BTS gets its first Grammy nomination for Love Yourself: Tear, but it’s for album art
- Best album Grammys are not usually given to groups that play pure pop music
- Some say that K-pop should be given its own genre at the awards
The past year was a banner one for K-pop in the US, with boy band BTS becoming the first South Korean act to land atop the Billboard album charts.
Love Yourself: Tear hit the chart milestone in May for an album universally applauded as a sleek, inventive statement piece for contemporary K-pop. If K-pop were ever to get Grammy acceptance on its own terms, this would be the album to do it (even if Grammy is terminally reluctant to award pure pop that appeals to young audiences).
Grammy voters are probably due to reckon with K-pop as a genre sooner or later. So it’s a little curious and a little obvious that they chose best recording package as the way to get BTS (and the attendant social media deluge) into the ceremony without having to grapple with what its music means in a Grammy context.
And certainly, Love Yourself: Tear is a lovely, modern piece of album artwork. The design comes from the Seoul-based firm HuskyFox, which chose an atypically austere colour palette and typesetting for this instalment of the Love Yourself trilogy (which itself came in several versions).
K-pop is usually known for saturated colours and elaborate, futuristic set pieces, but the restraint on Tear emphasised that this emotional album was playing for different stakes. To judge by the chart success, it worked.