Chances are that you have already heard of Kpop since the genre is slowly spreading across the globe. If you haven’t heard of it, you may have already seen a performance by one of Korea’s most internationally recognized Kpop groups, BTS or Bangtan Sonyeondan (in Korean). BTS did a pre-recorded performance on ‘Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve 2018’ show on January 1^st, 2018 and I’ve already met a couple people who were impressed by their performance.

Therefore, I think it’s appropriate to make my Passion Blog’s theme about K-pop since most of us haven’t been introduced to it or are just getting into it and might want a good starting point.

To start off, you may be wondering how I was first introduced to K-Pop. The first time I heard of its existence was five years ago, when I first came to live in Hanoi, Vietnam. Like many people who were foreign to the subject of K-pop, I thought it was weird that people listened to it and I had a really bizarre idea of what it sounded like in my head (despite the fact that I had never even heard a single beat of a K-pop song before). I was finally introduced to a K-pop song three years ago by one of my friends who managed to convinced me to listen to one called “Good Boy” by GD and Taeyang and it was so good! In fact, if you want, I would recommend listening to the song now. I put the link to the dance practice below because personally, I like watching K-pop dance practices a lot more since their dancing looks effortless.

Going back to talking about the genre itself, most artists in K-pop are from South Korea, but there are a few that are from China and Thailand. Regardless of where they are from, they must be fluent in Korean for obvious reasons. Most K-pop artists are formed from different companies – the most popular being SM Entertainment, YJ Entertainment, and JYP Entertainment. These three companies are known as “The Big Three” because they have been in the industry for a very long time and they create the most successful artists. Furthermore, in K-pop, each and every artist goes through a trainee period where they train before their debut. They train on different aspects such as singing, rapping, dancing, and learning multiple languages. The training period can take from 2 years to 9 years depending on the company and artist.

One of the reasons I really like K-pop is because each artist is very flexible in the sense that they are allowed to change the genre and style of performance that they want to do whenever they want! In fact, in the Western music industry, it’s unlikely that a member of a band can release or feature in a song alone, while in K-pop, it’s the complete opposite. As long as the company that the artist is representing has approved of the decision, the music can be released. In addition to this, artists from the same company can even form “units” where they form a group of two or three people and release a single or even an album and then go back to their original group (or solo) activities. An example of this is shown in the video above – GD and Taeyang formed a unit of two people even though they are a part of a group called BIGBANG.

To conclude, this was my best attempt at introducing K-pop in its most broad term. I learned a lot about it through my friends and my own research about the Korean culture and the genre. I’ll be linking more videos in the future, but for now, I will leave you with the video that got me hooked to K-pop from the start!

If you have any questions that you might be shy to ask or you think may be offensive or rude, it’s okay to ask them here! I know that I had quite a few questions when I was first introduced, but I had to research the answers myself because I was afraid that I would come off as rude to my friends. My only request is to be as open-minded as possible when listening to this genre if you’re not familiar with the Asian, or specifically, the East Asian culture and trends!

I hope you enjoy listening to “Good Boy.” In my next posts, I’ll be sharing more songs of different genres so maybe there will be something else that you’ll like if not this one 🙂