A pedra de Sísifo

A pedra de Sísifo is the book’s recurring metaphor for BTS’s improbable ascent and Jungkook’s continuing work within it. Its decisive meaning lies in the image of a stone that repeatedly threatens to roll back down the mountain: international recognition does not abolish prejudice, competition, national obligation, or the labor of remaining visible. Instead, every summit creates a higher one.

An Image of Repeated Ascent

The expression first describes the narrator’s changing expectations of BTS. Before the group’s international success, Western recognition of Korean pop often appeared temporary: Rain reached the top of the 2007 Time 100 reader poll, the Wonder Girls opened for the Jonas Brothers’ 2009 world tour, and Psy’s "Gangnam Style" became the first YouTube video to reach one billion and then two billion views. Each breakthrough seemed to create a brief disturbance before the artist returned to a successful career at home and faded from Western attention. The narrator therefore assumed that BTS would become another short-lived viral phenomenon, another instance of fifteen minutes of fame.

That expectation changes into astonishment as BTS repeatedly survives the presumed end of its story. Whenever the narrator thinks the group has reached the end of the line and that the stone of Sisyphus is about to roll down the mountain, BTS finds a way to push it upward again. Ten years after its debut, the group’s international presence still surprises her. The metaphor thus carries a double movement: it acknowledges the punishing repetition of the climb while also turning recurrence into evidence of endurance. The stone does not remain at the summit, but neither does BTS abandon it.

The Industry’s Mountain

The mountain is partly the highly competitive social and cultural order surrounding K-pop. In Seoul, daily life is presented as a series of contests for parking spaces, café tables, university places, and desirable employment. Status is quickly read through imported cars, elite universities, luxury logos, and Fortune Global 500 employers. That wider elitism shaped the K-pop industry, which at the time of BTS’s debut was dominated by SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment. These companies possessed financial resources, extensive talent pools, and established relationships with brands, sponsors, media outlets, and broadcasters.

Bang Si-hyuk founded Big Hit Entertainment in 2005 after working as a successful composer at JYP Entertainment, but Big Hit was younger and less powerful than the established Big Three. BTS therefore had to establish itself while surrounded by Seoul’s entrenched elites. The Sisyphus image gives this struggle a material shape: the group was not merely trying to become famous, but attempting to move a heavy cultural object through an industry whose advantages had already been concentrated elsewhere. Its later success does not erase the steepness of the original incline.

The Burden of Translation

The metaphor also measures the difficulty of crossing cultural and racial boundaries. A New Yorker article about K-pop described idols as manufactured, highly stylized figures and declared that a male K-pop group could not succeed in the United States. The article’s assumptions reflected a broader difficulty in translating K-pop for Western audiences, where polished production, synchronized dance, elaborate styling, and extensive teams were treated as proof that idols were less authentic than American pop stars.

The book connects that judgment to the "perpetual foreigner" syndrome: the racialized assumption that people of Asian appearance remain foreign regardless of where they were born. Applied to K-pop, the stereotype makes idols appear interchangeable, robotic, and unable to possess the individual personality that Western audiences are said to value. BTS confronted this barrier by centering ordinary experiences shared by people of the same age rather than presenting the members as unreachable ideal figures. Its stated mission—to speak about the joys and difficulties of contemporary life as friends and peers—offered a way to push against the image of idols as manufactured dreams. The climb therefore involved not only gaining listeners, but persuading them to recognize individuality where established stereotypes saw uniformity.

From Group Triumph to Solo Pressure

The metaphor remains active as Jungkook moves from collective success toward solo achievement. His visibility became unusually broad: he was mentioned in a 2021 episode of The Simpsons, ranked first on Billboard’s inaugural K-pop Artist 100 list in 2024, appeared with Charlie Puth on "Left and Right," was invited by FIFA to sing "Dreamers" at the 2022 Qatar World Cup opening ceremony, and became Calvin Klein’s global ambassador. His Calvin Klein campaign produced an estimated $13.4 million in media impact value within forty-eight hours, while an image of him later appeared on a 23-meter billboard on Houston Street in Manhattan.

