United States

The United States occupies a pivotal place in the book’s account of K-pop and Jungkook. It is not merely an overseas market, but the cultural environment against which Korean identity, artistic influence, beauty standards, commercial ambition, and international recognition are repeatedly tested. American military presence and media helped shape modern Korean popular music; American audiences initially treated Korean acts as curiosities or fleeting novelties; and the country later became the arena in which Jungkook’s solo career demonstrated that an East Asian pop star could compete at the center of the global mainstream.

A Market Once Defined by Distance

The author distinguishes K-pop from Korean pop music in general, using the term primarily for the idol system adapted from Japan and organized around fandom culture. From the United States, she watched Korean artists make isolated advances abroad: Rain topped the reader-voted Time 100 poll in 2007, appeared on The Colbert Report, and acted in Speed Racer; Wonder Girls opened for the Jonas Brothers’ world tour in 2009; and Girls’ Generation’s “Gee” became familiar even in an American university dining hall. In 2012, “Gangnam Style” could be heard from a run-down Midtown club to a small trattoria in Rome. Its video became the first on YouTube to reach one billion views and later two billion, making it a landmark in the movement of Korean music through American-led digital platforms.

Before “Gangnam Style,” the author’s experience was that the average American had only a narrow cultural reference point for Korea, often the 1970s television series MASH, centered on American soldiers during the Korean War. Korean artists could create a burst of attention and then return to successful careers at home, largely forgotten in the West. The author initially assumed BTS would follow the same pattern, becoming another viral episode rather than a lasting institution. Its continued international presence overturned that expectation, turning the United States from a place of intermittent breakthrough into one of the main stages on which Korean pop could establish permanence.

The Historical Channel of American Influence

The connection between Korea and the United States predates the internet. American troops entered Korea during the Korean War in 1950, the United States Armed Forces established a presence there in 1957, and the American Forces Korean Network offered Korean viewers continuous access to American radio and television through Channel 2 VHF. At a time when Korean television ended its programming at a fixed hour, the network broadcast around the clock, carrying programs, films, and music that exposed Korean audiences to a wider cultural vocabulary.

This flow helped form the generation that later carried Korean culture outward. MTV reached Korea through the American Forces Korean Network after its 1981 launch, while Michael Jackson’s videos, including “Billie Jean,” “Thriller,” and “Smooth Criminal,” influenced Park Jin-young, the founder of JYP Entertainment. That influence continued through later generations: Jungkook’s performance language in “Standing Next to You” explicitly drew on Michael Jackson. American culture therefore appears in the book neither as a simple foreign import nor as a one-way force. It was absorbed, reworked through Korean training and performance systems, and eventually returned to American audiences in a new form.

The book also links the history of Korean hip hop to the political and cultural conditions of South Korea. After the assassination of Park Chung Hee in 1979, censorship measures were relaxed, allowing new forms of expression to emerge. Seo Taiji and Boys used protest music to challenge the education system and government authority; fan pressure helped bring about the repeal of prior censorship by the Public Performance Ethics Committee. The later work of H.O.T. and Shinhwa continued this critical inheritance through songs about school bullying, greed, and social hierarchy.

From Korean Outsider to American Pop Star

BTS entered an industry dominated by SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment, companies with greater financial resources, established talent pools, brand relationships, sponsorships, and access to television and advertising. Big Hit Entertainment, founded by Bang Si-hyuk in 2005 after his work as a composer at JYP Entertainment, was much younger and less powerful. BTS therefore had to establish itself while surrounded by Seoul’s entrenched cultural and commercial elites. Its rise carried the logic of an underdog narrative into the American market, where the group initially had to overcome the assumption that K-pop idols were carefully manufactured curiosities rather than artists with durable appeal.

The author’s first meeting with BTS in Los Angeles in November 2017 marks a change in that perception. She had spent nearly a year persuading Vogue to interview the group at a time when mainstream American media still viewed idols as a passing phenomenon. BTS seemed different because of its more natural visuals, messages that connected with listeners, and organic social-media presence on YouTube and Twitter. At the center was Jungkook, whose combination of performance ability and accessible public image suggested that he could become an American-facing it boy without ceasing to belong to the group that formed him.

