Studying K-Pop: The Cultural Meaning Essay

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Globalization has made people more aware of other cultures, traditions, values, and viewpoints. In this sense, Asian cultures, including their artists, performers, and actors, gain more popularity in other nations. Among the well-known Asian music genres is K-Pop, which introduced to the world a large number of talented musicians. However, while learning about K-Pop can contribute to the understanding of the new genre, it can be valuable to study this field from a cultural perspective. This way, the cultural meaning of studying K-Pop involves a deeper understanding of the Asian communities, their values, preferences, perception of aesthetics, and artistic activity.

K-Pop can be referred to as a part of the popular culture of the Asian region. From an academic point of view, such kind of culture is an “inferior culture” culture and involves popular entertainment, art, press, and cinema (Storey 8). While being considered inferior, K-Pop is still valuable in terms of Asian ideology, which implies a systematic set of beliefs. The first cultural meaning of studying K-Pop involves learning “a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development” of Asian people (Storey 1). This will allow other nations to gain a more profound knowledge of great artists and the philosophy behind some lyrics. Furthermore, K-Pop can be useful in terms of learning about “a particular way of life” of South Korean individuals since clips of K-Pop songs might give references to or show Asian holidays, sports, and religious festivals (Storey 2). Lastly, “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity” might be learned via K-Pop due to Korean approaches to performances (Storey 2). This way, K-Pop serves as a conduit of information to learn about the Asian community.

Therefore, comprehending the cultural significance of K-Pop requires a better understanding of Asian populations, including their values, tastes, and conception of aesthetics and artistic endeavor. Learning a broad pattern of the intellectual, social, and artistic growth of Asian people is the primary cultural meaning of studying K-Pop. Additionally, K-Pop can be beneficial in learning about a certain approach to the life of South Korean people because music videos may make references to or depict Asian holidays, sporting events, and religious festivals. Finally, due to Korean attitudes to performances, practices of artistic activity may be learned through K-Pop.

Storey, John. “What is Popular Culture?” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction . Routledge, 2021, pp.1-15.

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How to Write Your College Essay About Kpop

How to Write Your College Essay About Kpop

An old client recently reached out to us a few weeks ago about how to write your college essay about Kpop. It’s not exactly their essay per se. Instead, it was a sibling of theirs who was beginning the college process for the current year.

As the turn of a new generation comes to fruition, modern institutions are beginning to accept the intricacies and individual elements which make up people’s identities. This is especially true with the rising popularity of holistic admissions, which dictates that admissions officers must take a critical look at the “whole applicant” past the numbers.

Thus, our client’s question, “How do you write your college essay on Kpop?”, is actually quite a valid question to ask. Because Kpop is a rather unconventional college essay topic, you’ll need to tread lightly and take careful precautions when writing about this topic. It’s easy to fall for the common pitfalls when writing about personal interests that can be seen as unconventional.

So, we’ve listed some valuable advice below (plus how to actually write the essay well enough that it stands out amongst other applicants.)

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Table of Contents

A Kpop College Essay is Still About You.

What did kpop do for you that made you a strong applicant, stand out amongst the other stans, really, don’t lose track of the main prompt., weave your story into a narrative format..

an essay about kpop

One of the things people forget when writing their college essay about Kpop is themselves.

Consider what purpose a college admissions essay serves to begin with:

Many applicants apply to top-tier universities with highly competitive GPAs. This leads to higher competition, which leads to admissions officers needing extracurriculars and essays to help distinguish between students. So, it’s imperative that the college essays are written about YOU.

The topic can be anything you choose. However, because admissions officers must distinguish between applicants, they need to know enough about their unique traits and personal qualities to make a proper decision on their acceptance.

So, let’s say you want to write a college essay on your favorite Kpop group: Ateez.

Who takes the spotlight? You, or Wooyoung? Yup, that’s right. Unfortunately, this is about you —not Wooyoung.

You can talk about how you fell in love with him. You can also talk about how seeing him inspired a fire in you to pursue your current aspirations. Maybe his charm gave you the spark you needed to take care of your fashion sense, clean up your act, and stay fit to take care of your body.

Whatever topic it is you choose to write about, writing your college essay about Kpop MUST be more about you and your character than about Kpop. This is what admissions officers will use as a metric to measure your value as a potential candidate for their school. This brings us to our next section.

an essay about kpop

To look for a strong applicant, the admissions officers will comb through your application with a fine-tooth, well, comb. This means they will deeply analyze each paragraph and sentence you write to better understand the character behind the writing.

