K-pop artist G-Dragon performs on stage in a red top, black pants and red crown.

G-Dragon is just the latest example of K-pop’s Nazi problem

As the father of Jewish children, Andy Crump writes why artists using Nazi iconography as a fashion statement should be held accountable

G-Dragon performs on stage.

G-Dragon

Words by Andy Crump

I can handle Elon Musk’s global shadow advocacy of neo-Nazi groups as one of his tools for “regime change.” For one, he’s an idiot with no meaningful achievements of his own, other than mass acquisition of founder titles. For another, Germany is thoroughly aware that there’s a Fourth Reich slowly metastasizing across civilized society, and no country is better prepared to sound that alarm; white supremacist dweebs loitering on the scant few digital forums that will have them might look like they’ve got their groove back, but history dictates that when push comes to shove, the world knows how to deal with Nazis.

What the world seems confounded by, on the other hand, and what I contrastingly can’t handle, are K-pop stars adopting Nazi iconography as a fashion statement.

Lately, that star is G-Dragon, whose latest album, February’s Übermensch—his first release since his 2017 EP Kwon Ji Yong and his first full-on studio album since 2013’s Coup d’Etat—debuted at number three on the Billboard World Albums chart, as well as number 10 on the Billboard Top Album Sales chart. The Nazi referentialism is baked into the album’s title, the German word for “overman” or “superman,” and the philosophical building block for Adolf Hitler’s concept of an Aryan master race. It is likewise enshrined in the design of the poster announcing his 2025 world tour, currently underway through Aug. 10, right down to the use of an umlaut in “toür,” which, is not specifically a nod to the Nazi party—it’s a harmless diacritical mark in German and Hungarian—but nonetheless facilitates that association (and changes the pronunciation of “tour” to something like “twoer”). Even the necklace he wears in the image resembles an “88”—an auspicious number in Asian cultures that is quite inauspiciously neo-Nazi code for “heil Hitler,” too.

Whatever tolerance I’ve developed for men like Musk, and the staggering majority of the Republican administration’s hatemongering cronies and frat bro orcs, like Pete “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” Hegseth, doesn’t apply to G-Dragon. I “understand” Hegseth. I do not understand the casual use of Nazi aesthetics in  G-Dragon’s promotional material. I do understand his fixation on the number eight, a direct reference to his birthday, Aug. 18, 1988, though it is impossible for me to see the onslaught of eights for anything other than its intrinsic connection to Nazi lore. My children are Jewish; set before me an octet composed of anything, and my antisemitism radar starts whining at me like I’m Hudson in Aliens.

I, on the other hand, am not Jewish. I did grow up in Newton, Massachusetts, though, where somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the total population is Jewish, and while attending college in Maryland, I celebrated Rosh Hashanah with my friend at his family’s home in New Jersey as a pretext for attending the world premiere of Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep at the Angelika Film Center in New York City. Close enough. In short: Am I being too sensitive?

G-Dragon himself mythologizes Übermensch as a statement of personal transcendence, which reads as delightfully empowering in the abstract, and, in fairness, hews closer to the concept German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had in mind when he coined the term in his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Who doesn’t want to grow and improve and ultimately metamorph into their best self? Wellness is all the rage these days, after all. But we haven’t let Eminem off the hook for his longstanding use of the word “f*ggot” or for his exhaustingly glib defense of the usage. Likewise, G-Dragon ought to be held to account for the deployment of antisemitic dog whistles and neo-Nazi symbolism.

Easier said than done, perhaps. G-Dragon may actually be the Superman of K-pop—the big difference between him and the Man of Steel being that G-Dragon’s kryptonite hasn’t been discovered yet. South Korean police alleged that he’d indulged in illegal drug use; he beat the rap. He lost two years’ worth of songwriting and touring while carrying out compulsory military service between 2018 and 2019; he is nonetheless one of the hottest artists in K-pop today. Not even BLACKPINK’s Rosé can hold a spot on digital music charts against him. That combination of apparent unstoppability and effortless style makes the Nazi motifs frustrating, in addition to grossly offensive. The man can accentuate a neatly tailored double-breasted suit with a f*cking straw hat and make it look like the coolest accessory on the planet. If I wore such a hat, the law would require me to glean potatoes while chewing on a wheat stem.

Put simply, G-Dragon’s knack for expressing his individuality is boundless. He therefore has neither a reason nor an excuse to turn to white supremacy for fashion inspiration. If additional proof is necessary, behold the Übermensch album cover, which has nothing to do with Nazis and instead does with the soles of his feet what Lorde’s Solar Power did with her behind. But pouring criticism on G-Dragon alone for his choices is, in the end, a minimal effort; they are his choices, but focusing on him without contextualizing him in K-pop writ large deflects habitual appropriation of Nazi imagery across the culture. G-Dragon isn’t the first K-pop star to reflect the typology of the Schutzstaffel. As K-pop’s unofficially crowned monarch, he is simply its most prominent.

In 2023, Twice’s Chaeyoung rocked a t-shirt depicting Sid Vicious sporting a swastika. Sowon of GFriend got cozy with a Nazi military officer mannequin in 2021. Not once, but twice, BTS has fallen on their face while wearing clothing emblazoned with nods to the Holocaust and World War II; in 2014, RM wore a camo-style hat emblazoned with the SS Death Head, and in 2018, Jimin wore a shirt celebrating the United States nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It appears practically endemic within the K-pop world that its brightest stars have a high likelihood of embarrassing themselves and inflaming global audiences with “oopsies” revolving around blatant Nazi signifiers (not to mention blithe attendance of Kanye West concerts). G-Dragon is part of the problem. He isn’t, however, the problem himself. 

Frankly, it’s rich for an American to criticize K-pop stars and Asia’s broader fascination with Nazi chic. The United States is hardly free of antisemitism. That much is evinced by our education system, and not, according to Republican propaganda, in our institutions of higher learning. Holocaust education across the country is a gallimaufry of mandates and directives, resulting in veritable chasms between states speaking to how thoroughly the subject is taught. (Shocking no one, Florida’s state education department rejected a pair of Holocaust textbooks for use in its classrooms, and also demanded that another textbook edit a passage about the Hebrew Bible to receive its approval, in 2023.) We’re supposed to be a bastion of safety against the threat that Nazi ideology represents. We aren’t.

But we’re talking about grown-up mega-stars backed by mega-labels and wrangled by mega-managers, and in that context, there is no plausible excuse for sending your performers out in the wild with a swastika or a mushroom cloud on their chest.

Likewise, Holocaust education varies across Asian countries; it isn’t a mandatory subject in, for instance, Japan, and has become more widely taught in China over the last couple of decades. This would make a fine excuse if we were talking about pre-teens acting out on their own—not “acceptable,” but “fine.” But we’re talking about grown-up mega-stars backed by mega-labels and wrangled by mega-managers, and in that context, there is no plausible excuse for sending your performers out in the wild with a swastika or a mushroom cloud on their chest. G-Dragon especially has no justification for Übermensch, forget that he’s as close to embodying the Nietzchean, and not the Aryan, ideal of self-possession as any of his K-pop contemporaries. I haven’t listened to Übermensch. I probably never will. Unlike other music genres, from Indian folk metal to Kentucky Americana, I won’t play it for my kiddos, either.

Published on May 23, 2025

Words by Andy Crump

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.