Revisiting The Number Ones “Dynamite”

I’ve been waiting for Tom Breihan to hit “Dynamite” for his Number Ones column since I read his chapter on the song in his (otherwise excellent) book. And it’s finally arrived! You can read it for yourself on the Stereogum website if the approximately one million ads on the page don’t freeze your browser.

My response to that original chapter is here if you’d like the long version but the TL;DR of my critique of the chapter is that while Breihan was on point about what “Dynamite” represented on the American charts, 1) he didn’t understand the history and mechanics of K-Pop and 2) he didn’t understand BTS’s place in the genre. And that is completely understandable for an American music writer who needs to rely on secondary sources for his material because the "official" secondary sources available in English for both K-Pop and BTS were and remain uniformly terrible.

Breihan has had a couple of years to refine his understanding of the genre and BTS but the updated column on “Dynamite” is still a very mixed bag. Some points he sees more clearly than in his book but on other topics he remains flat out wrong or gets twisted around in his thinking.

Basically, what “Dynamite” represents is how a company can push an off-the shelf, totally soulless, corporate slop product to number one hit using the mobilized and motivated labor of thousands of unpaid fans across the globe. 

How and why these fans are mobilized and motivated by the industry is the wheelhouse of my good friend Monia over at Exiled Fan but I think it’s important to keep in mind that “fan power” is a myth. None of this was self-motivated by the fans. 

As a creature of the early 2000s posting culture, my instinct is to quote block text this sucker but I’ll try to keep things moving.

Breihan starts with a doozy of a paragraph that combines two key ideas, neither of which is tied to reality [emphasis added].

When the South Korean boy band BTS became the most globally popular K-pop group in the late ’10s, they kept their Korean identity fully intact. BTS are a product of South Korea’s carefully controlled, vaguely militaristic K-pop star system, but they went against that system’s conventional wisdom in a few ways. They were first conceived as a rap group, though that didn’t last. They sang about love and partying but also, in the vaguest possible way, about generational discontent. They didn’t come from one of the mega-successful major Korean entertainment agencies that controlled most of the K-pop landscape. Where other K-pop groups shot for global domination by recruiting members from different countries, all seven of the adorable young men in BTS were Korean. Most significantly, they didn’t sing in English. This was important to them.

The bolded passage is why I keep returning again and again to the history of BTS. This manufactured press release version of their story keeps popping up in English-language music journalism and it drives me crazy. BTS were a totally fine, mid-tier boy group who were ABLE TO BE SOLD TO NON-K-POP MEDIA AS UNIQUE because non-K-Pop media had no points of comparison and didn’t realize that BTS were a simulacrum of a K-Pop group whose entire career was built on doing concepts already popularized by other groups. 

As I’ve laid out, in detail, time and again, BTS were firmly in line with every bit of conventional wisdom in the industry. They broke no boundaries, political, artistic, or otherwise.

It is true that they came from a midsize company and not one of “The Big 3” but that midsize company had plenty of industry connections and, in fact, had been able to push through some terrible business decisions that would have tanked genuinely small companies that didn’t have those industry connections and financial backing. And BTS had a lot of industry support when they debuted--to the point where they were given Rookie of the Year at MMA in 2013 over other arguably more talented acts like Boys Republic and ToppDogg.

In other words, their company was not a maverick outsider and this is not a rags to riches story by any stretch of the imagination.

Breihan’s other theme points to an on-going dispute among K-Pop fans that it’s likely he encountered while researching for this column: Did BTS “sell out” their Korean identity by going full English for “Dynamite”? 

What Breihan is doing here is attempting to seed the fan conflict by assigning outsized importance of BTS’s “Korean identity” to BTS up at the top. The problem is that there’s no evidence that this nationalist identity (in the way it’s framed in English language fan debates in 2025) meant anything in particular to BTS when they were starting out. It’s true that BigHit (now Hybe) didn’t take on any foreign members when BTS was formed but there’s absolutely no evidence that it was out of a desire to keep a Korean identity “fully intact,” as he implies. To the contrary, in BTS’s early era, there was a push to tie the group to an American identity, specifically a Black American identity. 

In 2014, they were even sent to Los Angeles to film a reality show about how much they are tied to the TRUE HIP-HOP culture of America by taking lessons from guys like Warren G and Coolio. 

