Bangtan Remixed

A Critical BTS Reader

Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader
Editors
Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Yutian Wong
Contributors
Andrea L. Acosta, Carolina Alves, Inez Anderson, Allison Anne G. Atis, Kaina “Kai” Bernal, Mutlu Binark, Jheanelle Brown, Sophia Cai, Mariam Elba, Ameena Fareeda, Rosanna Hall, Dal Yong Jin, JIN Youngsun, Despina Kakoudaki, Yuni Kartika, Alptekin Keskin, Rachel Kuo, Marci Kwon, Courtney Lazore, Regina Yung Lee, S. Heijin Lee, Wonseok Lee, Amanda Lovely, Melody Lynch-Kimery, Maria Mison, Noel Sajid I. Murad, Sara Murphy, Johnny Huy Nguyen, Karlina Octaviany, Nykeah Parham, Stefania Piccialli, Ray San Diego, Hannah Ruth L. Sison, Prerna Subramanian, Havannah Tran, UyenThi Tran Myhre, Andrew Albert Ty, Gracelynne West, Jaclyn Zhou
Publisher
Duke University Press
August 2024
Pages
432
Illustrations
48 illustrations, including 15 in color
Subjects
Popular Music, East Asian Studies, Cultural Studies
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Bangtan Remixed delves into the cultural impact of celebrated K-Pop boy band BTS, exploring their history, aesthetics, fan culture, and capitalist moment. The collection’s contributors—who include artists, scholars, journalists, activists, and fans—approach BTS through inventive and wide-ranging transnational perspectives. From tracing BTS’s hip hop genealogy to analyzing how the band’s mid-2020 album reflects the COVID-19 pandemic to demonstrating how Baroque art history influences BTS’s music videos, the contributors investigate BTS’s aesthetic heritage. They also explore the political and technological dimensions of BTS’s popularity with essays on K-Pop and BTS’s fan culture as frontiers of digital technology, the complex relationship between BTS and Blackness, the impact of anti-Asian racism on BTS’s fandom, and the challenges BTS poses to conservative norms of gender and sexuality. Bangtan Remixed shows how one band can inspire millions of fans and provide a broad range of insights into contemporary social and political life.

Praise

“Painted with both passion and erudition, Bangtan Remixed presents a complex portrait of a band that challenged and changed the rules of popular music today.” – Suk-Young Kim, author of K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance

“Equal parts fan letter, manifesto, and critical research essay, Bangtan Remixed is a work of care and collectivity. Assembled by an impressive squad of queer and feminist scholars and writers who are also unabashed ARMY, the book helps us listen and think differently about BTS by starting from the radical premise that the best music writing can (and should!) be prompted by deep feeling and pleasure. As this reader and its contributors ask us to do, to take BTS seriously is to also reckon with the afterlives of war and empire; the changing landscape of pop music; and the people and places we imagine produce musical aesthetics, business models, and knowledge that matters.” – Christine Bacareza Balance, author of Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scene in Filipino America

Chapters: “INTRO” and “OUTRO”

by Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong

Chapter Pages 1-27, 379-383

Chapter: “Empire Goes On: Circuits of Asian Care Work”

by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Chapter Pages 195-205