The K-Pop Fandom’s Unexpected Influence on Political Movements

Korean pop, or better known as K-Pop, features powerful dance routines, stunning performers, and catchy music. Starting off as a simple music fad, K-Pop now empowers its followers to create political change. In America, K-Pop fans overbooked a Tulsa Trump rally and overloaded a Dallas Police Department application for reporting Black Lives Matter protests with videos of their favorite idols. Internationally, these fans generated a million dollars in conjunction with BTS to support the Black Lives Matter movement. But, how did a musical genre inspire individuals to take political action?

Generally speaking, many K-Pop fans come from diverse backgrounds. Introduced by Krista Feind, who was quoted in “How K-Pop Fans Actually Work as a Force for Political Activism in 2020,” the K-Pop fan community consists of “‘Black, Latino, [and] LGBTQ’’ minorities, and the community supports these groups through their acts of political activism. The most notable of these efforts include the aforementioned Tulsa rally and DPD application, and the flooding of the AllLivesMatter, BlueLivesMatter, and WhiteLivesMatter hashtags on Twitter with fan-recorded videos of dancing K-Pop idols, also known as ‘fancams’.

However, Americans aren’t the only fans who have been able to create political change. Similar actions have been taken in Latin America to protest political injustice. In Peru, K-Pop fans used their Twitter accounts to protest the violence accompanied by the succession of Manuel Merino as Peru’s president and flooded the Terrorismo Nunca Más (No More Terrorism) hashtag. 

Although K-Pop activism is positively received in the United States and Latin America, Koreans see this mindset in a much different light. During the Tulsa Trump rally events in America, South Koreans were unhappy with American K-Pop fans’ actions. Koreans were hopeful for a second term for Trump, due to his foreign policy with North Korea, which may have ended the decades of unrest on the Korean peninsula. In South Korea, K-Pop fans tend to be “largely apolitical,” especially in comparison to their counterparts across the globe.