The United States also exposed the racial assumptions that Korean stars had to confront. Jungkook’s Calvin Klein campaign placed an Asian man in a highly visible American fashion setting, including a 23-meter billboard on Houston Street in Manhattan. The book contrasts his reception with the long history of emasculating stereotypes imposed on Asian men in the United States. The intense reactions to a short backstage clip of Jungkook without a shirt, as well as the astonishment expressed by Charlie Puth and Brian Puspos when watching him perform, demonstrate how his appeal disrupted expectations about Asian masculinity. His polished Korean beauty styling—makeup, carefully shaped brows, immaculate skin, jewelry, tattoos, and a body maintained under demanding industry standards—was not presented as a marginal variation on Western celebrity culture, but as a competing standard with its own power.

Commercial Infrastructure and “Seven”

By the time BTS entered its Chapter 2 period, the United States had become central to the organization of Jungkook’s solo career. HYBE faced the approaching interruption created by South Korean military service, which could remove male celebrities from the entertainment industry for roughly eighteen months during their peak years. Jungkook had enormous potential in the Western market, but the company could not simply compel him to pursue solo work. His individual career therefore emerged through a negotiation between his attachment to BTS, HYBE’s commercial ambitions, and the American infrastructure assembled around him.

Andrew Watt and Cirkut completed “Seven,” a song originally written for Justin Bieber and influenced by the contemporary sound of UK garage. Scooter Braun, who had sold Ithaca Holdings to HYBE in 2021 and become chief executive of HYBE America, heard the track and connected it with Jungkook. Braun took responsibility for the artist-and-repertoire side of the solo project, a form of career mediation more common in the American industry than in K-pop’s traditionally direct company management. The arrangement allowed Jungkook to enter the American pop system through producers, managers, choreographers, directors, and promotional networks already operating within it.

Jungkook treated the recording process as a test rather than a formality. He spent hours revising lyrics with Watt, experimenting with melodic ornamentation and softer high notes, and repeating lines until the sound was right. The session strengthened his confidence that he could perform effectively in unfamiliar styles and conditions. His stated ambition extended beyond a single crossover: he wanted to move between K-pop and pop, master multiple genres, and perhaps later attempt Latin music, opera, musicals, and classical singing.

The results made the United States a measurable site of transformation. “Seven” debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and Global 200, accumulated nearly sixteen million Spotify streams, and became the first K-pop work to top Spotify’s United States chart as well as the first release by a Korean solo artist to debut at number one on the global ranking. It also reached number three on the UK Singles Chart, became the fastest song in Spotify history to reach one billion streams, and ranked as the platform’s fourth-most-streamed song of 2023. HYBE supported the release through both its Korean headquarters and American division, while Brian Puspos joined as a supporting dancer and Bradley & Pablo directed the video with Han So-hee as co-star.

Recognition, Tourism, and Lasting Exchange

The United States is also where Korean cultural influence becomes visible as an economic and symbolic force. BTS generated an estimated $32.6 billion contribution to the South Korean economy over a decade, according to the Hyundai Research Institute, and the group’s international presence brought roughly 800,000 foreign tourists to South Korea each year. Although those effects are national, the American market helped make them possible by converting Korean music into global attention, brand value, and sustained fandom. Contracts with Samsung, Louis Vuitton, and the NBA further demonstrate how musical visibility moved into commercial and institutional capital.

Jungkook’s November 2023 surprise concert at the TSX stage in Times Square condensed this exchange into a single American scene. The day before the performance, he visited a Barnes & Noble in New York, held an iced coffee, and looked with genuine amazement at a display of Golden. He wondered whether he would buy another singer’s album if he were not a singer himself and whose fan he might be. The next day, after about twelve hours of sleep and a burrito bowl in his hotel room, he prepared to perform behind the Times Square billboard, aware that the audience would include people who were not part of ARMY. The location therefore carried an unusual pressure: it was not only a gathering of existing supporters, but a test before strangers in one of the most visible public spaces in the United States.

The book ultimately presents the American breakthrough as the result of timing, preparation, structural change, and fan labor rather than luck alone. Earlier artists such as Rain faced entrenched prejudice that restricted nonwhite performers to secondary roles in American society. A more open generation of listeners made an East Asian pop-star dream less impossible, but Jungkook still had to exploit the opportunity through disciplined performance, adaptability, and a capacity to remain connected to Korean idol culture while entering American pop’s commercial center. The United States thus functions as both historical source and proving ground: a culture that helped shape K-pop, a market that once minimized it, and a stage on which Jungkook helped make its global permanence difficult to deny.