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Screengrab via HYBE LABELS/Youtube
During a month that has seen tensions rise between BTS’s fanbase, ARMY, and Billboard, the band’s oldest rapper, SUGA, is going after YouTube, or rather its “slaves” in a new song released under his solo moniker Agust D.
In “Haegeum,” Agust D raps about “Slaves to capitalism, slaves to money, slaves to hatred and prejudice, slaves to YouTube,” but it’s the last portion of the lyrics that has set Twitter on fire. Fans of other K-Pop groups immediately took the verse to heart, assuming Agust D was shading not just YouTube itself, but the K-Pop groups who supposedly obsess over YouTube views and records.
Blackpink, especially, is collectively considered the queen of YouTube. It holds the record for the most viewed channel for a music group, with over 30 billion views, as well as the highest number of subscribers, surpassing BTS in second, and Justin Bieber in third. Because of its status as YouTube royalty, fans of the girl group, known as BLINKs, took Agust D’s lyrics personally, further fueling the ongoing feud between BLINKs and ARMYs.
Fans of BTS were quick to point out that the lyrics, taken out of context by the popular account Pop Base, weren’t aimed at anyone in specific but rather a system we are all forced to participate in. They’re preceded by a line stating, “Maybe we do it to ourselves.”
Releasing a song with such a direct comment on YouTube’s power within our culture, placing the platform on the same level of influence as capitalism or money, is very much intentional on Agust D’s side, however. BTS has had an ongoing struggle with the music industry, particularly the one in the U.S., which it initially aimed to break into, and eventually stand shoulder to shoulder with Western artists.
Recently, fans have accused the country’s most important music chart, Billboard, of sabotage, changing its rules in ways that keep Korean artists, and especially BTS, on the outside looking in. YouTube plays and any similar analytics such as Spotify or iTunes sales play a huge part in these charts and have made the music industry a slave to numbers, instead of a celebration of artistic expression.
Fans of other groups have pointed out that BTS itself released three songs sung fully in English to cater to U.S. radios and awards like the Grammys, but the leader of the group, RM, has confessed to losing the group’s identity during these releases. In the video where the group announced it would be taking a break from releasing music under BTS to focus on solo endeavors, RM shared that “for [him], it was like the group BTS was within [his] grasp until ‘On’ and ‘Dynamite,’ but after ‘Butter’ and ‘Permission to Dance’ [he] didn’t know what kind of group [they] were anymore.”
It’s not far-fetched to believe SUGA, one of the members of BTS most heavily involved in the band’s music, shared a lot of these same feelings and was using his solo music to reflect on how trapped the band felt in recent years, instead of using his lyrics to criticize others like many were led to believe.
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