Imagine the admissions process in the same way as your typical high school English class. Your teacher asks you to read pages 15-17, and provide a deep analysis of the character’s personality traits. This is essentially the same process in the admissions office.

“What can I make out of this person’s character?” “What does being president of Science Olympiad and founding a nonprofit at their local high school mean?” “Does it mean they are very conscientious? Does it mean they’re just looking for things to write in their application?”

With this in mind, you need to input some proper characteristics into your application essay.

If you are writing your college essay about Kpop, then it needs to show how Kpop made you a strong candidate for the school. What were the elements of your journey with Kpop that brought forth unique characteristics in your personality that would make you a great fit for the school?

Let’s say for instance you want to get into UCB Haas for Business. You write the “how do you express your creative side” essay prompt by talking about how Kpop brings out your creative side. Maybe Kpop brought forth a rabbit hole of new hobbies into your life that you normally would have never considered. This includes listening to the music, drawing the art of your favorite members, and taking the time to write popular fan stories on platforms like Webnovel and Wattpad.

What can someone learn from this? Well, this essay not only shows your creative side. It also shows that your creative hobbies are more than just times to relax. It shows you are someone who is able to take initiative to conduct big projects with your free time and truly go the full measure on your creative outlets.

Thus, someone getting into UCB Haas may truly benefit from this topic. Why? Well, what makes a great potential applicant to Berkeley’s business school? Is it the Kpop? Nope. It’s the conscientiousness of the student to take action and build things off of hobbies that they truly love.

Berkeley will not read your college essay about Kpop and think, “Perfect! We needed someone who was interested in Kpop!” Rather, they will read your essay and think, “Perfect! We needed someone who could take action and start projects that they’re truly passionate about!”

an essay about kpop

Many other fans will have reasons to appreciate Kpop, that’s for sure. However, you need to do some introspection to discover why your interest in Kpop differs from the rest.

In the college admissions process, where competition is fierce, standing out amongst the rest is crucial. You can’t get away with a generic college essay talking about Kpop that says, “I was always interested in E’Last.” It’s critical that you mention what your unique journey was in getting into that group.

“But, I got into the group because they had good music and one of the members was super cute! That’s no different from everyone else, right?”

This observation is perhaps true. However, there are typically small details that, if you zero in on them, can make your experience with Kpop unique compared to the rest. Think of HOW Kpop made you feel and WHAT those emotions were in your experience. The more you zero in on the details, the more you’ll start to realize that your experience with Kpop is actually quite unique and special compared to the rest.

Here’s an example.

“The first time I found out about BTS, I wasn’t really all too excited at all. It was with my friends during a sleepover. Samantha would roll over from her side of the bed and poke at me with the plastic corner of her phone to say, ‘see this man, he’s a fine like wine isn’t he?’ That’s when i’d reply with a muffled ‘mmmhm…’ before drifting once again to sleep. I don’t know why I did that. In fact, I don’t know why I never really bothered to listen or appreciate the next great glimmering object in the distance. It was like there was some invisible block in myhead telling me to just stick with what was safe. Why bother with anything new to begin with anyway? But, that’s seldom how Kpop works. It always finds a way to meander itself into one’s life; and I am very, very grateful for that… “

The reason this set of sentences works well is that the admissions officers may infer that the applicant used Kpop as a medium to discover more of the unknown. The applicant had a conservative temperament that was unwilling to try new things; but, Kpop made them into someone who is able to appreciate the new and experiment more.

an essay about kpop

So, maybe you had the chance to see Dreamcatcher in your Youtube recommended list. Perhaps that first click is what got you enthralled. It may be the case that their music just made talking about them impossible without getting into a big, giggly fit. Hey, that’s understandable!

Everyone has their favorite group to obsess about. Everyone has their biases. Everyone gets a little bit too captivated sometimes.

However, it’s very common for people who are very passionate about their hobbies, interests, and projects to get tunnel vision about their particular subject. This can be quite devastating, especially if you lose track of the main prompt.

For instance, a university may require you to answer why you deserve to attend their school in a 650-word response. Instead of circling back to answer the question, it can be very easy to think that we need to dedicate 450 words to just how amazing one idol was to you. This would be too much, and it takes away from the main purpose of the college essays.

When writing a college essay about Kpop, one of the best ways to stay on track with the main essay prompt is to implement this rule: every time you write a sentence, look back at the prompt to see if your sentence answers or at least follows into the prompt’s question. If your sentence either answers the prompt or leads into it, then you know you’re on the right track.

