KOREAN WAVE AND KPOP

We all know the importance that Asian culture has had through history and still has nowadays. Usually, when someone talks about any Asian influence we think about Japan or China, but I want to focus on a recently popular movement called the Korean Wave. It doesn’t have a “starting point”, but we could say that it started being recognised in the 90’s.

The main source of its fame is music. I first started to become interested in Korean music after I heard the famous musical success “Gangnam Style” by Psy, because I didn’t know which the language of the song was.

Today they have their own musical category called KPOP and some groups are even more famous in foreign countries than in their native one. Some bands like EXO, BTS, Super Junior or Topp-Dogg are widely known around the world because of their amazing videos and performances.

When I first watched one of their videos I was impressed by the coordination of their movements despite the large number of members, because most of the bands have at least eight members. Probably you’re wondering why they have so many members; well, it might be just to draw our attention, because you have a more complete range of voices to work with or because you don’t need to hire dancers, but none of them are the real reasons. They have so many members because their objective at first was to please everyone’s preferences. These bands were mainly intended to have girl followers and as everyone has different tastes, each member of the band was to represent a type of personality (there’s a cute one, a cool one, a rich one... and usually there’s a rapper too).

But then... what happens with the boys who like this kind of music? Seeing that it was so well accepted by men too, there appeared a lot of female bands such as AOA, KARA, Cosmic Girls or Sistar. These bands work exactly the same but all their members are girls.

Sometimes two bands perform a song together, but it’s not very common because they never hit so many views as they usually have individually. I really recommend you to watch some KPOP videos even though you don’t like the song just to see the dances, and who knows, maybe you can find a song you like (some videos are just nonsense and that’s why they are so funny). Although it’s called KPOP there are some groups that have tried to write songs from other genres.

Last but not least just in case you search for the lyrics online let me give you some advice; unless you know Korean or have a really good pronunciation with foreign languages, don’t try to sing in front of other people because they may think you are either cursing someone or calling them stupid (personal experience).

And that’s it! I hope you’ve enjoyed and learned something new. Feel free to let me know if you’ve heard KPOP before or if you intend to do it. SEE YA!