The fact that they didn’t have any foreign members or even any Korean-diaspora members may have been an attempt at a nationalist flex as Breihan implies but if that’s the case, why the heavy and early push towards Black American culture instead of having the group be involved with domestic Korean musicians and rappers? Isn’t it at least equally as likely that BigHit simply didn’t have the resources at that time to scout foreign talent? Especially since Hybe has certainly had no problem using foreign idols in the years since.

And I’ll throw in here that Bang Si-Hyuk, founder of BigHit (now Hybe) has been pushing for “K-Pop without the K” since the very beginning of the company in 2005-06. 

Moving on [emphasis added]: 

It took a long time for South Korea’s distinctive take on pop music to find any real commercial purchase in the US, and the conventional wisdom was that Americans wouldn’t get excited about any music that wasn’t in English. If you look back at the history of this column, you will see that the conventional wisdom has mostly been correct. We’ll occasionally get a big novelty hit in a different language, but that’s been pretty rare over the decades. There’s more Spanish-language music on the charts these days, but a lot more Americans speak Spanish than Korean. When K-pop groups did attempt to launch commercial campaigns in the US, they generally recorded English-language songs and collaborated with American stars. But that’s mostly not what BTS did.

And here we have the conflation of “pop music” with “idol music” that is inevitable when non-experts write on Asian pop music. While the two categories once overlapped completely, these days the sliver of the Venn diagram is a lot smaller. And I’d also argue that the Korean appetite for “pop music” as we think of it is a lot smaller than their appetite for sentimental ballads, rock, and rap. With K-Pop, specifically, the stuff that gets exported globally these days, often has no commercial purchase in Korea whatsoever. 

There’s a bigger conversation to be had about localization of songs to different markets—including the American one—but I’ll just say that I don’t think there’s a problem with Americans, by and large, wanting to understand the lyrics of the song they are listening to on the radio. There’s a reason for localization and this is it. I’m not a lyrics person so it doesn’t bother me but I also recognize that I’m not in the majority with that.

Anyways, Breihan then goes through the appearance of BTS “out of nowhere” and into the offices of Billboard in 2017 and then into the American charts in 2018-2019 with dreck like “Fake Love” and “Mic Drop” that might have been dreck but—in Breihan’s telling—at least weren’t in English [emphasis added]: 

In 2019, RM told Time, “We don’t want to change our identity or our genuineness to get the #1. Like, if we suddenly sing in full English and change these other things, then that’s not BTS.”

As that quote implies, the people involved with BTS knew that they probably could reach #1 in the US by recording an English-language single. They just didn’t want to do it. It didn’t fit their identity. Without singing in English, BTS were able to fill American stadiums and to break into the top 10. But then the pandemic hit. BTS had to cancel their touring plans, and they didn’t want their momentum to slow. Suddenly, the idea of an English-language song didn’t seem so bad. So they did it. They caved. BTS didn’t just sing a song in English. They sang a song in the most meaningless word-salad version of English that anyone has ever encountered. “Disco overload, I’m into that, I’m good to go.” “I got the medicine, so you should keep your eyes on the ball.” “Cup of milk, let’s rock ‘n’ roll.” “Ding-dong, call me on my phone/ Iced tea and a game of ping pong.” That kind of English.

Ah, the cup of milk, let’s rock and roll. 

While I appreciate the sell out narrative that Breihan is trying to spin here, the fight over English lyrics is nothing more than fanwank. BTS fans loved the idea that their faves hadn’t “sold out” by doing localized material for the American market (unlike those other groups) and BTS marketing played into that (see: RM’s quote) until financial necessity made it necessary to do localized material and then suddenly, English lyrics were fine with BTS fans.

I mean, Rap Monster had no problems with working in English back when he was trying to break into the market in 2017, when he was collabing with Wale.

The English lyrics in “Dynamite” don’t mean anything—literally or metatextually.

But, again, even if Breihan doesn’t quite understand how BTS got there, his read of the meaning of “Dynamite” is essentially correct [emphasis added]:

Thanks to their craven and obvious attempt to finally dominate the American market, BTS landed atop the Hot 100 for what would turn out to be the first of many times. They achieved things that nobody from their country had ever done, racking up all kinds of chart-history firsts and demonstrating just how globally inclined the American charts had become. From a ’90s alt-rock standpoint, their song “Dynamite” is the baldest sellout move imaginable, but that kind of thinking was never part of the BTS equation anyway. For BTS fans, the ultimate validation was to conquer commercially, and BTS did that. They accomplished it in part through their fanbase’s reliance on chart-manipulation tactics. But “Dynamite,” more than some of BTS’ later chart hits, actually served as a real hit in the way that I understand the term. It became the kind of song that you might hear at Target or at a middle-school dance. In its way, that’s more of an achievement than the song’s actual chart numbers.