So, an essay that only dives deeper into the history and lore of an idol group without answering the main prompt probably isn’t a good idea.

an essay about kpop

The college essay narrative format is exactly what it sounds like, a narrative. This means that your college essay will be structured much like how someone tells a story. This is not in a practical or overly-formal structure.

The narrative format typically works for anyone writing about meaningful hobbies, personal experiences, interests, and personal projects. This is because these topics help paint a good picture for admissions officers to see more of “you” in your character rather than just the scores you’ve earned and your academic performance.

Kpop as a college essay topic typically works very well for narrative formats. It gives you the chance to show more of your personality through your deep passion and interest in Kpop. However, most stans and fans have a special journey connected with their relationship with Kpop. It may have started with an off-handed recommendation from a friend. Or, it could have started from sheer curiosity after hearing about a certain idol.

No matter how you were introduced to Kpop, most if not everyone has had a journey with it. The narrative format will help you build the proper foundation for your story. The important thing to consider when doing this is making sure your narrative story dives deep into what you felt and what it made you into. How did your personal Kpop journey mold and change you into the person you are today? How do those qualities contribute to making you a great candidate for this school?

If you are still struggling with writing your college essay about Kpop, or have any questions at all about the writing process, don’t be afraid to contact us for a free consultation . Our 30-minute college admissions phone consultation will help you navigate the essay writing process and create a strong essay that will stand out amongst the rest of the applicants.

4 thoughts on “How to Write Your College Essay About Kpop”

Thank you so much for writing this article!! I’m considering writing about kpop for my common application since it’s just had such a huge affect on me as a person. All of this advice will come in super handy when I start writing! 😀

Thank you! It’s good to see people using this topic because there truly is a lot of potential in it! Let us know if you need any help with your writing too; you can reach us on our contact page!

Hi! Great article and definitely helped me FINALLY finish my essay 🙂 Is there a way you guys could read the final draft that I have for extra feedback?

Hi Jenny! Thanks! I’m glad it helped and I’d be happy to provide some feedback! I just sent you an email!

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Home / Essay Samples / Music / Kpop / The Development Of K-pop And Its Influence On East And Southeast Asian Countries

The Development Of K-pop And Its Influence On East And Southeast Asian Countries

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The Literary Life of K-pop Lyrics

myeongdong

Myeong-dong, Seoul at night. Photo © therealrealjd . CC BY-NC 2.0.

If you know me, you know I love K-pop. You’d think a man in his midthirties would learn to step back from the front lines of popular culture, but I still check the Billboard 100 and K-pop charts every week (and get the thrill of my life when these two charts have the same No. 1). I also listen to almost every new release and have the latest hot music video on repeat in the background while I write—at the time of this writing, it’s “Lalisa” by Lisa from BLACKPINK.

In all my stories there are mentions of mainstream pop music, from the shimmering names of Mariah Carey, Kylie Minogue, and Jennifer Lopez to the first-generation Korean wave artists S.E.S (the TLC of Korea) and Fin.K.L, to 2NE1, Girls Generation, f(x), T-ara . . . In my field, which is literary fiction, pop music, especially K-pop, is looked down upon, but this music is such a part of my daily life that I naturally include it in my work. How did my life come to this, I find myself wondering, and I can only come up with one answer: genetics, or household tradition.

My father, who was something of a decadent man of leisure, would fill up our tiny house with fancy audio equipment and hoarded music like it was running out. Every day of my childhood, I’d wake up to the strains of Yo-Yo Ma’s cello or to Lee Dong-won, Park In-su, or Whitney Houston, which perhaps made it inevitable that I’d become obsessed with pop music. Ever since I was ten years old and bought my first albums—S.E.S’s debut and Mariah Carey’s Music Box —I always had a “favorite singer,” and even today, when I don’t have a means of playing CDs anymore, I still try to squeeze another new album into the crammed shelves of my own little apartment. And thus, the aficionado (or hoarder?) doesn’t fall far from the tree.

“The resultant strains of beauty sear the solitude of the city deep into the listener’s bones.”  

My loud declarations of belonging to fandom culture got me a regular spot on MBC’s This Starry Night , a Korean radio program that’s been on since 1969. For the past couple of years, I’ve done the pop classics segment, where we examine lyrics from ’70s and ’80s K-pop, tracking their influence on contemporary songs. Not a difficult job considering my upbringing, and hardly a job at all considering how much I love doing it.

