Cultural appropriation

Cultural appropriation is presented as a central tension in K-pop’s effort to build itself from hip hop while reaching a global audience. The book does not treat every cultural exchange as theft; instead, it distinguishes admiration and participation from the extraction of visual or verbal signs whose social histories are ignored. BTS’s trajectory gives the concept a concrete shape: the group’s early hip-hop imagery could reproduce stereotypes, yet its later willingness to listen, acknowledge error, and revise its understanding suggests that cultural movement can become more responsible when it is accompanied by historical knowledge and accountability.

Hip Hop Between Influence and Detachment

K-pop’s relationship with hip hop began through sustained contact with American culture rather than through a simple, recent act of imitation. After the presence of United States forces in South Korea, American music and television circulated widely, and the American Forces Korean Network gave Korean audiences access to programming around the clock. In the 1980s, music videos by Michael Jackson influenced artists including Park Jin-young, who later transmitted elements of that influence into the Korean idol industry. Hip hop therefore became part of K-pop’s formative cultural environment, mixed with electronic music, pop, and dance rather than merely imported as a finished product.

The book also locates Korean hip hop within South Korea’s own history of subordination and resistance. Seo Taiji and Boys used protest songs to challenge the educational system and political authority; fan pressure helped overturn censorship of performance lyrics. Later artists continued to use hip hop and idol music to criticize bullying, greed, and social hierarchy. This history complicates any account that imagines Korean artists as passive consumers of American style. At the same time, the book insists that a history of influence does not automatically produce understanding. When the K-pop industry moved away from the original club culture associated with Moon Night, hip hop increasingly became an accessory: rap passages, weapons, chains, and other signs could be retained after their social and political context had been stripped away.

BTS’s Early Contradictions

BTS entered an industry in which hip hop was often treated as a visual package, and the group’s debut exposed the danger of that practice. In We Are Bulletproof Pt. 2, RM appeared with hair styled to evoke an afro and held a pimp cane with a dollar-sign handle; gunfire and gangsta-rap associations surrounded the group’s references to being bulletproof. The same video also included a break-dance segment performed by J-Hope, Jimin, and Jungkook, linking the group to a foundational form of hip-hop movement. The scene therefore contains both sincere engagement and imagery that reduces Black cultural forms to recognizable props.

RM’s language created an even more direct problem. As a teenager who had rarely left South Korea, he was expected to guide BTS through a culture he admired but did not yet understand fully. He adopted Black hairstyles and affected African American English, once describing his individual talent in racialized terms on radio. In 2013, while introducing BTS’s covers of Shinhwa songs on Show Champion, he repeated an anti-Black slur included in the original lyrics. The book treats these incidents not as harmless stylistic experimentation but as evidence of how enthusiasm can coexist with ignorance, especially when an industry supplies images without supplying the histories and responsibilities attached to them.

This problem was structural as well as individual. The Korean music industry could regard hip hop as a detached aesthetic, while artists and companies pursuing international markets remained insufficiently connected to the racial histories that made particular hairstyles, gestures, and words significant. The book describes later cases in which K-pop performers used racial insults, appeared in blackface, or wore dreadlocks while performing reggae-influenced music, sometimes followed by apologies for actions they had not understood. Cultural appropriation thus emerges as a failure of context: the borrowed form is visible, but the people, struggles, and meanings behind it disappear.

Learning Through Confrontation

BTS’s attempt to learn was itself imperfect. A year after its debut, the group traveled to Los Angeles for BTS American Hustle Life, where it worked with hip-hop mentors including Coolio, Tony Jones, and Warren G. The program used a staged kidnapping and linked Black men with crime and violence, reproducing the very stereotypes the members needed to unlearn. Its framing and editing made Korean ignorance about race visible rather than resolving it. Nevertheless, the experience behind the scenes exposed the members to a more complex account of hip hop, and the book identifies the Los Angeles period as a shock that helped change the group’s direction.