And that is pure truth.

Breihan goes on to say that he chose “Dynamite” for the book because he thought the K-Pop takeover was on the horizon but that maybe he read the tea leaves wrong and should have chosen “Old Town Road” instead as an early signal of the TikTok-driven hit. What followed after “Dynamite” wasn’t more K-Pop songs you’d hear at a middle-school dance but more K-Pop songs driven to number one by fan powered streaming and buying that nobody outside of the fandom would ever hear—at least until “APT.” (The K-Pop Demon Hunters takeover is more equivalent to the “Let it Go” era and is only tangentially related to K-Pop.)

Breihan blames the fallow period following the initial run of number ones post “Dynamite” on BTS being forced into a hiatus for military service but the timing doesn’t quite line up. Jin enlisted in December 2022 but they’d already started to fall off before then. If “Dynamite” was eventually pushed to the Target easy listening playlist, tracks that followed like “Yet to Come” were quickly vanished after fans got them to number one. “My Universe,” their unlistenable “collaboration” with Coldplay is probably the last song to get the Target treatment and that was released in September 2021—over a year before Jin enlisted. It’s almost as if “Dynamite” and the media bubble that followed were just that, an artificially inflated bubble.

Then comes the bottle recap of “K-Pop” which… okay. This is a mess.

By most accounts, the first-ever K-pop single was Seo Taiji & The Boys’ 1992 song “I Know,” a giant South Korean hit in 1992. Those guys basically did a New Kids On The Block thing, with cheap-sounding keyboards and metal guitars and Public Enemy samples and ultra-primitive rapping. A few years later, that group was torn apart by public backlash when they criticized the government on one song. 

Sigh. They did not do a “New Kids on the Block” thing, which would have involved Maurice Starr signing on a tween old heartthrob as frontman. As I’ve covered many times on the podcast, Seo Taiji was extremely innovative in mixing then-new techniques like sampling in with heavy metal to create a new sound for the Korean teen market. What makes people retroactively assign “I Know” the label of “first K-Pop song” is the teen hysteria it unleashed. The performance and form of Seo Taiji and Boys is rooted in the scene that popped up around Club Midnight in Seoul but Seo Taiji himself was a bedroom knob twiddler. He was not an idol in the way we understand it today. 

Yang Hyun-suk, one of the Boys, founded YG Entertainment, which became one of the big K-pop record labels and talent agencies. YG and the other two big firms, SM and JYP, adapted the system behind Japanese idol music in the late ’90s. They would find cute and talented kids, organize them into groups, and then send them to boot camp for years. Those kids would live together in dorms. They would take lessons in singing, dancing, different languages, and presenting themselves on TV — a hyper-charged version of the old Motown charm-school model. Naturally, those kids were often abused and financially exploited to all hell. When they were ready, these new groups would make their hyped-up TV debuts, and they would perform songs that the labels generated for them.

Again, sigh. It’s so much more complicated than this. SM Entertainment’s first group, H.O.T., is generally considered the first modern idol group in Korea and they were molded on Japan’s SMAP but they weren’t just performing songs the labels generated for them. H.O.T. was coming up with their own material. Same goes for early SM Entertainment groups like Shinhwa. JYP Entertainment was the home of Rain, who was a massive R&B solo talent and the face of global K-Pop in the pre-“Gangnam Style” 2000s. YG Entertainment specialized in artists, not idols, until 2006 with the debut of BigBang, who were explicitly marketed as “self-producing.” 

In the ’00s, some K-pop groups started getting really, really popular all over Asia, and some of them started to gain a foothold in the rest of the world. Those efforts were often supported by the South Korean government, which pushed the country’s popular culture everywhere. 

Actually, Korean music started gaining popularity around Asia in the 1990s, especially in China and Taiwan. H.O.T. (mentioned above) even performed in China in February 2000. 

K-pop was especially big in Japan, and K-pop groups would often record Japanese-language versions of their music.

