In the 2014 book K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea, John Lie tells the story of Yi Chong-Suk, performer of the titular song of the 1926 silent film Arirang. An enduring Korean folk song, "Arirang" has roots tracing back hundreds of years, but it wasn't canonized as a resistance anthem until the film's premiere, where Yi performed it despite attempted censorship from Japanese authorities, prompting the audience to join in. The song itself wasn't explicitly patriotic, but dropped into the right context, it became a symbol of national pride and independence. Likewise, Yi became a minor figure in the broader cultural movement around Japanese occupation, but the singer can also be seen as a bellwether for how genre distinctions in Korean music were already blurring. Her repertoire extended well beyond folk, into forms building out the popular soundscape of the time: children's songs like "Oppa Saenggak" (Thinking of Older Brother) and a rendition of the 1927 hit "Nakhwa Yusa" (Fallen Flowers, Flowing Water), held to be the first Korean record. "Contemporary classifications cannot do justice to the universe of popular music in colonial Korea," Lie writes. In the years since, there have been dozens of versions of "Arirang," in both Korea and Japan, across genres. And it appears once more in the opening minutes of an album of the same name by the K-pop boy band BTS.
In many ways, one can consider BTS — Jin, Suga, j-hope, RM, Jimin, V and Jung Kook — the ultimate realization of a genreless, referential and yet homegrown popular music of Korea, as well as of national pride made manifest. Like "Arirang," the group's songs are inherently changed by the sociopolitical context of its paradigm-shifting breakthrough, and seem to embody the many dreams of the Korean heart. Arirang, a reunion album bringing the group back together after a forced four-year break, is a reassertion of its significance to an industry that has only grown in its absence. The album has been pitched by Big Hit, the group's label, as "a deeply reflective body of work that explores BTS' identity and roots." Considered on their own, the songs don't make that roots-tracing explicit — but they do mirror the evolution of "Arirang," simultaneously carrying on, shifting and updating a cultural legacy. To that end, the reunion is already a massive success. The most resonant thing the group could do in this moment is return, unified and bilingual, with the program not merely intact amid Western sway, but more sharply defined.
The last BTS album, BE, was released in the dog days of the pandemic, and very much reflected the tension and restlessness of imposed isolation. It was the group's shortest album by far, at turns muted and fidgety but generally more reined in; even the hopeful sparkler "Dynamite" is considerably tamer than earlier singles like the prickly "MIC Drop" or the gospel-fied march "ON." That proved a refreshing turn for a group then buckling creatively under the increased pressure of performing for many different markets — including as the load-bearing plank of K-pop's American expansion. After three singles topped the Hot 100 in 2021, the group announced a "period of rest" that would coincide with solo pursuits. 2022 brought a more extended hiatus, as each member was conscripted into the Korean military at intervals through June 2025. The group hit pause at the peak of its powers commercially, but not before setting off a chain reaction that would open the door for K-pop's Western awakening.
In case you missed the Grammys and the Oscars and also don't have a Netflix subscription, that work is just about wrapped up, and BTS returns to a landscape remade by its influence. As with Blackpink, its ascendancy has brought an acceptance into the pop establishment that once felt elusive, but BTS is subtler about its integration into the Western machine than its girl-group counterpart; ditto for the maintenance of its internal components following a temporary separation. Recorded last summer in Los Angeles, Arirang is executive produced by megamix producer Diplo, with contributions from longtime group executor Pdogg, trap modernist Mike WiLL Made-It and a host of niche beat-makers from across the realms of global music, most notably El Guincho and Flume. The supporting cast feels representative of a wide-eyed, kid-in-a-candy-store enthusiasm, both in its newfound sense of access and its more curious creative ambitions: stylistically fluent rap oddballs like JPEGMAFIA and Teezo Touchdown, Tame Impala psych guru Kevin Parker and omnivorous alt-pop artist Artemas, OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder and 3OH!3's Sean Foreman. The road map seems haphazard, but taken together, it paints a pretty clear picture of what the ultimate K-pop boy band sees as its signature in this, its triumphant homecoming.
