MONSTA X Bet Big on An English Album. Then K-Pop Exploded.
In early 2020, MONSTA X released their first English album “ALL ABOUT LUV” in a bid for North American success. Why is it still overlooked?
ALL ABOUT LUV, 2020
At the beginning of 2020 K-Pop was finally beginning to make inroads to the North American market. After three years of careful development, BTS, a seven member boy group signed under Big Hit Entertainment, found slow burn success with the Halsey collaboration “Boy With Luv”. That year the group announced their first stadium tour of the U.S.. NCT, another rising boy group signed under SM Entertainment, was also began to attract North American fans due to their edgy concepts and fluent English-speaking members Mark and Jaehyun.
But on Valentine's Day that year, a much more audacious group named MONSTA X made the most high profile reach into the North American market with their debut English album “ALL ABOUT LUV”. While the group was a product of Starship Entertainment, promotions for “ALL ABOUT LUV” would be handled by the American conglomerate Sony Music Entertainment.
The album’s release coincided with a number of high-profile events for the group. On release day, the group appeared on The Zach Sang Show, one of the most high-profile ways for Western artists to promote their music. They held meet and greets and Q&A sessions at The Roxy and Tower Records in Los Angeles. Later in the week, the group traveled to New York for a release party at the Paramount in Huntington, New York. They held a private listening party at Chelsea Music Hall and stopped by the Live Nation record store. WONHO, a member who departed the group months prior and whose vocals were kept on the album, was not mentioned at all in press interviews. By the end of the first sales week, the album performed respectably in the U.S., placing at number 5 on the Billboard 200 with over 52,000 units sold.
The group planned to spend a significant amount of time in the U.S., though, because a tour was scheduled for June and July. The theater venues were intimate in comparison to BTS’ stadium tour but they would be critical in moving the needle for the MONSTAs and increasing their presence in the U.S.
That year, too, K-Pop became more widely available in U.S. retailers. “ALL ABOUT LUV” joined NCT 127 and BTS in stores like Target and Barnes and Noble, which made their music more accessible. I can remember this time vividly because for years, if I wanted to buy a K-Pop album I would have to either purchase them online or find them steeply overpriced at an anime convention. This accessibility changed the game for K-Pop Stateside.
But then, one month later, the World Health Organization declared the pandemic a global emergency. For some groups, like BTS, the pandemic fostered an explosion in popularity brought on by boredom from fans looking for new music and content to consume. But for MONSTA X, whose position in the United States was still on shaky ground, the pandemic’s effect was murkier.
It was a long journey to reach this moment: For the past fifteen years, K-Pop companies had tried and failed to succeed in the West. Soloists like Rain and BoA were sent on exploratory tours of the U.S. that often resulted in indifference or, worse, mockery. BoA, whose English language self-titled album in 2008, once remarked that her time in the U.S. was one of the loneliest periods of her life.
But the problem extended far beyond K-Pop: Asian artists struggled to find their place in the music industry where representation was minimal. In 2004, for instance, an eighteen year old Hikaru Utada attempted to break into the U.S. with her English-language album “Exodus”. The album was entirely written and largely produced by Utada, who is fluent in English. Universal Music Japan held great confidence in the music and shipped over 1 million copies to retailers. Yet the album debuted at number 160 on the Billboard charts and sold only 55,000 copies its first week.
Asian American artists found an even tougher trajectory, blocked from label support and a public that held stereotypical or racist views of Asians. In 2018, only 50% of Americans polled by YouGov felt that they could “enjoy” a song sung in another language. White critics were often leveled the harshest, and often most micro-aggressive, comments at K-Pop, calling it a “nostalgia act”.
In the decade since BoA’s debut landed flat, the K-Pop industry learned quickly from their mistakes. Over the next decade South Korea poured millions of dollars into the country’s cultural exports, becoming a juggernaut through the Ministry of Culture, which was established in the 1990s. "They wanted Korea of the 21st century to be like America of the 20th century where America was just considered so universally cool that anything made in America would automatically be bought,” Euny Park, author of The Birth of Korean Cool once told NPR. The end result was the Hallyu Wave.
But in 2020, Korean Americans comprised 6% of the U.S.’s population and represented one of the fastest growing demographics. This was reflected in a seismic shift in Asian-made entertainment succeeding in the West. The same month MONSTA X debuted in North America, the South Korean film “Parasite” won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, while BTS was beginning to compete with the biggest names in pop music like Billie Eilish and Justin Bieber on streaming platforms.
Perhaps, troublingly, what labels learned is that to succeed in the West, K-Pop groups needed to speak and sing in English. In essence, K-Pop groups needed to be palatable for American audiences to enjoy them. For MONSTA X, this requirement meant the group was scrubbed of their
If your first listen to MONSTA X was through “ALL ABOUT LUV”, you might be surprised to learn what a truly transgressive group they are. In the five years since they debuted in Korea, the MONSTAs had become a highly masculine, hypersexual version of a K-Pop group. Their music is loud and aggressive, often going further than many groups in their lyrics and choreography.