I have written so much about this. “K-Pop was especially big in Japan” is hand waving a lot of nuance.  K-Pop has occasionally been trendy in Japan but it’s not “big” like Michael Jackson was big. K-Pop acts first broke in Japan by singing Japanese pop songs. BOA and TVXQ both established themselves in the domestic Japanese market doing Japanese pop songs, not Japanese-language versions of K-Pop songs. In the first big crossover era of circa 2010 Girls Pop (KARA, Girls Generation), there was a mix of Japanese language versions on K-Pop songs and J-Pop songs that would get Korean language versions. BigBang’s “Gara Gara Go” is a prime example of a J-Pop song that eventually got a Korean version. 

Breihan gets back on more solid footing with the K-Pop inroads into the American market, including “Gangnam Style” which he says would likely have been a number one hit if YouTube views had been counted back then. [emphasis added]

“Gangnam Style” was a novelty hit, and it didn’t necessarily say much about the American commercial prospects of K-pop. But then BTS happened. BTS basically started in 2010. Bang Si-hyuk was a staff songwriter at JYP, one of the big K-pop labels, but he left in 2005 to start his own optimistically named company BigHit Entertainment. BigHit later became Hybe, which is now a global entertainment powerhouse, largely thanks to what Bang did with BTS. Bang first had the idea for BTS when he met and signed a 15-year-old kid who called himself Rap Monster. (He’s just RM now, which is too bad. I really like the name “Rap Monster.”) Bang wanted to build a rap group around RM, but he quickly decided to change course and turn it into a regular idol group instead. Still, Bang wanted BTS to be different.

Okay, no. BTS was not built to be different. BTS came about because Bang decided BigHit needed to get in on this “hip hop” thing and BigHit staff writer PDogg’s buddy Sleepy told him that popular underground rapper Zico had a buddy who was available. The original line-up of BTS was Rap Monster, Supreme Boi (who became RM’s ghost writer and producer for BTS), and the late rapper Iron (who… you can read about him). After Bang decided to switch concepts from hip hop to idol, both Supreme Boi and Iron dropped out leaving Rap Monster, because he had no other options available to him after failing his auditions at hip hop labels. The new BTS was firmly modeled on BigBang, Block B, and BAP, all groups who were extremely popular in 2013 when BTS debuted.

And here comes what I found to be the most telling line [emphasis added]: 

But when I say all this, I’m just going on what I’ve read. I don’t know the language or most of the cultural context, and almost every BTS single just sounds to me like a sleepier, more sentimental take on regular K-pop. They’ve got the big hooks, the rapped verses, and the constant switch-ups between which of the seven members is doing the lead vocal. They have never been my favorite K-pop group. I generally don’t get them. That’s fine. I don’t have to get everything.

In other words, Breihan’s ears are telling him one thing while the BTS press releases and fan hagiography say another. Trust your ears, Tom. Trust your ears. That’s because, as I said above, BTS were not built to be different—and they aren’t different.

In terms of presentation, they pretty much came off like any other male K-pop idol group, albeit with maybe a little less focus on frantic energy and a little more on moody sincerity. All seven of them had distinct looks, which allowed fans to pick favorites, in classic boy-band fashion. They did elaborate dance routines and had lots of special effects in their videos. They followed the playbook, but they resonated so much more than all their contemporaries. 

Why they resonated more in the American market than their contemporaries at the time is left unexplored but it is an interesting question. My personal theory is that in 2016-2017, BTS began to be marketed directly to American boy band fans instead of to fans in the existing K-Pop market. In that way, BTS was able to roll up lost Directioners, among others, who brought their charting expertise to the fandom. Part of the fan narrative that takes hold in 2016-2017 is that BTS were “different” and “not like other girls.” While earlier foreign ARMYS tended to also be fans of multiple K-Pop groups, as almost all foreign K-Pop fans are, by necessity, the new batch coming in with the ex-Directioners, were isolationist. 

The irony of the BTS story is that the pivot to the American pop charts signaled the beginning of the end for K-Pop in Korea. With some rare exceptions--NewJeans, whose deliberate tanking by Hybe is another story—K-Pop has lost a lot of traction in Asia. The top song right now on the Korean YouTube songs chart is by Japanese artist Yonezu Kenshi. The Circle Chart has ex-K-pop idol WOODZ  topping the first half of 2025.

While there are K-Pop acts doing well in Korea right now, there is little overlap with the post-“Dynamite” global market.