Where is K pop in the USA?

Can it be said that K pop had occupied the USA?
Okay. Maybe not OCCUPY but there are plenty of reasons why I would say that K pop exists in the USA.

1. Many K pop contests, concerts, and thus recognition in NY and CA areas.
2. Extremely high rate of participation for K pop auditions like SuperStarK or The Birth.
3. Attempts to make new groups modeled off of K pop artists.

Sorry about the people who may not be a US citizens, however, the viewers for my blog so far has been from the USA, and I think it is important to note how important K pop is in the USA.

But I digress; let's get back to the subject.

2NE1, the most influential girl group outside of South Korea.

So the first evidence that I have about K pop's popularity is that there are many K pop events that are happening in the USA. And this is solely because of the existing K pop fans in America. If there weren't that many people who are into K pop, contests like K pop contest (where people present their K pop skills by singing or dancing to K pop) , or concerts from SM, JYP, and YG in American would not have happened. In fact, it is American fans who made it possible for YG Entertainment's 2NE1 to win MTV iggy's Best New Band Award 2011.
Secondly, I chose the high participation rate from American region in K pop auditions. These auditions follows the format that is somewhat like American Idol but for K pop. Although the audition programs are very young, (the oldest one SuperStarK is only three years old, as in 2011) the high rate of participation from everywhere around the world has gained a lot of attention. One of the American participant, Shane actually is the one who got the most attention as a foreigner because he made it to top 6 in the audition program, The Birth.

Now, the third evidence that I have may be somewhat misleading. You will know why as I explain.
So there is a group called Heart 2 Heart, whose concepts and ideas are adopted obviously from K pop. But the responses to their debut was absolutely FAIL. If you want to check them out, the video is down below.

Anyways, whether this is a joke, as many people say, or not, one clear thing is that K pop is influencing American market to the extent that it is being mimicked by American entertainment companies. Now that I think about it, you've got to check this video out as well, by a boy group TeenTop, who is considered one of the sloppier group but still does a great job explaining where Heart 2 Heart came from.

This post is actually made because of your comments, and I will still post about something that you guys want to know about in the future. So please feel free to ask questions, write a comment, and get a new response from me :) I think I will be posting only one another post, because I have a plane schedule this week... :(

But just keep commenting or ask me questions; I appreciate it a lot! Alrighty. See youuuu!!

Dude Check this out!!!

A Vietnames individual who tries to lip sync 2PM's hand's up so hard but... LMFAOhope you guys found this entertaining XD

I can just tell what K pop did this to this young and innocent soul.

Here's the original one. Yep, this one is a live video and yep, if you pay attention at first, you'll see that they are JYP artists.

So I wanted to post about Asian fans today; as you see up there, the response that K pop artists get is sometimes overwhlemingly shocking. Even before we start talking about globalization of K pop, there has been so many indication that Korean culture itself is being followed by Asian countries, espeicially ones in South Asia.

It turns out that Korean Wave, (which I talked about in the second post, Everywhere?) has affected South Asia very, very hard that the young people started following K pop, popular culture in Korea, as well as they followed fashions and lifestyle in the dramas and TV programs that are being imported to their countries.

It is kind of amazing that, once Korean Wave become one of the concept, people were just so fantic about following, or at least pacing up with K Wave that K pop has become something almost of a must-follow thing among young people in South Asian countries like... Vietnam (as you can see)!

Yeah, today, I sort of digressed from reviewing styles of entertainment companies. I should have reviewed YG entertainment today, which is known for BIG BANG and 2NE1, who recently got MTV Iggy's Best New Band in the World this year. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut.... I will see if I want to review YG. I will do that if there is no comments posing some questions. Unless that happens, I will continue with YG entertainment review on Monday next week.

Until then, be well! :)

Oh yeah, I forgot to ask you guys something. Would you guys rather have me post videos with English subs or no? Some peopl just like to see the video first and search the video on YouTube later to understand what they are singing about.

Please answer by commenting, or answering to the survey that I have on the botton of this blog page.

SNSD, Super Junior, SHINee and more!

Arguably the biggest and the most influential K pop entertainment company now is SM Entertainment. Let's talk about this SM Nation today. 

courtesy of http://www.wikipedia.org/

What do you find common between SNSD (Girl's generation) and Super Junior?

As you might have guessed, (or not! perhaps) the groups that belongs to SM Entertainment is BIG. Unlike Wondergirls or 2PM, Girl's generation has 9 members, as Super Junior started out with 13 members! Why?

There are many conjectures about the reason why SME is doing this; if there are too many members in the group, it is hard for the audiences to learn their names and faces, as it is certainly the most important thing that entertainment companies have to be mindful about. If fans cannot remember any member's name and move away from them, then what is good to have nine or so members in a group? It is just unproductive to have bunch of members in a group since the profit has to be divided to each member of the group.

Well, SME basically set the precedent that K pop groups can be large.

Girl's Generation is the girl group that got the most attention from 2010-2011, according to the K pop music chart, in addition to their 9 weeks of keeping 1st place with their 2nd album, Gee (which is what you are looking at above).
Super Juniot needs no introduction; they are just so popular especially in South Asian countries like Thailand, Vietnam, and Miyanmar. The super group with 13 members, they are faring quite well even today.

SME's musics are all edgy. Very. I said that JYPE's were creative, and SME's are definitely the one that JYP tries to get away from; because SME set what is conventional and orthodox in K pop. SME got the most view in YouTube as a video producer of Korean origin. (this means that they get that much of attention abroad, since Koreans watch videos through other websites, mostly through Nate.net).