By the time I was six months into this gig, I’d accumulated what is surely the biggest collection of gem-like K-pop lyrics in the world. For example, I discovered that contemporary singer-songwriters Yozoh and Lee Sora have the most famous poetic lyrics of all Korean musicians; Yozoh’s song “We Lay Down Like Lines” seems on the superficial level like a love song, but going deeper, it reveals an existential layer as well as a metaphysical aspect regarding time and space. Lee Sora has her famous breakup anthems “The Wind Blows,” “Please,” and “Belief” as well as songs of aching self-realization and solitude like “I Am a Star” and “Track 9”—a true poet through and through. Indeed, these two artists topped a list of “Greatest Songwriters Picked by Poets” a year ago.

Aside from these famed singer-songwriters, I also hold a special place in my heart for Cho Yong-pil, an artist whose ability to capture urban life continues to amaze me. Even before the release of my novel Love in the Big City, about a young man navigating life in contemporary Seoul, the word “city” was very meaningful to me. I was born in a big city and then moved to another big city, where I live to this day; the ecology of cities has shaped every aspect of my thinking, writing, and way of living. And the first thing I think of when I hear the word “city” is always Cho Yong-pil’s 1991 song “Dream”:

Here I remain alone Wandering through the buildings and shabby alleys Eating hot tears Do those stars know my heart, my dreams When I’m sad I want to close my eyes And listen for the fragrance of home

The speaker in “Dream” probably left their home deep in the country and now lives a life among concrete buildings, holding onto their dreams as they endure a meaningless daily grind. To “eat” one’s tears instead of letting them flow or swallowing them, to use the verb “listen” to shake up the familiar phrase “fragrance of home,” the skillful spatial imagery, the sounds one immediately imagines coming from one’s faraway home on a summer night, all these sentiments fuse with the yearning in Cho Yong-pil’s unique, slightly nasal voice, and the resultant strains of beauty sear the solitude of the city deep into the listener’s bones. Searching for a similar song, I came upon “Dear Moon” from 2018, written by IU and sung by the genius artist Jehwi:

Dear moon, my moon, you never get any nearer. No matter how I run to you, you elude my grasp like the moon. Oh moon, like [the] moon, why do you not disappear. Even when I turn my back and run from you You follow me like the moon.

This song looks simple at first glance, but in one line evokes the moon as seen from the city. The sky we look up at amidst our lonely and difficult lives, the moon floating there, the speaker projecting their emotions and situation onto it—this image is not so different from that of “Dream.” It’s fascinating to me that these two songs, written thirty years apart, are evoking two very similar emotions.

Cho Yong-pil is a singer-songwriter known as the “King of Songs,” but IU is less known for her songwriting prowess; she still lives in our minds as an adorable teen idol, even when she’s penned hits like “See You on Friday,” “23,” “Palette,” “Heart,” “Night Letter,” and “Dear Moon” for other artists.

I especially love her “Night Letter” and “ Ait .” Jehwi was one of the composers of “Night Letter,” and judging from just the music, it’s more of a slow-tempo, soulful tune. IU added the words of someone writing to their lover or crush, creating a sad but sweet emotion, one you can’t quite define in so many words. Her new song “ Ait, ” on the other hand, is an up-tempo dance song that has the saddest and most desperate loss in its lyrics:

It’s hard to forget this one handspan of a memory Just because someone tells you to move on Time may keep passing but That place keeps me trapped where I am Under the orange sun we dance Together, throwing no shadows There’s no such thing as an inevitable goodbye I’ll see you there in our beautiful memories

In life, our emotions can’t be simplified into words like sadness, joy, anger, or love. Sadness can make us laugh, and laughter can leave us empty. And IU happens to be a precise lyricist of these familiar yet obscured emotional dynamics.

Recently I went to my father’s house to look at his music collection. Among the usual classics, old pop, and popera, I found a recently purchased copy of IU’s Chat-Shire album. The thought that I wasn’t the only one who would discover in IU’s music the echoes of a thirty-year-old moment made me smile.

This publication was facilitated with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

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How K-pop became a global phenomenon

No country takes its fluffy pop music more seriously than South Korea.

by Aja Romano

an essay about kpop

They call it Hallyu, the Korean wave: the idea that South Korean pop culture has grown in prominence to become a major driver of global culture, seen in everything from Korean dramas on Netflix to Korean skincare regimens dominating the cosmetics industry to delicious Korean tacos on your favorite local menu. And at the heart of Hallyu is the ever-growing popularity of K-pop — short, of course, for Korean pop music.

