What Happened when BTS Won at the Billboard Music Awards
On May 21, Korean boy group BTS won the award for “Top Social Artist” at the Billboard Music Awards. Since then, the entire world has been quaking in what the win means for Korean music, and in the major issues in America’s modern society with Asian representation and cultural insensitivity.
May 30, 2017
BTS, short for Bangtan Sonyeondan, or when translated Bulletproof Boy Scouts, is a South Korean k-pop / k-hip hop boy group under label Big Hit Ent. Ever since September 10, 2013, these boys have ruled the charts across the world reaching number 1 on iTunes nearly every time a new album is released.
It is very uncommon for Korean music groups to be represented outside of South Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, and other close Asian countries. Before this year’s Billboard Awards, the last American music award won by a Korean music group was in 2015 when senior music group Super Junior, or “SuJu”, won two Nickelodeon Teen Choice Awards for “Choice International Artist” and “Choice Fandom.” But never before now has Korean music been represented on such a large scale as the Billboard Music Awards in America, making BTS the first in history.
For those who are invested in the kpop industry, this award means fair representation of music and culture in America that has been a very long time coming. For generations, it has been an industrial goal in South Korean entertainment to be represented as artists across the world just the same as artists of American culture are represented to a major global scale.
But of course, as with all great things, there is a negative balance. That negative is the light that has been brought to excruciatingly large lack of Asian representation, and cultural insensitivity in the US. Almost immediately after BTS’s success, twitter was littered with awfully racist and insensitive tweets about BTS, their fan base (the ARMYs), and why they don’t deserve to have won such as,
“Who are these Asians and why does it seem like the entire audience knows who they are” ~ @Nards_10
“Kpop is still irrelevant, nobody in the states is gonna listen to a Korean song just because bts won an award” ~ @blowmycherry
“Who are these Asians with the bowl cuts on the #BBMAs” ~ @briannampnelson
There was even someone who tweeted a screenshot of a note they wrote on their phone captioned, “since none of y’all wanna talk, I’ll do it for you #BBMAs”. The note read, “Ok y’all but who the —- does BTS and their Korean fans think they are. Like Ari (Arianna Grande) or Sel (Selena Gomez) deserves to win and we all know it’s not our fault that all these stupid Korean fans have nothing better to do than to vote 28,482,884 times a day. Like not trying to be racist but you don’t see any American singer or band participating in a Korean award show so like BTS please go back to Korea.” (@mokatbah on twitter)
These tweets are just a small portion of hundreds that were posted with equally, if not more, hateful messages. To have such a large number of racist, degrading, and undermining words be said by and even larger number of people truly shows how poorly the public has been exposed to culture outside of the usual American-European norms.
For years Asian representation has been a huge struggle in America and is so excruciatingly slowly being fixed, but there is still mountains of work to be done. BTS ARMYs, responded to this hate with respect, asking that those who are hating them because they aren’t American icons to give the boys a chance because they have worked hard for years to get to where they are.
It is hoped that this response has been an awakening to the media on how much representation affects our culture, and how much we the people should be more pressing on the subject. Congratulations to BTS on your success and my there be many more to come.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/05/23/bts-billboard-music-awards-2017_n_16768224.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations_received_by_Super_Junior