All idol groups are shapeshifters, but the defining units are able to create a mold. Arirang makes a compelling case for BTS having a construct all its own: a moody, pretty-boy trap-pop yearning for a pop-star ego death that is perpetually out of reach — the buildup for which requires breaking into a melodramatic ballad from time to time as a release. "SWIM" is the axis upon which the album turns, balancing halves that teeter from one side of that spectrum to the other, chest-beating then introspective. "Name a place that I could breathe on this map, world," RM chirps, both a flex and an SOS.
Diplo makes sense as the point person for such an endeavor, as someone who palled around with SoundCloud's emo rap vanguard, headlined Tomorrowland and worked on hyper-aware pop for Robyn and M.I.A. (He also is no stranger to K-pop, having contributed to recent Blackpink songs and co-produced a single for BigBang's G-Dragon with Baauer in 2013.) Notably, there is nothing on the album that sounds as retro as "Butter" or as bubblegum as "Boy with Luv," both of which remain modes in the BTS arsenal but aren't singular to its operation. Given all the talk of "identity" as part of this comeback effort, it's hard not to read that choice as a statement of purpose. Sometimes the Western influence is still pretty baldly on the surface — "Normal" sounds like a Backstreet Boys song wearing a Dijon song as a hat — but much of the album revels in BTS' impact, and the expanded taste and sphere of Korean music generally. "One More Night" and "Please" settle into familiar sound beds that have flourished in K-R&B and K-rap scenes the past decade. "Body to Body," the song that incorporates "Arirang," thinks of touring as a kind of first contact: "B-T-uh, from everywhere to Korea," Suga raps, before j-hope later adds, "You could see about it or you read about it."
Perhaps that's why songs like "2.0" and "they don't know 'bout us" are emphatic about BTS being an indisputable formula-breaking force. The members were among the first in the K-pop industry to claim authorship of their songs, and there is clear world-building occurring, which, through trial and error, has now manifested a system confident in its self-reliance. Both the industrial rap of "FYA" and the grungy pop of "Like Animals" feel like quintessential BTS songs despite the variance in method. American ears have grown much more attuned to brassy K-pop presentation, which feels like even greater evidence of the group's effect on pop culture. BTS was always on the more streamlined side of things, and the album does oversell its sense of individuality, but this is certainly a band in command of its output. That is at least in part because of leader and rapper RM, the only member credited as a writer on nearly every song, who stands as an anchor for the band's aesthetic principles.
BTS is a hip-hop group swaddled in a pop group, and Arirang never loses sight of the hierarchical framework on which its songs are designed. That isn't to say the rappers are more essential to the BTS craft than the singers, but that the function (and, correspondingly, the innovation) of its model is in the particular way the music is arranged. A lot of K-pop is rap-forward, but this group is rap-foundational: Where other idols treat rapping as merely another role-playing exercise in the never-ending performance matrix, a thing that is done to keep a frenzied joyride from stalling out, these guys know ball. (J. Cole is j-hope's rap GOAT. RM collaborated with Little Simz while off the BTS clock. Suga's primary inspiration for picking up music was the pioneering Korean alt-rap crew Epik High.) The structural pillars of the BTS sound are tumbling, high-strung rhymes that slingshot the vocalists into bridges and hooks — just look at "Dope" or "Idol" or "Fake Love." You can add the new "Hooligan" and "Aliens" to that list, songs that are supercharged by bristly flows. But BTS really distinguishes itself in the more understated transitions. No K-pop group has ever been better about smuggling rap verses into various pop configurations. Take "Please" as an example, its baton passes made seamless by soft-pedaled singsong verses. It can make the staged cues of idol rotation seem not just natural but serendipitous.
In 2016, BTS led a medley performance of "Arirang" for M Countdown's stage at the KCON convention in Paris, featuring all of the other idols on the bill. Before the other groups come out, it's just them doing their thing, and the juxtaposition of zippy choreography and wistful national folk song is made all the more fascinating by the incessant cheering of a largely white crowd. The band was many years away from its apex, and yet the pull is apparent: You can see, in that moment, the promise of BTS to act as a bridge — between the past and present, and, as Suga put it, "from everywhere to Korea." Arirang is a full-circle moment that feels like a fulfillment of that promise. As the band regroups, it has never felt more connected, inwardly or to its calling.
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