K-pop has become a truly global phenomenon thanks to its distinctive blend of addictive melodies, slick choreography and production values, and an endless parade of attractive South Korean performers who spend years in grueling studio systems learning to sing and dance in synchronized perfection.

Hallyu has been building for two decades , but K-pop in particular has become increasingly visible to global audiences in the past five to 10 years. South Korean artists have hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart at least eight times since the Wonder Girls first cracked it in 2009 with their crossover hit “Nobody” — released in four different languages, including English — and the export of K-pop has ballooned South Korea’s music industry to an impressive $5 billion industry .

Now, with South Korea hosting the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang at a moment of extremely heightened geopolitical tensions , K-pop has taken on a whole new kind of sociopolitical significance, as South Korea proudly displays its best-known export before the world.

How did K-pop become a $5 billion global industry?

an essay about kpop

Vox explore K-pop’s elaborate music videos, adoring fans, and killer choreography for our Netflix series Explained .

Watch now on Netflix.

What the Winter Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies told us about K-pop (and vice versa)

During the Olympic opening ceremonies on February 9, 2018, athletes marched in the Parade of Nations to the accompaniment of a select group of K-pop hits , each playing into the image South Korea wants to present right now: one of a country that’s a fully integrated part of the global culture.

The Parade of Nations songs all have significant international and digital presences, and each advertises the cross-cultural fluency of K-pop. Twice’s “Likey” is a huge recent hit for the group, and recently made it to 100 million views on YouTube faster than any other song by a K-pop girl group. (The video prominently features the girls on a fun field trip to Vancouver, marketing the idea that they’re at home all over the world.) Big Bang’s “Fantastic Baby” was one of the first K-pop hits to make inroads in American culture and was featured on Glee’ s K-pop episode along with “Gangnam Style,” which also played during the Parade of Nations.

Psy’s ubiquitous 2012 hit is part doofy comedy and part clear-eyed satire, made by a musician who’s part of a wave of South Korean musicians who’ve studied at American music schools. “Gangnam Style” spent five years racking up more than 3 billion views on YouTube, reigning as the most-viewed video in the platform’s history before being dethroned in 2017.

As a whole, these songs and performers show us that K-pop stars can excel at everything from singing to comedy to rap to dance to social commentary. And their fun, singable melodies make it clear that the South Korean music industry has perfected the pop production machine into an effervescent assembly line of ridiculously catchy tunes sung by ridiculously talented people in ridiculously splashy videos. When Red Velvet sing, “Bet you wanna (bet you wanna) dance like this” in their single “Red Flavor,” they’re sending a message to the world that South Korea is modern but wholesome, colorful, inviting, and fun.

And at the Olympics closing ceremonies, we saw live performances from two more K-pop icons: solo artist CL, formerly a member of the powerhouse girl group 2NE1, and multi-national band Exo. CL’s appearance was a testament to her success in achieving one of the holy grails for K-Pop — a crossover into US fame, or at least onto the Billboard Hot 100. CL has landed on the list twice since 2015.

Exo, meanwhile, is arguably one of the two or three biggest K-Pop successes going right now. The band was a perfect fit for the Olympics — they’re multilingual and were formed with the intention of performing in Mandarin and Japanese as well as South Korea. And for several years, Exo was split into two subgroups, one performing mainly in Korea and one mainly in China. All of this made them a great choice to serve as a symbolic transition between nations, as Tokyo gets ready to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, followed by Beijing hosting the Winter Olympics in 2022.

Prominently missing from the live performance roster at the Olympics was the most popular K-pop band in the universe at the moment: BTS. BTS became an uncontested US phenomenon in 2017, with two songs hitting the Billboard Hot 100, a huge performance at the American Music Awards, a New Year’s Eve performance in Times Square, and a remix of their latest single, “Mic Drop,” done by Steve Aoki. If it’s possible to ascribe a tipping point to a “wave” that seems to be endless, BTS might be it; it certainly seems that the all-boy group has gone as far as a South Korean band can go in terms of making inroads into American culture — they recently graced the cover of American Billboard magazine. But while the band was missing from the Olympics, their song “DNA” — the other of their pair of 2017 hits — did at least play during the opening ceremonies, much to the delight of fans.

