How BTS’s comeback was hindered by the pressure of an entire industry

HYBE, BTS's record label, unearthed this historical fact and brought it to the group during the recording sessions that were documented in Netflix's BTS: The Return. When they used this history in the promotional materials for Arirang and animated a retelling of this profound story, the trailer carried a disclaimer reading that it may "deviate from actual historical events," and a majority of the Black audience when the “Arirang” performance was recorded in the courtyard at Howard was erased. In their place was a deracialized audience within a story that is fundamentally inseparable from the Black experience and influence. As TikTok creator Laura Chung, and many other users on the app have pointed out, this erasure matters.

The concept of parallelling BTS to those seven men in the 1890s did not emerge organically. It was assigned to the group. Seven Korean men in the late 19th Century, and now seven South Korean men in a global pop group, both carrying Korean culture into a foreign space. BTS had one goal: to connect the threads. What the documentary captures is the BTS members themselves not entirely convinced they could. RM, the group's leader and arguably the most outspoken member on matters of artistic integrity, didn’t initially like the idea of comparing themselves to men that he considered genuine cultural heroes. Their discomfort is legible on screen.

That discomfort makes more sense when you understand what the members actually brought back from their mandatory time spent in the military. This was not necessarily a clean pause followed by a clean return. For RM, the experience fractured something fundamental about how he understands himself and his relationship to time. In The Return, he reaches for the Greek words for time, chronos and kairos, to explain how the break feels.

Chronos is the mechanical march of clock time, the kind that governs military service, structured and controlled. Kairos is the other kind, the time that feels charged with meaning, and moments expand and can feel like forever. Time in the military was chronos. Life with the members, being together, swimming in the ocean without a care in the world, is kairos. Which is perhaps why the album's lead single is called "SWIM." Not as a metaphor for the abstract and relishing of it, but rather the attempt to stay inside a moment that you know is impermanent, to hold onto the feeling of being fully alive in the kairos before chronos swallows it up again.

And that’s where The Return gives us insight into where the album's central problem actually is, not a failure or oversight, but a structural issue. Arirang is an album made by men still finding their footing in kairos, handed an album rollout schedule rooted in chronos. They were given an abstract historical concept and told to connect the dots within a specific time frame. And at many points during the process, a member of the group, Jin, was notably missing. 

But there is an additional layer even beneath that. BTS, by their own acknowledgment, are in a position that no other K-pop group has ever been in. They’ve outlasted the model. They are still here and exponentially growing when they weren't supposed to be. And while that is extraordinary, it also means they have no map for where to go next because the industry never expected to need one. So when The Return shows them in a house in LA, in the midst of recording their big comeback album, exhausted and unsure whether the album is experimental enough, that is not just creative doubt, it’s the pressure of an entire industry weighing on them.

The Return haunts us with a question we’ll never know the answer to: What would Arirang have looked like with more time? Not the clock kind of time, but the other kind. BTS tells the audience themselves in the documentary that they owe it to the genre to experiment and to push boundaries, leaving it to let the artists decide what Arirang actually means. But it’s impossible to rush your way into meaning or to weave threads without being given a needle to sew. And when you try, what you get is an album that sounds like a ghost of what it could have been. In a sense, the album is a direct reflection of what the upper-echelon of HYBE handed to the members of BTS when they told them what the album had to be conceptually, which is the outline of a profound story without the weight of genuine reckoning behind it.

And that reckoning has a specific shape that’s hidden itself quietly in the deepest corners of K-pop for decades. K-pop's self-established sonic DNA—the skeletal sounds of R&B, hip-hop, funk and soul—is, at its core, Black American music. The genre has absorbed those influences, repackaged them, and built an industry. BTS are obviously not the only ones guilty of operating within a system built around them, but they are uniquely positioned and sitting in a place to reckon with it, especially when they are offered creative freedom. The threads were there with the folk song, the HBCU, the Black allies, and the long history of marginalized cultures finding each other across time and holding each others’ hands. Pulled with intention and given real kairos, those threads could have made Arirang not just a great pop record but a genuinely important and intentional cultural document.