K-Pop’s Moving West, but Are We Ready For It?
By JULIE LEE ‘22
Everyone has their own music taste, whether it be country, rap or afrobeats. My personal favorite genre has to be K-pop. The “K” in K-Pop stands for Korean, and surprise surprise, the music these artists produce are sung and rapped predominantly in the Korean language. While Korean is in the name, K-Pop groups do not only include members from Korea. Companies will recruit potential artists from China, Japan, Thailand, other parts of East Asia and even Western nations, on the condition that the recruit is East Asian.
In order to appeal to a worldwide audience, K-Pop groups will often include English in their tracks or release tracks in other languages like Japanese. Last year, the group GOT7, a seven-member boy group from JYP Entertainment (a major entertainment company), released their title track “Lullaby” in Spanish, English, Korean, and Chinese as a thank you to their multinational fans for supporting them even when the music wasn’t in their language.
GOT7’s inclusion of multilingual tracks is a great example of K-Pop’s rise in the world market. K-Pop’s fanbase isn’t just limited to teen girls in Korea, but to a diverse group of people from all over the world. Through their talent and music, K-Pop groups are able to bypass the language barrier and connect to fans.
Just this year, BTS, the most well-known K-Pop group of this generation, sold over 4 million copies of their newest album “Map of the Soul: Persona,” and TWICE, a nine-member girl group, were able to sell out an 11,000 seat concert in Los Angeles with little to no promotions in the West. There is no denying the success of K-Pop, with the mixture of attractive artists who can dance, sing and rap. The only hindrance idols face is xenophobia.
K-Pop is moving west, but instead of open arms, it’s greeted with resistance. The amount of times I’ve seen the same “meme” of Twitter users mocking K-Pop fans for having a favorite member of a group because “they all look the same anyway” or calling male idols homophobic slurs for wearing make-up and more “feminine” clothing speaks to western countries’ resistance. This year’s VMA’s pushed K-Pop groups into one category as a way to seperate them from the western (majority white) artists. Even groups like Blackpink, whose recent music video “Kill This Love” hit over 600 million views and counting, weren’t included in the Video of the Year category while this year’s winner Taylor Swift barely hit 150 million. It has become clear that K-Pop isn’t being taken seriously solely because of that “K” attached to the front of it.
People don’t have to like K-Pop. Like any style of music, it’s not for everyone. But, it’s time to start respecting K-Pop as a real genre and not just some fad for teen girls. Artists pour their lives into creating music for their fans to enjoy. That their work is discredited because they speak Korean shows how xenophobia and racism against Asians is ingrained into our society. As BTS’s Suga said in a magazine interview with J-14, “You'll like BTS music if you listen without prejudice.”
Image courtesy of youtube.com