These accomplishments look like summits, but the solo career converts them into new obligations. During the recording of "Seven (feat. Latto)," Jungkook spent hours revising verses with Andrew Watt, testing melodic ornamentation and softer approaches to high notes, and repeating lines until the sound was right. The resulting single debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and Global 200, accumulated nearly 16 million Spotify streams, became the first K-pop work to top Spotify’s United States charts and the first release by a Korean solo artist to debut at number one on the global ranking, and reached third place on the United Kingdom Singles Chart. It also became the fastest song in Spotify history to reach one billion streams. The scale of the achievement does not end the labor; it demonstrates how much labor is required to reach the next height.

Jungkook’s ambitions extend beyond one genre or one market. After the session, he described a desire to move between K-pop and pop, master every genre, and perhaps later attempt Latin music, opera, musicals, and classical singing. The stone becomes an image of aspiration as well as burden. The next climb is not imposed only from outside; it is also generated by a performer whose sense of possibility keeps expanding after each success.

Collective Weight and Public Consequence

The stone is never carried by Jungkook alone. BTS’s rise produced an estimated $32.6 billion contribution to South Korea’s economy, drew roughly 800,000 foreign tourists annually who spent an estimated five trillion won, and prompted the Korean postal service to issue commemorative stamps in 2023, selling about 1.5 million units. The group also became a national representative through campaigns with UNICEF, its Love Myself initiative, a $1 million donation to the Black Lives Matter movement, and an appearance at the United Nations General Assembly where the members were appointed special presidential envoys for future generations and culture and performed "Permission to Dance."

That national role added weight to every ascent. BTS was expected to embody South Korea abroad, turning popular entertainment into soft power. Yet international exposure also broadened the members’ perspectives; V described Jungkook as the most open-minded of them all. The group’s public position required it to negotiate the demands of being both artist and idol, both individual performer and national symbol. The stone therefore represents a collective burden: success carries the expectations of fans, institutions, the state, and an international public that may still interpret Asian performers through inherited stereotypes.

The same logic shaped the question of military service. South Korean men are generally expected to share the national burden, and exemptions for celebrated athletes or artists can provoke suspicion that public figures have received special treatment. Against this background, BTS’s image as a national source of pride made exemption politically and symbolically dangerous. The possibility of relief from one obligation could have damaged the group’s claim to represent a shared national experience. The climb continues because each privilege creates a new test of legitimacy.

The Stone and the Refusal to Change

The book’s most important revision of the Sisyphus image is that repeated struggle does not harden Jungkook into someone unrecognizable. In the 2016 "hamburger case," he brought hamburgers and soft drinks for a Flower Crew team member, only for Jo Se-ho to reject them as seeming like leftovers. The moment was later stripped of context and transformed into an image of Jungkook being publicly disrespected. After online outrage, Jo issued a formal apology. When BTS appeared on You Quiz on the Block in 2021 with Jo as a co-host, Jungkook embraced him warmly, making the encounter appear to close a painful cycle.

The gesture mattered because it linked triumph to continuity rather than revenge. By then, BTS had achieved extraordinary economic and cultural influence, yet Jungkook’s response suggested that success had not erased the gentleness associated with the boy who had started from the bottom. He remained, in the book’s formulation, a beloved underdog. At his final solo showcase for Golden, he became emotional while thanking ARMY and resisted a fan’s suggestion that he would have succeeded at anything. He said that he was not such an extraordinary person, but that meeting the fans had enabled him to become one. The summit is therefore attributed not to solitary greatness, but to a relationship that transformed effort into possibility.

The book finally places the metaphor within a broader historical change. Rain’s earlier Western career had been constrained by American prejudice that relegated nonwhite people to secondary roles, whereas a more open generation made an East Asian pop star’s dream less impossible. Jungkook’s 2023 Times Square surprise concert embodies that altered landscape: the day before the performance, he visited a Barnes & Noble holding an iced coffee and stared with genuine wonder at a Golden display; on the day itself, he slept for roughly twelve hours, ate a burrito bowl in his hotel room, and felt pressure because the TSX stage stood behind a central Times Square billboard and would attract people beyond ARMY. Even at a public height that once seemed unimaginable, he remained attentive to the next performance and to the strangers who might be watching. A pedra de Sísifo names that condition precisely: the achievement is real, the labor is renewed, and the refusal to stop pushing becomes the lasting form of the victory.