If we read BTS's decision not to knock on the Grammy's door merely as an absence from an awards ceremony, we will miss an important part of the story. It is similar to how the survival of the ancient Greek 'Odyssey' for thousands of years cannot be found solely in the adventures of a single hero. The process by which a culture becomes a universal language of the world requires not only the quality of the work, but also time, repeated memory, and above all, a vast 'accumulation of narrative' capable of explaining itself.

BTS announced in July that they would not submit their music to the 69th Grammy Awards, to be held in 2027. The decision came after the Recording Academy, which organizes the Grammys, established a new category: 'Best Asian Pop Music Performance.' BTS stated their position, saying they hope their music will be heard and loved as music itself, rather than being categorized by region or language.

■ A Being That Has Become Able to Refuse an Award

What matters here is not the simple fact that BTS gave up an award. Rather, the question should begin in the opposite direction: for a culture to become global, who must recognize whom? For a long time, prestigious award ceremonies and criticism systems in the United States and Europe functioned as a kind of final gateway for non-Western artists. Recognition there was accepted as elevating 'regional culture' to 'world culture.' However, BTS's choice poses a subtle question to this old structure of approval: is reclassifying music that the world is already consuming under a regional name truly inclusion, or is it a new form of border-drawing?

The Recording Academy explains it differently. They say the Asian pop category is not intended to separate Asian music, but is a device to more widely publicize and evaluate its diversity and artistry. They also maintain that entering the category does not block competition in major categories such as Album of the Year or Song of the Year. Therefore, reducing this controversy to a simple dichotomy of 'Grammy discrimination vs. BTS resistance' is also inaccurate.

Yet it is precisely at this point that the 'Odyssey' comes to mind. Homer's 'Odyssey' deals with the return of Odysseus to his hometown of Ithaca after the Trojan War. He crosses seas, encounters monsters, endures the wrath of the gods, and rejects temptations—or sometimes remains within them. The destination is clear: Ithaca. But the greatness of the 'Odyssey' lies not in the conclusion that Odysseus eventually reached Ithaca. It lies in what he experienced before arriving there. It is a narrative in which the process, not the destination, makes the human.

Reading BTS's history through the same structure reveals an interesting scene. The Billboard charts, stadium concerts, Grammy nominations, entry into the English-speaking mass market, and the formation of a global fandom each seemed like an endpoint. Yet each time one was passed, another gateway appeared. The Grammys, too, were long one of those symbols. BTS has been nominated for Grammys several times but has not yet won.

Then a paradoxical situation arises: a being that once desired an award becomes, at a certain moment, able to refuse it. This change is significant. A person without authority finds it difficult to refuse authority, because they lack the option to choose. Conversely, a being that has secured sufficient popular and cultural capital can set its distance from existing authority. Therefore, BTS's Grammy non-submission is not a matter to be simplified as 'declaring the award unnecessary because they didn't win it.' Rather, it must also be seen as a choice made possible because their position within global popular culture has changed.

■ The Accumulation of Narrative: Time Settles into Story

Here, a more fundamental concept connecting the 'Odyssey' and BTS appears: the accumulation of narrative. The 'Odyssey' is not a story completed overnight. Scholarship on Homeric epics has centrally addressed the point that a long oral tradition played a crucial role in the formation of the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.' Repeated stories, formulaic scenes, and processes of memory and performance accumulated to form the foundation of the great epics. Modern research also views the Homeric epics within the complex interaction of orality and literacy.

This tells us a very important fact: civilizational narrative is not invented one day by a single genius. Countless people remember the story, retell it, gradually transform it, and the next generation receives it again, thickening the narrative. Time settles into the story.

This is also why the figure of Odysseus is so powerful. He is not a simple character. Numerous archetypes—the human who left home, the human returning from war, the human enduring temptation, the human who loses and recovers his identity—are layered upon him. That is why, in reading Odysseus, we do not see just one ancient Greek but humanity itself. This is the moment a local story becomes a universal one.

