Bangtan Hermana Notes: Singing Beyond Empire

@rkive posted on IG Story the facade of the building where the APEC CEO Summit is held. This is today, October 29, 2025. @rkive, RM, Kpop Idol, Kim Namjoon of BTS, our Leader Nim will deliver a keynote speech. As he stands before the world’s business and political elite at the APEC CEO Summit in Korea, I reflect on the importance and significance of this moment, for South Korea and its management of the arts as an economic force, for countries in Asia that has a history of colonization and imperial influence, and for ARMY a diverse fandom who can approach this milestone with nuance.

At first glance, this might look like another victory for K-culture, another proof that Korean creativity has “made it” into the halls of power. But if we pause and listen with the ears of those who know his story, and the story of Bangtan, we might hear something more radical humming beneath the polite applause and our enormous pride as ARMY.

RM’s presence at APEC unsettles the very logic that built such summits. APEC is a space born of global capitalism and postcolonial hierarchies, where nations compete to sell, to produce, to consume. And here stands an artist whose body of work has long questioned those same systems; an artist who insists that the self is not just a brand, that creativity is not only a just commodity, that love and integrity are forms of resistance.

Through his words and his art, RM redefines what it means to lead, to represent, to succeed. He enters this space not to reinforce empire, but to remind it of its humanity. His talk on “Cultural and Creative Industries in the APEC Region and the Soft Power of K-Culture” invites us to rethink: What if power is not in the market, but in meaning? What if the truest form of growth is not economic, but ethical, relational, and imaginative?

For some of us, ARMYs, those who came to care and to think through their music, this moment is not simply pride in seeing “one of ours” on a global stage. It’s an act of reclamation. RM’s participation gestures toward a decolonial imagination, where artists from the once-colonized world speak not as cultural exports, but as equals shaping discourse, redefining value, and unsettling the West’s monopoly on modernity.

In a summit of CEOs and ministers, RM represents something that cannot be quantified: a people’s longing to be seen and to create freely, beyond the binaries of consumer and producer, colonizer and colonized. He stands not as the product of a system, but as its quiet critique. This is proof that art can inhabit power without surrendering its soul.

And maybe that’s why we, the ARMY who read between the lyrics, are moved. Because in that brief moment on the APEC stage, the story of Bangtan, our seven boys who turned their wounds into wonder, becomes the story of all of us still learning to sing beyond empire.

Apobangpo! Purple and true!