The Korean supergroup BTS has pulled its blockbuster album “Arirang” from Grammy Awards consideration, in protest of the new Asian Pop Music Performance category. The move is a remarkable rebuke to the Grammys from a band that has long aimed for American mainstream stardom. In a statement, the group said: “We hope music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided into region or language.”
BTS and many of its fans see the new category as an attempt by the Recording Academy to keep the growing power and popularity of K-pop groups from overwhelming the prestige categories — for the Record, Album, Song of the Year and multiple Pop Performance awards — and they reject the academy’s claims that the new award is simply a means to acknowledge the growth of popular music from South Korea, China, Japan and Southeast Asia. BTS rightfully refused to risk being pigeonholed.
The Recording Academy has been cooking up new categories for years. It started out with 28 in 1959. We’re up to 100 now, a proliferation that mirrors the contours of the music business: R&B, Latin, gospel, folk, New Age, and so on. Some reflect true genres and discrete markets. But most are the malignant offspring of the record business’s historical segregation, which divided Black and white artists into separate genres and markets, even if they were playing sonically similar music.
To this day, label executives, awards committees and radio programmers find ways to push aside artists whose racial or ethnic provenance challenges the industry’s preconceived ideas about the boundaries of a particular genre.
You can see this most brazenly when new Grammy Awards categories emerge. Months after Beyoncé became the first Black woman to win Best Country Album, the academy split that award in two — Traditional and Contemporary. After a song from “K-Pop Demon Hunters” won big this year, Asian Pop was created. When Grammy voters or music programmers are primed to think of a genre as niche, that can adversely affect an artist’s potential mainstream success. For awards, bookings, endorsements, streams, airplay and promotional resources, Pop remains king.
Which prompts a bigger question: What is pop, anyway? Its name implies an aggregation of what’s popular; but industry gatekeepers continually make judgments about what they promote, declaring what pop is and isn’t. And for the ways people treat pop as if it’s an actual genre, no one can seem to articulate any enduring stylistic markers.
The Recording Academy’s award rules are specific with genres like Dance (“rhythmic momentum, dynamic buildups and breakdowns”). The only qualifier for the Pop Performance category? The song must be “pop.” The fundamental absurdity in the music business, the term that causes all the problems and then plays innocent bystander, is “pop” itself.
Listen to the top five songs on the Billboard Hot 100 right now and ask yourself what genres they actually are. With all the Ella Langley, Taylor Swift and Stella Lefty songs, we’ve got different shades of country and country rock. A couple of years back, it was Sabrina Carpenter’s take on early ’80s post-disco funk. A few years before that, trap and reggaeton topped the chart. The point: All popular music comes from somewhere. All styles have parentage and places of origin. Once, each of these genres was not considered pop, and then at some point became so.
American pop was shaped by exclusion. Black artists suffered the most, barred from radio station playlists and venues where white counterparts who played their styles and songs enjoyed access. Benny Goodman and Elvis Presley never had to ask to be “crossed over” from jazz or R&B; pop was assumed to be their home base. Yet through the years, Black artists, even undeniable pop stars, were often denied the pop designation. In 1980, Michael Jackson was shut out of the biggest categories at the Grammys for his best-selling album “Off The Wall.”
By many accounts, MTV refused to play videos from his follow-up, “Thriller” (which would become the best-selling album at the time), until the president of CBS Records threatened to yank all of the company’s artists from the channel. Goodman and Presley never had to ask to be called the “Kings” of Swing or Rock & Roll. But Jackson is said to have proclaimed himself the “King of Pop.” He knew the truth: Pop wasn’t going to hand it to him.
Pop music in America is an extension of whiteness and works just like it — it has no defined borders; it expands and contracts to maintain its dominion; it tells us that nothing too ethnic can have universal appeal. In particular, pop extracts Black music’s style from its cultural context while denying its original creators equitable access to the music business’s most profitable arenas.
With its own take on R&B, dance, hip-hop and rock, K-pop is one of many genres that run on Black music — even if BTS and other groups have at times acknowledged the influence of Black artists. Though BTS’s protest can be read as a challenge to the centrality of American pop (and its racism), a real accounting must acknowledge that many Asian artists didn’t challenge it until segregation came for them, too.
The largest Asian entertainment companies, with lots of new acts to promote, may not want to fight that system on principle. But BTS, possibly the biggest act in the world since Jackson, is perhaps the only Korean recording act with the freedom and leverage to spark a reckoning. So will this be a moment where artists and entrepreneurs conspire to force the major institutions of this business to break its addiction to racism dressed up as demography?
Every artist, whether BTS or Bad Bunny, deserves access to the largest market without being filtered out or qualified. The solution isn’t about getting rid of special markets or categories. Folk, for example, is a real thing, and if it benefits folk to have discrete awards and institutions, great. It’s pop that needs to be examined, because pop is the biggest market and yet admission to it still seems largely subjective.
Artists and their managers should scrutinize record companies for the way they exclude artists from their pop departments. Labels and artists should challenge playlisters at streaming services and radio station programmers about how they wield the term “pop” for some but not for others. The Recording Academy should stop inventing new award categories, especially ones based on ethnicity, nationality or language, when people aren’t asking for them — every division separates its occupants from the larger, more profitable market. And if those Pop Performance awards or pop playlists cannot be defined musically or aesthetically, perhaps they shouldn’t exist.
Pop is a term that has become as insipid as that other vile word the tech world uses: content. That vapidity has an effect on the music. Artists who aspire only to be “pop,” encouraged to dress themselves in universality, contented to be content, are aspiring to a kind of emptiness. It’s why much of today’s pop sounds like bad decisions.
Dan Charnas is the author of “Dilla Time” and a professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University.
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