On Drinking milk with King Kong
Hello internet! It’s been a minute since I’ve written anything new but I have been paying attention. So let’s light it up like dynamite and dive in!
BTS’s English language song “Dynamite” has just gotten a number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Written by Jonas Brothers songwriters David Stewart and Jess Agombar (“What a Man Gotta Do”), this is an alleged hit and “song of the summer” that has played a handful of times during the middle of the night on my local Top 40 radio station the week it was released and has since vanished. The song (as of this blog post) has not made an appearance on Ryan Seacrest’s Top 40 pop chart and is currently tumbling down the American Spotify charts where at last count it had about one third the streams of number one song “WAP”, which has been camped out on top for weeks. So who is listening to “Dynamite”? And why are BTS fans acting so smug about it?
There’s a few things going on here that we need to unpack. Let’s take a look at the Billboard Hot 100 first. I got absolutely blasted on Twitter (when I could have a Twitter) for saying this about Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve but it remains true: Billboard Hot 100--just like Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve--does not have the meaning that it did even 10 years ago, let alone 57 years ago which is when Sakamoto Kyu’s “Sukiyaki” topped the chart. The reason for this is simple: we no longer have a dominant, shared mainstream culture in America. Institutions like the Billboard Hot 100 are a vestige of the days when topping the Billboard chart meant that a song was playing everywhere from shopping malls to car stereos to a 45” single played over and over again in a teen’s bedroom. The American public listened, in large part, because they had no other options. It was the radio or nothing. What was available at the local record store or nothing.
And these hits were hits. In 1996, the number one Billboard song of the year was the “Macarena”, an earwormy Spanish language song that camped out at number one on the Hot 100 for a solid three months and (I can personally attest to this) was utterly inescapable. Everybody and their grandmother knew the “Macarena” even if you didn’t want to. But as difficult as it was to have a mainstream song in 1996, it’s next to impossible to achieve this feat in 2020. There’s a reason that vintage groups like the Beatles still regularly rank in on best selling albums lists: the number of people who like the Beatles hasn’t changed, the market for newer artists has collapsed. There’s a disconnect between the culture industry and the American public. Dissatisfied with what’s on offer, we’ve turned away and splintered into numerous smaller subcultures (of which Kpop is one) as the major corporations try to lure us back in with nostalgia and novelty. Whether it’s sampling of known and popular songs of years past or, like last year’s hit “Old Town Road”, bringing in Billy Ray Cyrus (singer of 1992 Billboard Hot 100 #4 certified Platinum seller “Achy Breaky Heart”) among others to goose its numbers. Pop music today is its own subculture tracked by the redditors of r/Popheads and rarely reaching outside the bubble. The recent 2020 VMAs, on which BTS performed their new song “Dynamite”, had 6.4 million viewers down 5% from 2019 and down even more from the almost 12 million the awards show had in 2010. This decline coming in the middle of a pandemic where most of us have been cooped up at home with little to do other than consume media. To put that in perspective there are over 320 million people in the United States. Is something consumed by such a small fraction of the public really mainstream?
At some point in the past--I lean towards the CD album sales bubble of the 1990s--the contract was broken between American consumers and the music business. The Napster fiasco was merely the cherry on top of a shit sundae, confirming the sorry status of the industry that had been a long time coming: having felt ripped off for a while, Americans no longer considered music worth paying for. And to a large extent that is the reality we’ve been dealing with ever since.
The Billboard Hot 100, trying to remain on top of popular trends, has changed its formula for calculating what’s hot numerous times over the years, which is another reason you can’t compare the chart of today to the charts of the past. For example, until 2013 YouTube streams were not taken into consideration for the Hot 100, meaning that the literal one billion streams earned by Psy’s “Gangnam Style” as the video went viral in the summer and fall of 2012, were not factored into the song’s Billboard Hot 100 chart position where it peaked at number two.
And then there are the “album equivalent units” which Billboard only started tracking at the end of 2014 in an attempt to track popularity via streaming and digital downloads as traditional album sales cratered. But is the creation of a single “album equivalent unit” achieved through 1600 streams coming from both passive playlist streaming funded by the label and stans spending hours a day strategically mass streaming to game the system really the same thing as a single fan buying a single Janet Jackson LP in 1989? Can we really say these two things are equivalent?
I’m going to go ahead and say, “no.”
So, where did this “hit” song “Dynamite” come from?
For one thing, it came on the back of BTS fans each purchasing dozens of mp3s each of both the original song and of its numerous remixes in an attempt to game the Billboard algorithm. Given instruction from big fan accounts (only four of each item per transaction) and funded by opaque donation accounts as well as their own money, these fans managed to purchase a not insignificant 300,000 units--a number representing something far closer to 3,000 fans purchasing 100 units each than 300,000 general listeners and an incredible show of devotion.
But the sad truth is that American BTS fans still do not understand that they are not the target audience for any of this because let’s get real: “Dynamite” is a mediocre song at best. The genre is an even more lifeless and generic “Uptown Funk” (itself already a slick nostalgia suck) overlaid with BTS’s lifeless and overprocessed vocal track and accompanied by a video set in a washed out Lisa Frank “Los Angeles” where milk and donuts take the place of gin and juice.
This is not a song meant to set the American market on fire. It’s not even a song meant to set the American Kpop market on fire--something “Jopping” did quite handily last year. It was a song meant to get a Billboard Hot 100 in order to boost BigHit’s bona fides in the Korean market because questions are being asked about the true value of the company in the face of the looming IPO. The actual hit status of the song in America doesn’t matter because the audience are the investors in Seoul, not the listeners of American Top 40 radio.
And it really is a shame that it had to happen like this. I’ve been painted as a BTS anti for pointing out the hollowness of these American “successes” but the truth is that I think BTS and their fans deserve better than paper awards. They’ve all worked hard over the years and it really does break my heart that the reward for everything is a fake hit coming from a JoBros knockoff song. Both “Gangnam Style” and “Sukiyaki” were genuine global hits that came from songs written for domestic audiences that transcended borders and won the ears of listeners around the world with their artistry. Comparing the soggy “Dynamite” to either of these songs is a disgrace. I actually do believe BTS has (or rather had) the power to generate an actual global hit rooted in the Korean market but “Dynamite” is not it.