RM later described Warren G’s most important lesson as the openness of hip hop to anyone who genuinely loved it, regardless of race or nationality. That openness did not erase the obligation to understand the culture. In a 2015 interview, RM rejected the idea that drug use and gun violence represented original hip hop, and he revisited his earlier use of the phrase Westside till I die. He said that he had been completely wrong, had not understood its meaning, and had shown disrespect toward West Coast hip-hop artists. His later formulation is deliberately stronger than a casual apology: he called the incident an error, not merely a slip, and said there were no excuses.

The distinction matters because the book presents cultural exchange as a process that requires historical listening. BTS’s early desire for authenticity could not be fulfilled simply by declaring a love of hip hop or reproducing its surface vocabulary. Authenticity had to involve recognizing the difference between being welcomed into a musical form and claiming experiences one had not lived. The group’s development therefore shifts the question from whether Koreans may participate in hip hop to how participation can avoid turning another community’s history into costume.

Fans, Responsibility, and Unequal Visibility

BTS’s direct relationship with its fans made this debate harder to ignore. Unlike many earlier K-pop groups, the members controlled their Twitter account and communicated more immediately with international audiences. ARMY responses to racism and cultural appropriation reached the group directly, and RM, as its English-speaking spokesperson, was positioned to encounter those arguments repeatedly. The book describes him reflecting after 2016 that actions, music, and words could hurt people even without harmful intent. He concluded that he needed to take responsibility, reconsider his thinking when it was wrong, and listen to what others said.

This exchange also operates within a larger racialized media environment. Western commentary had long described K-pop idols as manufactured, robotic, and culturally interchangeable, sometimes treating their Asian appearance as proof that they were an impersonal mass rather than individual artists. The book connects that response to the perpetual foreigner syndrome, in which Asian people are marked as outsiders regardless of where they were born. BTS’s challenge to that stereotype does not cancel the reality of appropriation; it shows instead that different forms of racialization can coexist. Korean artists may be othered by Western audiences while also borrowing from Black culture without adequate understanding.

Jungkook’s image further demonstrates how global circulation can redistribute cultural power without making it equal. His styling, dance, and later international visibility helped challenge the desexualized representation of Asian men in Western media. Yet the book’s account of K-pop’s polished visual system also shows how bodies, music, and cultural signs are packaged for rapid recognition and consumption. A global campaign, a song, a dance vocabulary, and a recognizable racial image can all become forms of marketable capital. The success of BTS, whose activities were estimated to contribute $32.6 billion to South Korea’s economy and attract roughly 800,000 foreign tourists annually, makes the stakes of that conversion especially clear: culture is not only exchanged, but also monetized.

Translation Rather Than Innocent Borrowing

The concept finally belongs to the book’s broader argument about translation across national, racial, and commercial systems. BTS began with an ambition to speak about the ordinary pressures of Korean youth, while its music drew on a form rooted in African American experience and then traveled through Korean institutions toward international markets. Later songs made that movement even more explicit. Dynamite was an entirely English-language disco, funk, and pop song that presented an exuberant synthesis of American imagery, while Seven was shaped through a transnational production network involving Andrew Watt, Cirkut, Scooter Braun, and a United Kingdom garage influence before becoming a global hit for Jungkook.

These examples do not carry the same ethical problem as the group’s early racialized styling, but they reveal the same system of circulation: sounds and images move across borders, are recoded by companies, and acquire new meanings for different audiences. The book’s criticism is directed at the fantasy that such movement is frictionless. When cultural forms are treated as an inventory of attractive styles, historical memory disappears; when artists accept criticism and learn from the communities whose culture they invoke, exchange can become more dialogic.

Cultural appropriation therefore marks both a failure and a possible turning point. BTS’s early errors show how quickly admiration can become stereotype when context is absent. RM’s later admissions, the group’s exposure to criticism, and its attention to international fans provide a model of revision rather than innocence. The decisive issue is not whether cultural boundaries can remain sealed, but whether those who cross them recognize the unequal histories, labor, and vulnerability that make the crossing possible.