KpopWave already traced how the Grammys boxed K-pop into a category too narrow to hold it. Three weeks later, MTV’s 2026 VMA nominations show the opposite failure — a “Best K-Pop” category with no floor at all.
Three weeks ago, we wrote about a Grammy category built too narrow to hold BTS — a new “Best Asian Pop” box the group declined to compete in at all. This week, MTV nominated a group with one Korean member and zero Korean lyrics for Best K-Pop. It’s the opposite mistake, and it’s been building for longer than one nomination.
The Nomination
On August 18, MTV released its 2026 Video Music Awards nominations. The Best K-Pop category — one of six competitive slots this year — went to BLACKPINK’s “JUMP,” BTS’s “SWIM,” CORTIS’s “REDRED,” LE SSERAFIM’s “SPAGHETTI” (featuring BTS’s j-hope), Lisa’s “Dream” (featuring Kentaro Sakaguchi), and KATSEYE’s “Pinky Up,” which also picked up a Best Choreography nod.
KATSEYE’s inclusion is the one raising eyebrows, and it’s worth being precise about why. The group was built by HYBE and Geffen Records through the reality competition “The Debut: Dream Academy,” explicitly conceived as a K-pop-style group for Western audiences. Of its members, only Yoonchae Jung is Korean. The group doesn’t describe itself as a K-pop act. “Pinky Up” — the same track KpopWave clocked at a tight 2:11 in our recent piece on short-form song structure — contains no Korean lyrics at all.
Not the First Time
This isn’t a one-nomination story. Last year, Lisa won this exact category with “Born Again,” a fully English track featuring Doja Cat and Raye — two artists with no connection to the Korean music industry at all. This year, Lisa is nominated again, for “Dream,” also entirely in English. Two years running, the trophy for “Best K-Pop” has gone to, or is in the running for, a song with no Korean-language content and collaborators who have never worked inside Korea’s music industry.
The halo effect extends further than the K-Pop category itself. HUNTR/X — the fictional girl group from Netflix’s animated film “KPop Demon Hunters,” voiced by EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami — is nominated for Song of the Year alongside BTS’s “SWIM.” No members of HUNTR/X exist as performers outside the film. The category built to honor Korean pop music now sits comfortably next to a nomination for a group that has never performed as itself.
Two Ceremonies, Two Mistakes
The Mirror Image
Put the two ceremonies side by side and the shape of the problem gets easier to see. The Recording Academy’s new Asian Pop category drew criticism, including BTS’s boycott, for being built too narrow — a single box asked to hold K-pop, J-pop, and C-pop together, more a sorting mechanism than a genuine honor. MTV’s Best K-Pop category has the inverse problem: it isn’t narrow at all. There’s no working requirement that a nominee be Korean, sing in Korean, or identify with the genre the category is named for.
Lumps K-pop, J-pop, and C-pop into a single box regardless of language or industry — a category BTS declined to enter at all.
No requirement of Korean language, Korean membership, or self-identification — open enough that a fully English track has won or been nominated two years straight.
Neither mistake looks intentional. The Grammys’ category reads like an inclusion effort that never checked whether the artists it was built for actually wanted to be grouped that way. MTV’s category reads like nobody has revisited its criteria since it was created — a “K-pop” label loose enough to keep absorbing whatever HYBE, Geffen, or Netflix packages as K-pop-adjacent, because the aesthetic sells regardless of the language underneath it.
2025: Lisa’s “Born Again” (feat. Doja Cat, Raye) — fully English — wins Best K-Pop. 2026: KATSEYE’s “Pinky Up” (zero Korean lyrics, one Korean member) and Lisa’s “Dream” (fully English) are both nominated. Two award cycles, the same gap between the category’s name and its contents.
Who Actually Loses Here
The acts with the most to lose from an undefined category aren’t the ones bending it — it’s the ones competing inside it on its stated terms. CORTIS’s “REDRED” and BLACKPINK’s “JUMP” are Korean-language releases by Korean-majority groups running for the same trophy as tracks with neither. That’s not a scandal each year on its own; it’s a pattern that, two cycles in, is hard to read as coincidence.
None of this requires bad faith on MTV’s part, and it’s worth saying plainly: expanding what counts as “K-pop adjacent” isn’t inherently wrong, and KATSEYE and Lisa aren’t doing anything dishonest by existing inside a category MTV chose to nominate them for. The question isn’t whether these are good songs — several clearly are. It’s whether a category can keep calling itself “Best K-Pop” while declining, for two years running, to say what K-pop actually has to be.
We don’t think MTV is trying to erase anyone here — if anything, the opposite problem. “Best K-Pop” keeps swelling to include whatever reads as K-pop-adjacent, which looks less like malice than like a category nobody has bothered to redefine since it was created. But an undefined box is still a box, and it’s still doing work. Every year it nominates or crowns a fully English track with a thin Korean connection, it quietly tells the Korean-language acts competing alongside them that the prize was never really about the language, the industry, or the culture the category is named for — just an aesthetic package that happens to be easy to sell as “K-pop” to a Western audience.
The Recording Academy’s mistake, the one we wrote about three weeks ago, was building an Asian Pop box too small to hold BTS. MTV’s mistake is building a K-pop box too big to mean anything. Put the two side by side and neither institution has actually done the hard part yet — not making the box bigger or smaller, but deciding what’s supposed to be inside it.
2026 VMA Best K-Pop nominee list and category details per Soompi, Korea JoongAng Daily, and Sportskeeda’s official nominations coverage (all August 18–19, 2026).
KATSEYE’s origin, member composition, and “Pinky Up” lyric content, and Lisa’s 2025 “Born Again” win and 2026 “Dream” nomination, per Forbes and Yahoo Entertainment coverage of the 2026 nominations (August 18, 2026).
HUNTR/X’s Song of the Year nomination for “Golden” per Korea JoongAng Daily (August 19, 2026).
Background on the Grammys’ Best Asian Pop Music Performance category and BTS’s boycott per KpopWave’s own prior reporting: “Not Divided By Region or Language” (July 31, 2026).