of Asians having slanted eyes. As the rising sun of the East, BTS can now demand respect and expect others to cede to their cultural norms, such as taking off one’s shoes at the entrance of their house.
.jpg)
BTS thus reminds us through the seemingly disparate nature of the album’s title and the songs within that it is good to preserve one’s culture, but it is also good to continue breathing fresh life into it and making a lofty and revered example of it accessible and personal. To News1, a Korean media outlet, BTS’s leader RM shared that “the meaning of something being ‘Korean’ continues to be redefined and changed. It would be fun to become a part of that flow.”
A fun example of this is found in track 1, “Body to Body.” Belying its sexy-seeming title, they describe it as a 2026 version of “손에 손잡고 (Hand in Hand),” the theme song for the 1988 Summer Olympics held in Seoul. A rousing anthem to encourage “breaking down the walls that come between us,” it was sung by the South Korean band “Koreana” in both English and Korean, was produced by the Italian Giorgio Moroder, and incorporated the word “arirang” at the end of the English chorus.
The explanation given by the band for “Arirang” in the Studio Notes is that “the lyrics are quite abstract, but it’s about a longing, nostalgia—for a hometown, lover, family, or friend” and so, for them, it is about how they have missed the fans, and the times they have had together.
So, we have “Arirang”: not just the cultural giant, on the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, used as a resistance anthem against Imperial Japanese rule and other nation-making moments, but a song that is quick to be sung by any Korean to commemorate heightened feeling. As much as the album Arirang is a declaration of Korean identity for the worldwide phenomenon that is BTS, it is also more simply a culmination of all the times they’ve hung out, chatting about how much they miss the work they do and the people that they love.
I write all this whilst being sympathetic to other fans’ potential disappointment around the album. On one level, there was hope that Arirang—especially its lead single—heralded a return to BTS’s heart language of Korean after their trio of best-selling English singles of “Dynamite,” “Butter,” and “Permission to Dance,” which seemed to stray from where they could be the most authentic and masterful in their craft.
In some circles, BigHit’s marketing campaign seemed to confirm that Arirang would be a stringent promotion of traditional Korean culture: the three CD versions were titled “rooted in Korea,” “rooted in music,” and “living legend”; the group vinyl mixed the palette of each member’s version to create the pink of their national flower, the Mugunghwa; the merch was traditionally inspired, linked especially to the carvings on the Divine Bell of King Seongdeok, their National Treasure No. 29; and the animation trailer paid tribute to the seven (!) Korean men who sang “Arirang” on their arrival at Washington D.C.’s Howard University in 1896, with three of them later lending their voices to what became the earliest known audio recording of Korean music in the United States.
Furthermore, as a fanbase recognized for their sleuthing skills, primed by BigHit’s emphasis on the group’s lore, ARMY added to the suspense. There were theories that the cover would be of magpies, the symbolic bridge reuniting separated lovers of a Korean folk tale mentioned by the members themselves, and that the seven (!) stars of the Big Dipper would carry them home like in an annual Korean shamanistic ritual performed on July 7 (!).
Some of the speculation came true. Most did not. What Arirang implores us to realize is that this is the beginning of a new era, of their Chapter 2. They are not bound anymore to their past. They are simply bound, by choice, to each other and the music that they want to do.
There is more that even I hoped for, within the framework of what we got. What if in “Body to Body,” celebrating their return to the stage and fans, the sample of Arirang had been followed by their own version, leaving an indelible mark on the ever-changing nature of this centuries-old folk song? What if for track 6, “No. 29,” which begins with the resounding sound of the Divine Bell of King Seongdeok and continues until its reverberations still, they had added sounds of other historic bells from other countries, signifying how the concept of “arirang” is for all people, universal in character? I expect every listener has things they wished could have been.
But of course, Arirang is BTS’s album, not BTS featuring the disparate thoughts of every listener.
So I’d like to sit with the album a little while longer, soaking in what BTS mean to tell us of who they currently are, what excites them, and what they have longed for. I’ll play songs from this album in moments where I want to borrow their “heung” or “han.” And over time, I will play this to my children alongside other “Arirang”s, just as I pass down stories of travelling freely across the world to see BTS alongside ones of my grandparents crossing the border successfully in the Korean War, safe but ripped away from their families who they yearned for until their final breaths.
The sounds of BTS will reverberate far into time and place, as all cultural markers do. But they’re only getting started, and so are we, in this story of what it means to be Korean, a fan, a person here in this time.