■ The Name 'K-pop': How Long Is It Needed?

The problem BTS faces ultimately leads here as well. The name K-pop was necessary at first. It was a powerful brand that made popular music produced in Korea identifiable in the world market. It clearly showed the starting point of Korea and was a useful concept for explaining production methods and fandom culture different from existing Anglo-American pop. However, as culture grows, the name that initially explained it can at some point become a border. If it entered the world with the explanation 'music from Korea' but, even after becoming fully globalized, must continue to be evaluated only in a separate box called 'music from Korea,' the question changes: how long must K-pop remain K-pop?

If the music sung by British singers is not always placed in a separate category called 'British pop,' and if American singers' music is not always evaluated in a regional section called 'American pop,' when does Asian music that has achieved global success go beyond being 'Asian pop' and become simply 'pop'?

This is where the philosophical weight of BTS's question lies. At a deeper level than the question of whether the Grammys recognize Asian music, it asks: who holds the right to define the universal? In the global cultural market since modernity, the word 'universal' has in fact not been entirely neutral. Things created in the West were often accepted as universal without any regional modifier, while things emerging from the non-West often had to first explain their regional identity. This is a repeated structure in literature, art, and music alike—an asymmetry in which the Western becomes genre and the non-Western becomes region.

This is also why there is room to read BTS's choice from a postcolonial perspective. However, it should not be concluded that the Grammys created the category deliberately to exclude Asian music. The Recording Academy explains it as a system intended to broaden the scope of recognition. What is interesting, therefore, is not a matter of intent but of structure. Even a classification made with good intentions can become a border, because the moment a name is attached in order to recognize something, that name can again create a division.

Philosophically, this is the 'paradox of recognition.' Recognizing a being in a special way is an act that raises that being's value while simultaneously re-emphasizing the fact that it differs from other beings. The moment an 'award for Asian music' is created, Asian music becomes more visible. At the same time, it becomes visible once again within the border called 'Asian music.' BTS touched precisely that contradiction.

■ The 'Odyssey' Is Not Regional Content but a Classic of Humanity

And the 'Odyssey,' from an entirely different time and space, shows another aspect of this problem. Today, no one calls the 'Odyssey' simply 'Aegean regional content.' Though born in Greece, it is accepted as a classic of humanity. Why was this possible? Time. And accumulation, and narrative. For thousands of years, humans read the story, rewrote it, turned it into theater, painted it, and interpreted it philosophically. Countless eras summoned Odysseus back as a person of their own time. It took this long span of time for a local story to become a universal one.

Korean popular culture is now experiencing a compressed process at an incomparably faster speed. While the globalization of culture in the past took place over hundreds of years, in the digital age global narratives form in decades, sometimes in just a few years. YouTube, streaming, social media, and fan communities repeat and spread stories in ways entirely different from past oral traditions. The methods have changed, but interestingly, the principle is similar: stories grow stronger with repetition. Fans remember performances, share videos, translate lyrics, add their own experiences, and people from other cultures reinterpret them. This, too, is a kind of modern oral tradition. If ancient bards repeated songs in the square, today tens of millions of accounts carry the story. Thus the name BTS has become both a proper noun referring to seven singers and a vast cultural text created through the participation of countless people.

From this perspective, the existence of ARMY also looks different. The fandom is not merely a consumer but a memory device that stores and transmits narrative. Just as ancient epics could not exist without the memory of their audiences, modern popular culture also finds it difficult to build long-term narrative without the memory and reproduction of fandom. The analysis in Homeric studies—that oral poets constructed and performed stories using various resources of memory—prompts us to consider the broader proposition that 'culture survives through memory.'

■ News Becomes History, and History Becomes Myth

What BTS is accumulating now, then, is not just album sales or streaming records. It is the total sum of memory. The memory of becoming Grammy nominees, the memory of not winning, the memory of standing on world stages, the memory of Korean-language songs being sung around the world, the time when activities paused for military service, the memory of returning, and finally the memory of choosing not to submit to the Grammys at all—these pile up as one continuous story. Each of these events is news at the time. But when connected over time, they become history. And when history is told and retold, it becomes myth.

