“… I hope that music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language.”
On July 29th, 2026, roughly a month after the Recording Academy introduced the Best Asian Pop Music Performance category, BTS, the global boy band consisting of seven South Korean members, decided not to submit any of their multi-week Billboard #1 songs for the 2027 Grammy Awards. Formed in 2013, the all-Korean boy band has become one of the biggest-selling acts in the entertainment industry. All seven members are voting members of the Grammys since 2019. However, this year (2026), BTS joined a list of performers who have expressed their disappointment in the Grammys for a number of reasons. In 2020, Drake called for the ceremony to be replaced, arguing that the awards habitually overlooked black artistry, and rap music in particular. This year, BTS confidently returned to the global stage after all members completed their mandatory military service in South Korea, with their fifth album Arirang becoming the first K-pop group album to hold No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for three straight weeks. Yet, they decided not to submit any of their Billboard toppers for the Grammy Awards.
While BTS was performing sold-out performances, the Recording Academy had introduced the new Asian category as an expansion of recognition. The category was described as recognizing “artistic excellence in Asian pop music performances originating from or widely recognized within Asian markets,” including but not limited to K-pop, J-pop, and C-pop, with meaningful use of one or more Asian languages.
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. defended the change as an effort to give more music and more creators opportunities to be recognized.
But BTS’s response raises a question that reaches far beyond the Grammys:
When does a category created to celebrate diversity begin to define and contain the very diversity it intends to celebrate?
When Does a Category Celebrate Difference—and When Does It Contain It?
The intense backlash from the Asian Music industry, other artists from around the world, and a roaring ARMY (BTS fandom, who even planned to boycott the Grammys and watch the BTS comeback on Netflix instead) has led the Recording Academy to rethink its strategy to celebrate diversity in music in collaboration with the Asian music industry, including K-pop (including a representative from HYBE) , J-pop, C-pop, and Indian music.
The core of the controversy lies in whether classifying music by region and language truly reflects the global musical market. Just take a look at the massive global and demographic spectrum of ARMY. BTS’s fandom unites diverse ages, genders, and nationalities. Time magazine estimates the fan base at anywhere between 90 and 130 million members. For music that has achieved such extraordinary global reach, what is this regional category trying to do? One commentator describes the concern as : If K-pop with such “global dominance is relegated to a regional award, the category does not respect diversity but rather solidifies a musical hierarchy.
This question resonates with a concern I have been developing in my own work around cultural and theological categories. Who creates categories, and what do these categories allow us to see?
I would argue that to truly celebrate diversity, one must acknowledge that categories themselves are not neutral. Categories have histories, cultural assumptions, and power. The problem is not the categories in themselves but the tendency to universalize a particular way of organizing. I then suggest an evaluative process that is universally accountable.
The Particular Is Not the Opposite of the Universal
BTS’s statement recovers something of what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic metaphor from Outre-mer, a pilgrimage beyond the sea was trying to express –
“How universal is the love of poetry! Every nation has its popular songs… music is a universal language of mankind – poetry their universal pastime and delight.”
This statement is often treated as though Longfellow made an empirical claim that music is intelligible across cultures. But that misses the poetic character of the statement.
Longfellow was not proposing that every culture shares the same musical vocabulary or that a melody means the same thing to every listener. His larger discussion actually attends to the many different musical expressions found among different peoples. Contemporary scholarship has similarly noted that Longfellow’s idea of universality is better understood as pointing toward humanity’s shared engagement with music than toward identical musical meanings.
Music can be universal without being uniform.
BTS and the Possibility of Universal Encounter
BTS may be pointing toward universality as encounter, affection, and participation, rather than universality as comprehension. Kim Namjoon, a member of BTS himself, states that they are but seven normal Korean boys . They are most definitely not denying their particularity. In fact, they celebrate it by using traditional instruments native to South Korea in their hip-hop arrangements (the song IDOL being one of them) or in their latest album with several references to Korean culture, history, folk songs, etc. Here is another example from the song “Aliens” from their latest album Arirang. Kim Namjoon raps :
“Everybody know now where the K is / Pardon Kim Ku seonsaengnim tell me how you feel.”