Some of their most memorable choreography is often their riskiest. Take for example, SHOWNU’s legendary “chest shake” choreography in “Shoot Out”, where his chest literally vibrates. In recent years, as rappers IM and JOOHONEY have been given more creative control, their music has become more daring and experimental. The group’s excellent mini-album “FATAL LOVE”, released just months after “ALL ABOUT LUV”, featured the wild lyrics, “I want you to eat me like a main dish/ I want something more provocative, hot.”
“Wearing a harness is just to express our song concept. Showing the audience what we want to show is the most important thing,” IM told GQ. “We’re not ashamed. We’ve done a lot of sexual items, like harnesses and chains. We’re comfortable.” But HYUNGWON’s quote also stood out to me, “We’re stage performers, so I like wearing something that shines from head to toe.”
The decision for MONSTA X to then look wholesome for the “ALL ABOUT LUV” campaign felt like a strategic move. In photoshoots for the album, the MONSTAs are in jeans and t-shirts. They wear stylish jackets and look like they are posing for a menswear magazine. They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, looking to be provocative.
This is reflective in the music too. By all intents and purposes, “ALL ABOUT LUV” is arguably the most bland and off-brand album of the group’s discography. That is not to say the music is not good. There is plenty to like about “ALL ABOUT LUV”, but there is nothing to differentiate the group from the artists they collaborate with like Pitbull or French Montana.
I am most struck by the lyrics of “ALL ABOUT LUV” which sound like they were created at a songwriting camp in an LA AirBnB. On “She’s The One” the group feels weak over a girl who’s “so beautiful and I know she knows it”. They might “fly her out to Paris/ But I just haven’t told her yet.” In “GOT MY NUMBER”, the group theorize about being the other man and possibly being used by a girl: “Tryin’ hard not to text me/ Is it ‘cause your bed is empty?”
The lyrical content is decidedly more “adult” than MONSTA X’s releases up until this point, but also lacks the nuance of the group’s most interesting work. In fact, some of the most fascinating moments on the MONSTAs promotional tour for the album were the interviews where the group rejected deeper meanings in their English music.
When I think of MONSTA X at their best it is how they subvert the way we see sexuality portrayed by men. As they’ve received more creative control, their deployment of sexuality is what makes them stand apart from nearly every boy group in K-Pop. In performances for tracks like “LOVE KILLA”, “GAMBLER” or “Lone Ranger”, they’ve donned leather pants, strapped on harnesses, or have simply gone shirtless as a means to titillate viewers. As HYUNGWON said, they like this kind of provocation, which makes the conservative image of “ALL ABOUT LUV” so jarring to absorb.
It’s been rumored that K-Pop training instills idols with many all-round talents from dance to vocal training to even learning how to take the perfect selfie. But representing a cultural movement, like when the Hallyu Wave finally landed Stateside, is not something that any idol can be prepared for. That kind of fame is once in a generation, and it is the punishing kind because at the root of the fame is a dehumanization effect.
Just ask BTS who, just two years after the mammoth success of the single “Dynamite”, seemed exhausted by their popularity. As they gathered to celebrate their ninth anniversary, the group spoke candidly about the pressures they felt to be a product. “For me, it was like BTS was within my grasp till ‘ON’ and ‘Dynamite’. But after ‘Butter’ and 'Permission To Dance', I didn’t know what kind of group we were anymore,” RM said in a dinner party video that quickly went viral. “I don’t know what kind of story we should tell now.”
In the near two years since that confession, I’ve thought a lot about how a group can lose the plot when their fame becomes as outrageous as BTS’. In truth, what happened with BTS is what could have happened to MONSTA X had “ALL ABOUT LUV” made them superstars. But does American success really matter to a group like MONSTA X? In subsequent releases, the group has only leaned harder into meatier concepts that accentuate their sexuality and top-tier showmanship skills. As a result, they’ve released some of the most exciting and daring music from any boy group active right now. I don’t see how they could have been happy if they stayed in North America playing the part of a wholesome boy band. That is not who MONSTA X is.
“ALL ABOUT LUV” deserves to be a major player in conversations about the year that K-Pop broke into the Stateside’s mainstream consciousness. But it is, like BoA and Rain’s attempts before them, also a study in failure. Crucially, too, the album is a lesson in what happens when a group’s individuality is stripped from them.
What results in instances like this are micro-aggressions and, finally, a reminder of the group’s “otherness”. On The Zach Sang Show, I was struck by a moment when IM asks self-consciously, “Did I say something wrong?” after a co-host chuckles at his answer, perhaps due to his broken English. But IM’s body language seems to tell another story, one where he knows exactly what the Americans are thinking.
It’s hard to know where MONSTA X would have gone had the pandemic not halted their promotional tour. Perhaps they would have competed with BTS to become he most popular group in North America. Maybe their second English language album “The Dreaming” would have been a blockbuster event. But as I see it, their lack of success in North America gave the MONSTAs something far more valuable: Freedom.