This is the essence of narrative that the 'Odyssey' demonstrates. What mattered to Odysseus was not the fact that he defeated a single monster. The individual events—the Cyclops, the Sirens, Calypso, the wrath of Poseidon, and the homecoming—connected to form one vast archetype: 'the human who returns.' Likewise, looking only at individual records, BTS is a success story of the popular music industry. But connecting those events reveals a different story: a group that carried Korean-language music into the world market, moved to the center of the world's largest music market, continually challenged one of its oldest authorities, and at a certain moment began to question the very new classification that authority proposed. This is a far stronger narrative than a success story, because success has an end, but questions do not.

Therefore, we cannot yet know what historical meaning BTS's Grammy non-submission will hold. Years from now, it may be recorded as an event that passed without particular significance. Conversely, it may be remembered as a symbolic moment when Asian popular culture began to reset its relationship with the West's existing systems of recognition. Nothing can be concluded now, because narrative is completed not by contemporaries but by time. The 'Odyssey,' too, was not a 'classic of humanity' from the moment it was first sung. It became a classic because countless generations did not discard it.

Here, the most important condition of 'narrative accumulation' is revealed. Great culture is not completed simply by entering the world; it must remain in the world's memory. Trends are consumed, but narratives are remembered. A hit song can be pushed aside by the next hit, but a story can grow larger as it meets the interpretations of new generations. Some assessments note that the share of Korean and Japanese popular culture in Western cultural markets has itself been growing recently. This is one backdrop showing that the old terrain dividing the center and periphery of global popular culture is shifting, beyond the success of a single group called BTS.

In that sense, BTS's next competitor need not be another singer. Perhaps it is time. Will people still listen to their music in ten years? Will a new generation reinterpret BTS thirty years from now? Fifty years hence, when the history of Korean popular culture is explained, will their story remain as a point of reference? And someday, will BTS's music be naturally described as part of world popular music history even without the regional explanation 'K-pop'? Only then will we be able to accurately judge the meaning of what is happening now.

■ Ithaca Is Not a Trophy Podium

Odysseus ended his journey by returning to Ithaca. But the journey of the 'Odyssey' began at that moment. The story traveled for over two thousand years on human memory. The tale of one man's homecoming, which set out from the small world of ancient Greece, finally lost its nationality and became a story about humanity itself. BTS may be standing at a similar boundary. A bigger question than whether they win a Grammy is whether their music and story can transcend their first narrative of 'a success story that went from Korea to the world.'

Becoming a global culture is not the same as becoming world-famous. Fame has a peak, but narrative has accumulation. A Grammy trophy records a year's winner. But cultural history records who was remembered longer. That is why, despite the gap of thousands of years, a single question flows between BTS's Grammy refusal and the 'Odyssey': not who is at the center of the world, but which story ultimately remains in the world's memory.

The sea BTS is now crossing may be far wider than the award ceremony called the Grammys. The name of that sea is time. And the Ithaca they are heading toward may not be a trophy podium, but a point at which their music, without erasing the starting points of 'Korea' and 'Asia,' is no longer defined by them alone. Not becoming universal by discarding locality, but setting out from the intensely local until, at last, all humans accept it as their own story. The 'Odyssey' walked that path. No one yet knows how far BTS's voyage will extend. But one thing is certain: the story surrounding that voyage is already accumulating. And the history of culture has always begun that way.

■ Netizen Awards Voting Status

The power of this global fandom can also be confirmed in the domestic fan vote currently underway. As of 11:26 a.m. on the 21st, BTS is ranked 8th in the August Netizen Awards Best Group category with 376 votes. Having consistently maintained a mid-to-upper ranking in the Netizen Awards with fans' support, they continue to compete this month backed by global fan enthusiasm. With the August voting still in progress, attention is focused on how they will perform in the remaining ranking competition. [This article was partially assisted by AI.]