These lines refer to Kim Ku’s famous 1947 autobiography Baekbeom Ilji (Diary of Baekbeom), where he wrote that he did not desire for Korea to be a terrifying military or economic superpower that conquered others, but rather hoped it would become the most beautiful country in the world powered by the “power of a noble/high culture” that brings happiness to humanity. Kim Ku is a Korean independence activist and statesman. He was a leader of the Korean independence movement against the Empire of Japan, head of the Korean Provisional Government from 1926 to 1927 and from 1940 to 1945, and a Korean reunification activist after 1945. Such culture-specific lyrics is just one way this boy-band allows their fandom to know them. Their music is deeply connected to Korean language and culture.
ARIRANG is unmistakably connected to Korean cultural memory. Its title invokes one of Korea’s most enduring traditional songs. The album draws upon Korean language, cultural references, and musical traditions while simultaneously engaging contemporary pop, hip-hop, R&B, electronic music, and global production.
In “Aliens,” BTS even incorporates jungmori, a traditional Korean rhythmic structure, into a contemporary pop song. The lyrics move between Korean and English, and the song references the Korean alphabet from “ga-na to ha.”
The point is not simply that BTS includes “Korean elements.” It is that their particularity becomes part of what travels. A listener does not have to become Korean before encountering BTS. But the encounter may invite the listener to learn something about Korea even as they learn from the rest of the world.
BTS has built an extensive catalog of cross-cultural partnerships, collaborating with prominent Western musicians, producers, and recording studios across pop, hip-hop, EDM, and rock. These collaborations expand their global reach, blend diverse musical styles, gain mainstream Western radio airplay, and create mutual artistic and commercial value that bridges the K-pop and global music markets.
Music May Not Be a Universal Language—but It Can Become a Universal Invitation
This is where I find myself slightly uncomfortable with the simple binary between “music as a universal language” and “music as a universal phenomenon.”
The critique of music as a universal language is important. We should not assume that everyone interprets music in the same way. Musical meanings are culturally learned. What sounds familiar, beautiful, mournful, sacred, celebratory, or even musical itself can be shaped by cultural formation.
But this BTS incident demonstrates/suggests a third possibility – music as a universal site of encounter.
A listener may not initially understand the language, musical conventions, historical references, or cultural meanings of a song—and yet may be moved by it, curious about it, and willing to cross the distance necessary to understand it. This is different from claiming universal comprehension.
Perhaps then music is a universal human capacity for creating and responding to organized sound that continually becomes a site of intercultural encounter. Music may not be universally intelligible, but it can become an invitation to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries.
BTS is Korean, and global.
Their Korean identity does not prevent global participation. Their global reach does not require them to become culturally neutral.
This challenges a tendency to imagine particularity and universality as opposites. So perhaps the problem is not particularity. The problem is particularity turned into a boundary.
The task is not to choose between universalism and particularism. It is to learn how particularity travels without losing its particularity, and how others encounter it without requiring it to become universal on their terms.
A traditional Korean musical element doesn’t have to be stripped of its Korean identity to participate in a hip-hop/pop song. Musical meanings are culturally situated; we do not automatically understand another culture’s music simply because we hear it. BTS’s global reception suggests another possibility – universal encounter.
But Encounter Is Not the Same as Interpretation
The fact that art can cross cultures does not mean that the categories we use to analyze art are universally adequate.
I can enjoy and participate (as so many across the globe) in BTS’ music tradition without understanding the history, social relationships, ritual meanings, or aesthetic assumptions through which practitioners understand it. But encountering an art form is not the same as adequately interpreting it.
An Indian street play, for example, cannot necessarily be adequately analyzed by importing French theatrical conventions of blocking or American assumptions about the spatial relationship between performer and audience.
The problem is not that French or American categories are inherently wrong.
The problem is that a category developed within one theatrical tradition may not allow us to perceive what another theatrical tradition considers important.
Every Analytical Framework emerges from a Particular culture and intellectual history.
The Grammys’ Asian pop category is essentially an etic category that does not adequately hold the complexity of BTS’ music. The observer’s category, based on geography and language, fixed the practitioner’s world within bounded categories -that challenged the scientific understanding of Longfellow’s statement about music. BTS’ statement, on the other hand, holds in tension both the poetic understanding and scientific claim of “music as a universal language.” The question is whether “local” should function as a boundary of meaning, or as a site from which new forms of knowledge and encounter emerge.