There is no comment question today; I am leaving it open to you! :)
here are some more videos from different SM artists, if you want to see what they look/sound like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dww9UjJ4Dt8 SHINee -- Lucifer (Boy group)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8ZrPFMr_nY f(x) -- Nu ABO (Girl group)

I will be back with YG Entertainment post tomorrow, which will be the end of my review on three most influential K pop companies. Until then, bbye!

Management Companies: JYP

So one of my acquaintance today saw Wondergirls's photo which I posted in my yesterday's blog and said, "Ho Ho Ho, they don't look like Koreans... They look like they are from the 60s and sort of resemble dream girls."
-sigh-
Okay. Let's break this down. And this will be what I am going to be talking about today because
NO ONE LEFT COMMENT... (ㅠ.ㅠ)... Please comment. I am begging to your English feet.

counrtesy of www.wordpress.com

So K pop groups which are gaining popularity in and out of the USA now are ALL in control of some kind of management companies. What does this mean? Well, it's not too complicated, actually. K pop artist are created through a system that is very structured over the past 20 years of K pop history.

Say you want to be a K pop artist. (HerpDerp) Firstly, you'd have to get into a certain management company through auditions at a young age. Then, you have to go through apprenticeship, which takes about 3~4 years in average. By the time you go through that period, you have to compete against other apprentices of that management company to debut as a member in an idol group.

JYP entertainment is one of those company that produces such idol group through strucutred system of apprenticeship. This company is led by Jin Young Park (English name JYP; where the name of this company comes from), who likes to try unprecedented kind of beats, rhythm, and concepts; applying retro music on Wondergirls was one of his many trials to make a creative album to produce something out of the box.

courtesy of www.allkpop.com

This retro concept was tried after Wondergirls gained place in South Korean music industry as the most influentical group in K pop. This hopefully made sense and explained why Wondergirls are wearing something that your MOM would have worn when she was attending college (yes she did).

2PM, 2AM, Miss A, and Wondergirls are the best known JYP artist.
You may even know Rain, who was a JYP artist until 2009 (yeah that dude from Ninja Assassin).

Anyways, with a video that completely has nothing to do with K pop, I think I might stop here for now. Hopefull you liked this post on JYP Entertainment, and remember, you can always leave comment down below, and I will answer any question that might come to you with the best of my ability.

If I do not see any other comments, I think I might review the big three K pop entertainment companies and their artist. So I will comeback to you guys with SM Entertainment tomorrow.

To end today's post, let me ask you this question:

Who are dream girls???

Everywhere?

So on the last post I mentioned about how K pop is just about EVERYWHERE.
Then, now, how did it gain such a great attention?

courtesy of www.joinsmsn.com

Above picture is a poster of a Korean drama, "Winter Sonata," which gained a lot of popularity in Japan, China, and Taiwan around early 2000s. Basically, this drama did two things: first, it created an international star Bae Young Jun (the man in the picture), and catalyzed to make the term, "Korean Wave (:한류)." The people that watched this drama, which gained an unusually great international popularity, then started to pay attention to South Korean fashion and lifestyle, because they were such a fan of this drama, and those came after (some of them specifically made to target international audiences, although they were shown in Korea). From then, this so-called "Korean Wave" has become the driving force in lifestyle of Eastern Asian youth.
So as Korean Wave was influencing people in all of East Asia (some South Asia like Vietnam), the followers of Korean Wave came to know about K pop easily, as they were following through what is popular, and considered "cool" among Korean Youth.

courtesy of www.iamkoream.com

So that's Asia.

How about Europe and the USA?
Some of you may know K pop idol groups like SNSD, Wondergirls, or 2NE1. As they held concerts for Korean diasporas, it started to gain some attention by people who are native to those regions. Thus, American and European youths started to search for these groups and their music.

How did you come to know about your K pop groups and their music? Comment down below! :)

K pop!

K pop!

Courtesy of www.SovietRussia.org.

So we hear about so-called "K pop" these days, and your friend talk about it. What is, then, Korean popular music, really?

It is relatively a new phenomenon in the USA, and even a later development compared to K pop in Europe or Asia. It is clearly happening as we are speaking right now, and I would like to tell you what K pop is, and what it means to us, the young generation of 2010s.I just have limited amount of resources to find out just about every aspect of K pop music, singers, and their influences in the society. But what is even more challenging for me is that, how will I know what kind of thing YOU will be interested? Thus your contribution to this blog will be very crucial.

There is another reason why subscriber's contribution is so important; since this blog is written in English, we only have limited people who can read about K pop, while there are K pop lovers outside of English-speaking nations. So where English-speaking K pop lovers are in terms of information, I would have to know (by the way, I am Korean) in order to blog in a level that is making sense to YOU.

Well, let's begin from here:

have you heard about K pop? Tell me what you know about it! If you just
don't have any idea what it is, then what would you like to know about it?

Comment anything that you feel like it is necessary for me to post on. Comments can be as silly as possible, it just does not matter to me as long as it makes sense! :)

Just some infos about K pop:

1. K pop artists are holding concerts just about everywhere on this planet; Vietnam, Thailand, Germany, France, Korea (huh!), Japan, China, Malaysia, Taiwan, USA,Australia, England... you name it!
2. These are not concerts attended by Korean diasporas around the world. In fact, the majority are from their respective regions!
3. In Korea (as of now), official K pop artists are about 100 in number. Let's talk about what's here deeply on the next post.

Right now, I want some comment for me to prepare for posts after that second post, which I will write tomorrow. Please comment below!