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Boyband BTS: Your current song is a cover of the Coldplay song "Fix You"
Photo: MTV UK YouTube channel
The Twitter account of the radio station Bayern 3 is usually leisurely.
The latest post on Friday lunchtime is from Tuesday, the "day of the banana bread" was celebrated.
In the days before that, the 27,000 followers of the account received, among other things, a “sweet action” by the Penzberg police in a video, as well as the “smallest reptile in the world”.
Such posts did not make big waves - until now.
Suddenly there are thousands of interactions with the banal Bayern 3 tweets, and many replies contain the same message: "Racism is not an opinion", racism is not an opinion.
What has happened there?
To understand the excitement, you need to know three things:
Matthias Matuschik, a cabaret artist and long-time Bayern 3 presenter, according to his own description, known for “sharp-tongued entertainment with a high level of truth”
the South Korean boy band BTS, which makes so-called K-Pop and is one of the most successful music groups on the planet (read more here)
and Twitter's K-pop scene, an extremely busy, well-connected social media community that reveres BTS.
A torrent of abuse
Matthias Matuschik, on the other hand, doesn't have it with BTS, which is a much-noticed phenomenon musically, but also in terms of staging and sales.
In his show »Matuschke - the slightly different evening«, the presenter was annoyed this week about a cover version of the band.
“And then these little pissers also brag that they covered 'Fix You' from Coldplay,” Matuschik said on air.
Previously, according to a Twitter user who recorded his moderation and posted it online, he compared the band name BTS with "some shitty virus" against which "hopefully there will also be a vaccination soon."
Only half of this statement can be heard in the user's video.
On the other hand, as Matuschik says, it is documented that for their cover version the band will "go on vacation" to North Korea for the next 20 years.
A flood of insults that should be funny, but the style is somewhere in beer tent rhetoric and the murmur of professional rioters like Alex Jones.
After the radio recording - in video form - found its way onto the Internet, a kind of social media tremor began.
The user who uploaded the video asked online for help from the “fanbase” and “other fanbases” - and soon a very brief summary of what had been said was also found in English.
Later, English-language instructions were even circulated on the Internet on how to write complaint emails to Bayern 3 and Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), to which the station belongs.
The campaign came about with copy & paste against racism on German radio.
Hundreds of thousands of users from all over the world, obviously mainly BTS fans, were outraged about radio comedy, which in the days before social media would presumably have simply been sent to Bavaria.
Now Twitter users from different countries cheered themselves on, and the storm of protest soon reached people who had nothing at all to do with K-Pop.
On Friday, the English-language hashtag # Bayern3Racist, racist Bayern 3, was one of the most used buzzwords in the world with over 1.4 million tweets.
Other hashtags such as #RacismIsNotAnOpinion, # RacismBayern3 and # Bayern3Apologize that appeared on Twitter trends were also responses to the radio show.
The BR told SPIEGEL on Friday afternoon that Bayern 3 was currently receiving "a lot of reactions" on all channels and was taking the topic "very seriously."
The scene is known for its actions
It has already happened quite often that actions by groups such as the self-proclaimed "BTS Army", ie actions from the ranks of the global K-Pop fan community, left an impression far beyond their own scene.
For example, in the course of the “Black Lives Matter” protests in the USA, K-Pop fans had hijacked hashtags directed against the movement such as #WhiteLivesMatter or #BlueLivesMatter, under which racist information was posted, and flooded them with BTS material.
The band themselves spoke out clearly against discrimination and violence in June 2020 and expressed their solidarity with "Black Lives Matter".
“K-Pop fans are characterized by their collective identity and collective action culture,” said K-Pop expert Sung Un Gang in the summer of “Deutschlandfunk”.
The actions of the scene are on the one hand about increasing the celebrity and visibility of the K-Pop stars in the media world, on the other hand about strengthening their own identity as a group.
On Friday, expert Sung Un Gang retweeted an overview on Twitter of BTS fans around the world supporting charity projects.
Do good and talk about it, this age-old motto seems to be taken to heart by the millennial community.
And just as you donate together, you turn against everything that you think is problematic.
The excitement goes far beyond Germany
Bayern 3 initially did not seem as if it had been able to cope with the massive online counter-speech that is now raining down on the transmitter via the network.
On the Twitter account only the banana bread greets you, a statement on the station's website appeared on Thursday only in German.
In that statement on Matuschik's moderation, Bayern 3 apologized for the fact that "many of you have found his statements hurtful or racist" - a sorry that did not refer to the statements themselves.
In addition, the broadcaster stated that it was "the character of this program and also of the presenter to express his opinion clearly, openly and without makeup."
Xenophobia and racism, however, are far from Matuschick in any form, emphasized Bayern 3.
Further statements appeared on Friday afternoon, apparently also in response to criticism from the network of the first apology.
They should now also be distributed in English, as the BR informs SPIEGEL.
Bayern 3 now writes that it was "unacceptable" the words the moderator used to express himself about BTS.
“And both he and we at Bayern 3 know that it's not enough just to mean things differently.
If statements are perceived by many people as offensive or racist, then they are too. «Like Matuschick, Bayern 3 also distances itself» expressly and decisively from any form of racism, exclusion and discrimination «.
"I am really sorry"
Matthias Matuschik, who spoke to »Buzzfeed« after his broadcast about the fact that the »currently very popular racism club« was being unpacked against him, is now apparently being insulted a lot himself.
Bayern 3 announced that the moderator and his family were "now massively threatened."
Therefore, please "with all due understanding for the indignation" that the discussion remains on a substantive level.
The moderator himself said on Friday afternoon that he would like to sincerely apologize.
»In my moderation, I was primarily annoyed by the fact that the boy band BTS covered the song 'Fix You' by Coldplay, which I really appreciate.
The nationality of the seven boys shouldn't matter - mentioning them and making the connection with a virus was completely wrong. "
“I have thought a lot in the past few hours and I understand and accept that I could have racially insulted many of you, especially the Asian community, with my words,” Matuschik continues.
"That was never my intention, but I know that in the end it is how the words are received by the recipients - and not how they were meant."
His statement ends with a sentence that most K-Pop fans around the world will understand: "I am really sorry."
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