Their global reception suggests that particularity is an invitation to encounter. If we recognize that cultures have different ways of making meaning, then we cannot assume that the interpretive categories developed within one cultural tradition are universally adequate for interpreting another culture’s visual practices. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. defended the new “Best Asian Pop Music Performance” category by stating it was created to celebrate the diverse art coming out of Asia and allow more artists to be recognized, not to divide. To celebrate diversity is not simply to create more categories for different cultures. It is to recognize that the categories through which we perceive, classify, and evaluate cultural practices are themselves situated. Genuine intercultural theological engagement therefore requires more than representing the other within our categories; it requires allowing the encounter with the other to expose the limits of our categories and potentially transform what we understand by art, beauty, theology, and even the sacred.
Who Gets to Be “Just Music”
The issue is not that comparison is impossible nor that we should abandon categories. A category can help us compare and dangerously flatten the very difference we try to understand. And when a particular category becomes universal, it does more than classify. It determines what becomes visible and intelligible.
why is there an Asian, Latin category but not a European or American category? Nobody created a “Best European Pop Music Performance” category for Ed Sheeran. And does it even make sense to club J-Pop, K-pop, C-pop, and Indian music under the Asian banner? That makes me wonder why there isn’t a Native American, Latina, and Black music category – Can these musics fall under the “American” category? What makes European or American music lose its particularity?
The issue is not that geographical categories are always meaningless. It is that the unmarked category can begin to appear universal while everyone else’s particularity becomes visible as a modifier.
Encounters
If regional and linguistic categories are insufficient, what should replace them?
The interesting thing isn’t simply that people of different ages and nationalities follow BTS. It’s that they don’t all necessarily share the same musical formation. A 90 year old Korean grandmom is proud of these boys representing her nation on a global platform, a 50 year old Indian is ecstatic that these boys use their global influence to speak to the needs of the people (UNICEF address, APEC Summit). In an interview with Rollinstone, singer Jungkook rightly discerns when he says the Army (BTS fandom) encounter BTS through the “sincerity” of the voice, the emotional narrative, the relationality of the performance and online conversations, the layered meanings of the lyrics, the visual storytelling, or the musical juxtaposition itself. Perhaps music is “universal” in the more poetic sense because it can draw human beings into relationships of attention, affection, curiosity, and encounter across the boundaries of what they already understand.
From More Categories to Better Encounters:
We have talked about particularity, universality, and encounter. And i have repeatedly stated that encountering something is not the same as adequately interpreting it. We cannot responsibly interpret another community’s artistic practices without attending to the ways that community makes sense of its world, because art practices are not merely objects that exist within a worldview; they participate in producing and sustaining that worldview. Difference does not prevent encounter. But genuine encounter requires us to take difference seriously enough not to impose our framework of interpretation on it.
We have established that regional, linguistic, and cultural categories are not neutral, then we ask: What would a genuinely diverse evaluative system look like? So instead of “”Where does this music come from?” we ask: What is this music doing, and how well does it accomplish what it sets out to do? The evaluative or interpretive criterion has to travel with the practice, not merely be imposed upon it. For example (from a different artistic genre): A judge evaluating an Indian street play cannot simply apply French theatrical conventions of blocking and audience relationship.
The evaluative process must be a universally accountable process. The process might require evaluators to ask:
- What artistic tradition(s) does this work emerge from?
- What does excellence mean within those traditions?
- What is the artist attempting to do?
- What conventions is the artist following, transforming, or rejecting?
- How does the work innovate?
- What can an evaluator from outside this tradition not yet see?
- What assumptions am I bringing to this work that might prevent me from seeing what is actually happening?
Imagine the Grammy evaluator saying:
Before I evaluate this performance, what am I likely to misunderstand because I am approaching it from my own musical formation?
That is epistemic humility built into the evaluation process. (I addressed this in a Comparative Theology Conference and in my proposal for Global Worship for the Lausanne International Gatherings, which I will share in future posts). Perhaps what would celebrate diversity is not a better “Asian” box but an evaluative process capable of encountering music that doesn’t fit neatly into any box.
If music can be universal without being culturally uniform, why must our systems for evaluating it be culturally uniform?
and What might happen if, rather than asking how we can fit another culture’s art into our categories, we asked what that art might teach us about the limits of the categories themselves?
Use of generative AI: During the development of this article, I used Grammarly and ChatGPT to assist with revising the prose, especially the use of commas (ha!ha!). I independently evaluated the resulting suggestions and take full responsibility for the argument, factual claims, citations, and wording.