None of this is accidental. K-pop has become the international face of South Korea thanks to an extremely regimented, coordinated production system. More than any other international music industry, K-pop has been strategically designed to earworm its way into your brain — and to elevate South Korea and its culture onto the world stage.

How did we get here? Through a combination of global political changes, savvy corporatization and media management, and a heck of a lot of raw talent being ground through a very powerful stardom mill.

K-pop began in 1992 with one electric hip-hop performance

K-pop as we know it wouldn’t exist without democracy and television — specifically, South Korea’s reformation of its democratic government in 1987, with its accompanying modernization and lightening of censorship, and the effect this change had on television.

Prior to the establishment of the nation’s Sixth Republic , there were only two broadcast networks in the country, and they largely controlled what music South Koreans listened to; singers and musicians weren’t much more than tools of the networks. Networks introduced the public to musical stars primarily through weekend music talent shows. Radio existed but, like the TV networks, was under tight state control. Independent music production didn’t really exist, and rock music was controversial and subject to banning ; musicians and songs were primarily introduced to the public through the medium of the televised talent show, and radio served as little more than a subsidiary platform for entertainers who succeeded on those weekend TV competitions.

Before the liberalization of South Korean media in the late ‘80s, the music produced by broadcast networks was primarily either slow ballads or “trot,” a Lawrence Welk-ish fusion of traditional music with old pop standards. After 1987, though, the country’s radio broadcasting expanded rapidly, and South Koreans became more regularly exposed to more varieties of music from outside the country, including contemporary American music.

But TV was still the country’s dominant, centralized form of media: As of 1992, national TV networks had penetrated above 99 percent of South Korean homes, and viewership was highest on the weekends, when the talent shows took place. These televised talent shows were crucial in introducing music groups to South Korean audiences; they still have an enormous cultural impact and remain the single biggest factor in a South Korean band’s success.

As Moonrok editor Hannah Waitt points out in her excellent series on the history of K-pop, K-pop is unusual as a genre because it has a definitive start date, thanks to a band called Seo Taiji and Boys. Seo Taiji had previously been a member of the South Korean heavy metal band Sinawe , which was itself a brief but hugely influential part of the development of Korean rock music in the late ‘80s. After the band broke up, he turned to hip-hop and recruited two stellar South Korean dancers, Yang Hyun-suk and Lee Juno, to join him as backups in a group dubbed Seo Taiji and Boys. On April 11, 1992, they performed their single “Nan Arayo (I Know)” on a talent show:

Not only did the Boys not win the talent show, but the judges gave the band the lowest score of the evening. But immediately after the song debuted, “I Know” went on to top South Korea’s singles charts for a record-smashing 17 weeks, which would stand for more than 15 years as the longest No. 1 streak in the country’s history.

“I Know” represented the first time modern American-style pop music had been fused with South Korean culture. Seo Taiji and Boys were innovators who challenged norms around musical styles, song topics, fashion, and censorship. They sang about teen angst and the social pressure to succeed within a grueling education system, and insisted on creating their own music and writing their own songs outside of the manufactured network environment.

By the time Seo Taiji and Boys officially disbanded in 1996, they had changed South Korea’s musical and performance landscape, paving the way for other artists to be even more experimental and break even more boundaries — and for music studios to quickly step in and take over, forming an entire new studio system from the remnants of the broadcast-centered system.

Between 1995 and 1998, three powerhouse music studios appeared: SM Entertainment (often referred to as SM Town) in 1995; JYP Entertainment in 1997; and YG Entertainment in 1998, created by one of the members of Seo Taiji and Boys, Yang Hyun-suk. Together, these studios began deliberately cultivating what would become known as idol groups.

The first idol group in South Korea appeared on the scene in 1996, when SM founder Lee Soo-man created a group called H.O.T. by assembling five singers and dancers who represented what he believed teens wanted to see from a modern pop group.

H.O.T. shared traits with today’s idol groups: a combination of singing, dancing, and rapping, and disparate personalities united through music. In 1999, the band was chosen to perform in a major benefit concert with Michael Jackson, in part because of their potential to become international pop stars — an indication that even in the ’90s, the industry was attuned to K-pop’s potential for global success.

That potential can be seen in the studios’ eager promotion of multilingual artists like BoA , who made her public debut at the age of 13 in 2000 and in the ensuing years has become one of South Korea’s best-known exports thanks to a brand built on raw talent and multicultural positivity.

All the while, K-pop as a whole was building its own brand, one based on flash, style, and a whole lot of quality.

Don’t ask what makes a K-pop song. Ask what makes a K-pop performer.

