BTS Transcends

The Recording Academy introduced several new Grammy categories last month – among them the Best Asian Pop Music Performance award, better known as the BTS Grammy. Let’s not pretend that the award wasn’t created for BTS, because as I wrote at the time, even in the description of the category on their website, the Recording Academy had to namecheck the band.

The announcement of the Best Asian Pop Music Performance Grammy did not go over well. Many pointed out that the creation of an award that othered “Asian” music, in whatever bullsh-t way the Recording Academy defined it to be (which in itself is a f-cking problem), was misguided, confusing, insulting, and stupid. And as I predicted in my post about the situation back in June, “they’ve just created a giant pitfall for themselves”. Today we’re seeing that pitfall open up and swallow them. Because the artists they made the award for have said that they don’t know her.

All seven members of BTS – RM, Jin, Suga, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook – in concurrent posts on Instagram stories confirmed today that they will not be submitting for ANY Grammys this year. The message is written in Korean and reads.

"We have decided not to submit for Grammys this year. Rather than music being divided by region or language, we hope music itself can be heard and loved for what it is. We are always grateful to ARMY and everyone who is always with us."

I am ARMY and in our ARMY group chats all day we’ve basically been sobbing with pride, and also inspiration. There are so many layers to this and for some of us, it is deeply personal, just as it is for BTS.

Their comeback album ARIRANG is an artistic expression of their Korean cultural pride and also a statement about who they are as musicians, in a group and also as individuals. These are seven people who, at the height of their success, fulfilled their obligation to their nation and made an active choice to come back together. Not to chase accolades, or any institutional markers of achievement, but because they’d built a relationship with each other and in turn extended that relationship to include their fans – through art.

The album is complicated and vulnerable. They are confident but they are also candid about how they struggled to cope with change, with fame, with reality exceeding and then distorting their dreams. How do you find your goalposts when you didn’t even know that you wanted those goals in the first place?

And yet the goals keep piling up. They’re on the biggest tour of 2026, the album is the biggest selling album of the year in physical and digital sales – by a huge margin, like practically TRIPLE the number of physical and digital sales of Harry Styles. And in the age of streaming, this is significant.

One of their goals, at least in the past, was to win a Grammy. We know this because they shared it with us. They posted videos of their reaction to being nominated for the first time. They also shared video of themselves reacting with graceful disappointment when they didn’t win. So it is true that, at one time, it meant something to them.

Which makes it that much more extraordinary that they have now decided, unanimously, in no uncertain terms, that it no longer holds meaning. BTS’s announcement is a declaration that they do not see value in Grammys because what they really value is their own work and their album, without needing it to be recognised by any establishment.

And they said it out loud, with their whole chest. In polite language, which makes it even better. A classy “f-ck you”, but a f-ck you all the same. Because they could have just quietly not submitted. They could have not submitted and been like, we’re not submitting, thanks. But the fact that they spelled it out, naming and blaming the attempt to “divide music by region and language”, is an open indictment of the Recording Academy’s bullsh-t.

It is also a reclamation of creative spirit, which totally tracks with the ideas they’re exploring on the ARIRANG album. On the track “Aliens”, they’re directly addressing the racism they’ve experienced from the western music industry and the media. But with a flex – because no longer are they trying to fit into someone else’s space. Instead, “If you want to hit my house, shoes off at the door”. That’s how it’s done in Korea. And it’s a metaphor for no longer playing by the conditions of a system that is always shifting and gatekeeping.

BTS, then, has transcended. Which, for any of us who has ever felt like we were always trying to belong in places that never wanted us, is simple… but profound. It’s the ultimate actualisation, really: to elevate beyond needing to be validated by the status quo, to reimagine who gets to qualify success, and what success is. I’ve spent decades, personally, defined by those markers and much of those years not even knowing that they would never truly apply to me. And today BTS has reminded me that certain things don’t hold power if you stop giving it to them.

We're Squawking BTS today - join us for the conversation! (App link here.)