🌻petal

I think the poster is right. That ARIRANG Era has brought out some folks resentment towards black people, black ARMYs, Black Americans too because we're identifying with the music beyond a surface level, I guess you can say? While it's quite adjacent to the hip-hop genre, where BTS started, which suggests all ARMYs should actually be welcoming of this return to their musical roots, the fact is that for some in the fandom it's too Hip-Hop adjacent because quite a bit is in English and it's 'too black' and too in that culture.. it's not as 'safe' & easily digestible for a subsection of the fandom that already tries to uplift BTS music in Korean over their Eng. trilogy tracks just because of the language..like it cant be a deep song & be in English. So you have the 'it's in English' crowd, but now it's also partly in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which makes it too aligned to black people. Where before when it was hip-hop, but still largely in Korean, it was okay & 'safe'. They still didn't understand what they were saying but at least it was in a language that they can somewhat understand via translations. While they may listen to songs that sound similar to ARIRANG tracks form other artists, they don't expect it from BTS so that means 'they're getting too close to black people' or 'trying to align to blackness for validation' and "that makes me uncomfortable because I don't understand it, I don't accept it, and I don't actually like the rap genre all that much. I only like it when BTS is rapping & now them doing it in English means we're losing their (safe) Koreaness in exchange we're getting (less safe) Black Ameircan music.' For some, ARIRANG will never be 'good' because their uncomfortable it's not in their safe zone for BTS (Korean). With Korean lyrics they can just go look up the translations or have Korean translator on twt as the authority for context and feel comfortable in understanding what's being talked about. But for ARIRANG era, having major influence from black producers, black lyricists, and having a lot of black American musical hip-hop influences and rhythms within the music along with black people or black ARMYs on here now becoming translators of sorts & having the 'knowledge' to explain lyrics/wordplay & context to the fandom it rubs some the wrong way... Especially when we loudly explain that you can't just call 2.0 meaningless cuz it's in English, ghetto, or say 'the choreo saved the song', you can't call Hooligan a mess & call this or that lyric dumb & meaningless just because it's in English, but also in a black vernacular English that they don't understand. People take our explaining & corrections as if we're trying to center ourselves or make ourselves the main characters yet they will respect Korean translators giving context & corrections but now that Black ARMYs (& yes, it does matter too that it's Black Americans) are having some part in that translation role it makes ARIRANG too connected to us, for some people, and they resent that.