There are three things that make K-pop such a visible and unique contributor to the realm of pop music: exceptionally high-quality performance (especially dancing), an extremely polished aesthetic, and an “in-house” method of studio production that churns out musical hits the way assembly lines churn out cars.

No song more perfectly embodies these characteristics than Girls’ Generation’s 2009 hit “Gee,” a breakout success that came at a moment when K-pop was starting to turn heads internationally due to a number of recent milestone hits — notably Big Bang’s “Haru, Haru,” Wonder Girls’ “Nobody,” and Brown Eyed Girls’ “Abracadabra.” “Gee” was a viral internet earworm , breaking out of typical K-pop fan spaces and putting Girls’ Generation within striking distance of US fame.

The combination of cheeky, colorful concept, clever choreography, cute girls, and catchy songwriting makes “Gee” the quintessential K-pop song: It’s fun, infectious, and memorable — and it was all but algorithmically produced by a studio machine responsible for delivering perfect singing, perfect dancing, perfect videos, and perfect entertainment. The then-nine members of Girls’ Generation were factory-assembled into the picture-perfect, male-gaze-ready dolls you see in the song’s music video via extreme studio oversight and years of hard work from each woman — a combined 52 years of training in total, beginning in their childhoods.

Through highly competitive auditions, starting around ages 10 to 12, music studios induct talented children into the K-pop regimen. The children attend special schools where they take specialized singing and dancing lessons ; they learn how to moderate their public behavior and prepare for life as a pop star; they spend hours in daily rehearsals and perform in weekend music shows as well as special group performances. Through these performances, lucky kids can gain fan followings before they even officially “debut.” And when they’re old enough, if they’re really one of the lucky few, the studios will place them into an idol group or even, occasionally, launch them as a solo artist.

Once an idol group has been trained to perfection, the studios generate pop songs for them, market them, put them on TV, send them on tour, and determine when they’ll next make their “comeback” — a term that usually signals a band’s latest album release, generally accompanied by huge fanfare, special TV appearances, and a totally new thematic concept.

Because of the control they exert over their artists, South Korean music studios are directly responsible for shaping the global image of K-pop as a genre. But the industry is notoriously exploitative , and studio life is grueling to the point that it can easily cross over to abusive ; performers are regularly signed to long-term contracts, known as “slave contracts,” when they are still children, which closely dictate their private behavior, dating life, and public conduct.

The studios are also a breeding ground for predatory behavior and harassment from studio executives. In recent years, increasing public attention to these problems has given rise to change; in 2017, multiple studios agreed to significant contract reform . Still, as the recent suicide of Shinee artist Kim Jong-hyun revealed, the pressures of studio culture are rarely made public and can take a serious toll on those who grow up within the system.

Despite all this, the cloistered life of a K-pop star is coveted by thousands of South Korean teens and preteens — so much so that walk-in auditions to scout kids for the studio programs are frequently held in South Korea and New York.

In addition to studio auditions, a wave of new TV audition shows have sprung up in the past few years, giving unknowns a chance to be discovered and build a fan base. Often called idol shows or survival shows, these audition shows are comparable to American Idol and X-Factor. Competitors on these shows can make it big on their own or be grouped up — like the recently debuted group JBJ (short for the fan-dubbed moniker “Just Be Joyful”), consisting of boys who competed in the talent show Produce 101 Season 2 last year and then got put in a temporary group after fans started making composite Instagram photos of them all together. The band only has a seven-month contract; enjoy it while it lasts!

JBJ

These TV-sponsored idol shows have caused pushback from the studios, which see them as producing immature talent — and, of course, cutting into studio profits. That’s because a K-pop group’s success is directly tied to its live TV performances. Today there are numerous talent shows, along with many more variety shows and well-known chart TV countdown shows like Inkigayo and M Countdown, which factor into how successful — and therefore bankable — a K-pop idol or idol group is seen to be. Winning a weekend music show or weekly chart countdown remains one of the highest honors an artist or musical group can attain in the South Korean music industry.

Because of this dependence on live performance shows, a song’s performance elements — how easy it is to sing live, how easy it is for an audience to pick up and sing along with, the impact of its choreography, its costuming — are all crucial to its success. Groups routinely go all-out for their performances: Witness After-School learning to perform an entire drumline sequence for live performances of their single “Bang!” as well as pretty much every live performance mentioned here .

