Image credit: Big Hit Entertainment

It is common for the Western media to characterize the artistry of BTS as "manufactured", "robotic" -- or to quote an arrogant Bowie fan’s response to the comparative analysis I drew up in Part One, "just production".

Gee, I guess "Swan Lake" is also "just production”.

It is fascinating how quickly people will jump in to defend and elevate the authenticity of a Western favourite like David Bowie, as though he didn’t very openly build his whole career identity on artifice, while entirely dismissing the authenticity of a Korean group they have only perfunctorily listened to. If you were to listen only to his greatest hits -- think “Starman”, "Let’s Dance", "Rebel Rebel" -- you would assume that Bowie too was nothing more than a bop machine. Besides, he was an artistic inheritor of the pop art movement, and therefore the supreme leader of Warholian "just production". He verbalized this on many occasions -- he was fixated on it both artistically and philosophically.

"Sometimes, I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all. I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas"— Bowie, 1972

Against a contemporary backdrop where many Western charting songs do not even belong to the performers, as we will see, the Korean group BTS have quietly arrived while cutting their own uniquely authentic path. A culture of self-direction embedded within broader production values, rather than the scattered and diluted creativity culture of the West or the bland company standards of other K-pop idols, is behind the quality and success of their music.

Obsessed with a specific, static and fairly outdated image of authenticity, however -- generally a lone singer-songwriter strumming a guitar -- it is near impossible for many Westerners to imagine that genuine, self-composed music could come out of a choreographed Korean group.

BTS ... raising the standards of both East and West. (Image credit: Big Hit Entertainment)

As someone who can speak from both corners —classic rock and BTS — I guarantee that their reality could not be further from this manufactured notion, so let me fill you in.

Calling ourselves a nation is wrong / when you’re being apathetic / Vote is yours, but future is ours.

In the winter of 2012, six months before the debut of Bangtan Sonyeondan, a short music video was quietly dropped onto the YouTube channel "BANGTANTV". With rap and an altered popular melody superimposed onto a stream of provocative images, the D.I.Y. piece was an assertive clarion call for Korean citizens, particularly young people, to exercise their civil duty -- to vote and to challenge present figures of authority in recognition of the relative privilege they have over prior generations who lacked their political freedoms.

With a tight flow and a confident, aggressive tone, the self-made video -- bluntly titled "Vote, Or Just Shut Up" -- is a prototypical example of the creativity and sociopolitical persuasions of Bangtan’s lead rapper, RM.

The three original core members of BTS (the first ones to be signed; vocalists were added later so that they debuted together as a septet) had their origins in the self-made space of the underground hip-hop community. With no prior intention to form an idol group, their groundbreaking decision to utilize the pre-existing idol platform as a way of distributing self-expressive music earned them much scorn and abuse from the indie scene they chose to diverge from.

Thinking outside of the box is a sure-fire way of garnering vitriol from one’s culture, but it is also the crucial factor in the ongoing evolution of art -- to take the risks other people refuse to take or else let yourself melt into obscurity with the rest of them. In the unfortunate case of Bangtan, they have become the ultimate poster children for misunderstood pioneers, with hostility grinding its gears from not one but three different sides -- Korean hip-hop, Korean idol music and the West.

In the beginning, BTS suffered with quite the handful. (Image credit: Big Hit Entertainment)

K-pop wasn’t always the "manufactured" industry it is today. When the archetypal choreographed K-pop act Seo Taiji and Boys burst onto television screens in the early 1990s, the concept of company-based idol music was little more than a twinkle in industry executives' eyes. With an earthy hip-hop identity, subversive fashions and music that confronted the social norms and censorship issues of the day, Seo Taiji was an especially brave beginning for a fledgling industry, bringing the promise of a new wave of culturally-specific, authentic popular music to the nation’s entertainment scene.

"Classroom Idea,” a heavy track complete with death growls, is probably the most infamous example of their socially conscious song-writing. Extremely critical of the educational system, it initiated a moral panic and garnered accusations of thinly veiled satanism. It wasn’t their first artistic collision with the conservative norms of Korean society, but it is probably their most directly subversive piece. The group’s cultural reputation, however, gradually grew and evolved from these seeds of controversy, eventually earning the lead artist Seo Taiji the informal title of "President of Culture" for his creative daring.

It is in this subversive vein of artistry, and not the later domain of mass-produced K-pop groups, that BTS belongs. With a whole narrative universe to their name (filled with struggle, poverty, violence and death), Seo Taiji recently proclaimed Bangtan Sonyeondan to be the true heirs of the original Korean pop ethos he gave birth to decades previously.

If these topics sound angsty, it's not without national precedent. There's a unique melancholic sentiment to be found in Korean culture, which goes by the name of "Han".

“There is no literal English translation. It’s a state of mind. Of soul, really. A sadness. A sadness so deep no tears will come. And yet still there’s hope.” – The West Wing.