COVID-19 could not stop the global rise of K-pop
The moment was undeniable. BTS were the first group since the Beatles to land three number one albums on the Billboard 200 chart in a single calendar year. Then Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite took the Cannes Film Festival by storm (before winning the Best Picture Award at the Oscars in 2020). Retailers such as Target were selling Korean masks alongside copies of People reviewed for years. And a tantalizing episode of the Netflix docuseries Chef’s table transformed a 60-year-old Buddhist monk named Jeong Kwan into South Korea’s most unlikely star.
A country of 51 million people had somehow caught the global spotlight, dictating what people around the world played in their headphones and watched on their screens. (If you were among the 296.5 million people worldwide who bought a Samsung phone in 2019, they built this screen.)
The media had long recognized this trend, dubbed hallyu, or the Korean wave. And there was proof that hallyu had done for South Korean tourism what the Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand. According to a study by the Hyundai Research Institute, 10.41 million people visited South Korea in 2017. Of these, 7.6% cited BTS as the main reason.
But as the pandemic has closed borders and canceled events, tourism fell to its lowest level in 32 years of only 2.5 million people. Now even 2021 seems like a wash. South Korea may be cautiously opening up to international visitors (with a mandatory 14-day quarantine for most tourists, at press time), but K-pop groups like MonstaX and BTS have even delayed their local broadcasts.
As I sat in my bed in June to watch BTS’s tight choreography with over a million fans from over 190 countries, I realized that a more surprising story had emerged: Even COVID-19 doesn’t. couldn’t stop K-pop.
Catch the Korean wave
During quarantine, the Korean wave became a tsunami, especially in the West. After George Floyd’s death in May 2020, BTS and its management donated $ 1 million (£ 724,000) to the Black Lives Matter movement, only to see the band’s legion of fans, known as ARMY or Adorable Representative MC for Youth, match that feat in just 25 hours. Kathryn Lofton, professor at Yale University, has compared BTS to a “religious project”, due to the dedication of the community.
A year later, McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast food chain, partnered with the biggest group on the planet for the limited-edition BTS Meal. This was the restaurant’s very first global celebrity collaboration, available in 49 markets including Colombia and Lithuania, and it was almost too successful.
Meanwhile, these concerts online? BTS made it into a series, raising so much money that Rolling stone magazine said they had changed the music industry forever: “BTS just proved that paid live streaming is here to stay.”
During the lockdown, Netflix created a documentary about all-girl group Blackpink, chronicling the group’s rise from obscurity to a 2019 performance at Coachella in front of more than 100,000 fans. I didn’t have to set an alarm for that one; it was streaming at my leisure.
And I was the perfect audience. Shortly before COVID-19 hit, I had flown to Seoul, where I took a tourist K-pop dance class, learning the steps of Blackpink’s “Ddu-Du Ddu-Du”, with pistols. The $ 50 (£ 35) course, held at a glass studio called Fanxy, was advertised on TripAdvisor and Airbnb. (If you want to try it for yourself, they rotated in line during the pandemic.) Maybe one day I’ll find the courage to post the clip we shot in class.