BTS will not compete in the 69th Grammy Awards, the South Korean group’s members said on Wednesday, in an apparent protest against what fans have long criticized as the American music industry’s slighting of K-pop.
“We have decided not to submit an entry for Grammy consideration this year. We hope music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided into region or language,” the group’s seven members said in a statement shared across their social media profiles.
The band, which released a long-awaited comeback album in March, appeared to reference a new, exclusively Asian category added last month to the Grammys, which will be held in February. The Best Asian Pop Music Performance category, as it is called, is one of five new categories and “recognizes artistic excellence in Asian pop music performances originating from or widely recognized within Asian markets, including but not limited to K-pop, J-pop and C-pop, with meaningful use of one or more Asian languages,” according to an announcement by the Recording Academy, which hands out the awards.
The additions also include a Best Latin Song category for songs in which Spanish makes up at least 51 percent of the lyrics.
While the Grammys chief executive, Harvey Mason Jr., has framed the new categories as a way to boost inclusivity, the addition of the Asian category was criticized by some fans as a racialized barrier between Western pop and genres unfairly perceived as ethnic niches despite their global success, such as K-pop. The most prestigious Grammy Award categories are the six that comprise the general field, including Song of the Year and Album of the Year.
Asked for comment, Hybe, BTS’s label, said it had nothing to add to the band’s announcement.
The debate over how race and language color Western attitudes toward K-pop has figured especially prominently in BTS’s success arc. Despite the group’s immense commercial success — and multiple Grammy nominations — the band has never been able to secure a win. At the same time, some fans have expressed disappointment in the band’s liberal use of English lyrics, which they have seen as pandering to Western tastes at the expense of the band’s Korean identity.
The band itself has struggled to balance these two competing ambitions. In 2022, at a concert held after the group’s hit song “Butter” failed to bring home any wins at that year’s Grammys, held in Las Vegas, the group’s leader RM, whose real name is Kim Nam-joon, brushed off the loss, which many fans saw as a snub.
“We didn’t come to Vegas for the Grammys,” he said. “The record, the title, the accomplishments, the trophies, they’re really important, but that wasn’t the first thing, the first reason why we started all these things, right?”
During production for their latest album, “Arirang” — which includes songs that were seen as strong contenders at the upcoming Grammys — the group’s members pushed back against pressure from producers to include more English-language lyrics for greater global appeal, according to a recent Netflix documentary about the process. The album, in the end, was released with far more English than Korean.