BTS on the Road by Seok-Kyeong Hong (review)

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Reviewed by:

• BTS on the Road by Seok-Kyeong Hong
• Ria Chae

BTS on the Road by Seok-Kyeong Hong. Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2023. 200 pp.

It was time to restart the class after a break, but many desks remained empty. Instead of the sound of students moving their chairs, I heard someone jump in the hallway just outside the classroom door. When I opened it, I saw the students taking my course in the international summer school in Seoul, including both Koreans and non-Koreans, doing what looked like an unusual exercise. It turned out to be a rehearsal of the “horse dance” they planned to perform at a party after the completion ceremony. A few days later, I flew to New York and, listening to the local radio, counted “Gangnam Style” playing at least four times during my thirty-minute drive from the airport. I could not believe I was halfway across the globe from Korea. Fast-forward five years, and a conference brought me to Helsinki. As I passed an ordinary-looking clothing store, I heard through its open windows an instrumental version of a very familiar-sounding song. The realization of what it was made me stop in disbelief: “Fire.”

Despite the exponential growth of Hallyu for two decades since the late 1990s, both the success of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” in 2012 and BTS’ breakthrough in North America in 2017 took media, scholars, and the public by surprise, each time sparking debate on whether this act was an outlier or representative of Hallyu. BTS on the Road by Seok-Kyeong Hong, a professor of communication at Seoul National University, addresses this question regarding BTS, showing the ways in which the band conforms to and diverges from Hallyu. As such, the book is not only about BTS but also K-pop—and at times Hallyu—at large. It is based on extensive field research, online and offline, and interviews carried out by Hong for three years prior to the publication of the original Korean version in 2020. To answer the book’s overarching question—“How did BTS transcend K-pop and move people all over the world?” (3)—Hong well reflects the interdisciplinarity of Hallyu/K-pop studies by delving into a different field or discipline in each chapter, while also demonstrating an encyclopedic knowledge and minute understanding of the multiple facets of Hallyu befitting a leading scholar of Hallyu studies in Korea.

Chapter 1, for example, which introduces the reader to the production and distribution systems and fandom culture of K-pop, includes a discussion of hybridity and counter-hegemonic flows. Hong first explains the deep influence of Korean media culture on the formation of BTS, role of K-pop fandom culture on social media in the rise of the band’s popularity, and importance of distribution strategy, mastered by the Korean entertainment industry, for maintaining [End Page 99] the band’s appeal to fans and commercial success. She then defines K-pop as a hybrid that “did not stop at imitating imported music styles but created a highly Korean hybrid through the unique combination of its constituent parts and the regionalism of production environments” (49). Hence, BTS serves as an example of Hallyu’s hybridity: two imports, the Japanese Idol system and American hiphop, are mixed in Korea with the resulting product expressing local experiences. Yet, Hong argues, BTS has outstripped K-pop conventions by becoming the first band to achieve phenomenal success and change the conversation in the West. She thus posits that the hybrid (BTS) has “arrived at influencing the West, the origin of its influence, in a reversal of relationship” (49); in other words, the band acts as a counterflow against North American popular culture.¹

In chapter 2, Hong highlights transmediality as another distinguishing feature of BTS within K-pop. Her expertise as a communication scholar is particularly noticeable in this chapter as she effectively explains the rather intricate concept of transmedia and jargon such as “nodes” and “rabbit holes.” She points out three layers of BTS transmedia: the fiction of the Bangtan Universe, reality-based narrative of the development of the band’s solidarity, and individual stories...