All of this emphasis on live performances make fans an extremely active part of the experience. K-pop fans have perfected the art of the fan chant , in which fans in live studio audiences and live performances will shout alternate fan chants over the musical intros to songs, and sometimes as a counterpoint to choruses, as a show of unity and support.

This collectivity has helped ensure that K-pop fan bases both at home and abroad are absolutely massive, and intense to a degree that’s hard to overstate. Fans intensely support their favorite group members, and many fans go out of their way to make sure their favorite idols look and dress the part of world-class performers . K-Con, the largest US K-pop convention, has grown exponentially over the years and now includes both Los Angeles and New York.

(There are also anti-fans who target band members — most notoriously an anti who attempted to poison a member of DBSK in 2006. But the less said about them, the better.)

You might expect that in the face of all this external pressure, K-pop groups would be largely dysfunctional messes. Instead, modern-day K-pop appears to be a seamless, gorgeous, well-oiled machine — complete with a few glaring contradictions that make it all the more fascinating.

Modern K-pop is a bundle of colorful contradictions

Though government censorship of South Korean music has relaxed over time, it still exists, as does industry self-censorship in response to a range of controversial topics. South Korean social mores stigmatize everything from sexual references and innuendo to references to drugs and alcohol — as well as actual illicit behavior by idols — and addressing any of these subjects can cause a song to be arbitrarily banned from radio play and broadcast. Songs dealing with serious themes or thorny issues are largely off limits, queer identity is generally only addressed as subtext, and lyrics are usually scrubbed down to fluffy platitudes. Thematically, it’s often charming and innocent, bordering on adolescent.

Despite these limitations, K-pop has grown over time in its nuance and sophistication thanks to artists and studios who have often either risked censorship or relied on visual cues and subtext to fill in the gaps.

Case in point: the 2000 hit “Adult Ceremony” from singer and actor Park Ji-yoon, which marked the first time a K-pop hit successfully injected adult sexuality into fairly innocuous lyrics, representing a notable challenge to existing depictions of femininity in South Korean pop culture.

The women of K-pop are typically depicted as traditional versions of femininity. This usually manifests in one of several themes: adorable, shy schoolgirls who sing about giddy crushes; knowing, empowered women who need an “oppa” (a strong older male figure) to fulfill their fantasies; or knowing, empowered women who reject male validation , even as the studio tailors the group’s members for adult male consumption.

Top: K-pop group Blackpink performing at the 31st Golden Disc Awards. Bottom: Miss A onstage during the 2011 Hallyu Dream Concert.

An idol group’s image often changes from one album to the next, undergoing a total visual and tonal overhaul to introduce a new concept. However, there are a few girl groups — 2NE1 and f(x) spring most readily to mind — that have been marketed as breaking away from this gender-centric mode of performance; they’re packaged as rebels and mavericks regardless of what their album is about, even while they operate within the studio culture.

Yet the women of K-pop are also increasingly producing self-aware videos that navigate their own relationships to these rigid impositions. Witness Sunmi, a former member of Wonder Girls, tearing down her own carefully cultivated public image in her recent single “Heroine,” a song about a woman surviving a failed relationship. In the video, Sunmi transforms physically , growing more empowered and defiant as she faces the camera and finally confronts a billboard of herself.

If songs for women in K-pop break down along the “virgin/mature woman” divide, songs for men tend to break down along a “bad boy/sophisticated man” line. Occasionally they even break down in the same song — like Block B’s “Jackpot,” the video for which sees the band posing as wildly varied members of a renegade circus, uniting to kidnap actress Kim Sae-ron into a life of cheerful hedonism.

Male performance groups are generally permitted a broader range of topics than K-pop’s women: BTS notably sings about serious issues like teen social pressures, while many other boy bands feature a wide range of narrative concepts. But male entertainers get held to arguably even more exacting physical and technical standards than their female counterparts, with precision choreography — like Speed’s all-Heely dance routine below — being a huge part of the draw for male idol groups:

If you’re wondering whether co-ed bands coexist in these studio cultures, the answer is, not really. Most of the time , co-ed groups tend to be one-off pairings of members from different bands for one or two singles, or novelty acts that are quickly split into gendered subgroups. The most famous actual co-ed band is probably the brother-sister duo Akdong Musician, a pair of cute kids who made it big on an audition show; and even they get split up a lot to pair with other singers. (See the “Hi Suhyun” clip above, which features Lee Hi and the sisterly half of AM, Lee Su-hyun.)

It probably goes without saying that this traditional gender divide isn’t exactly fertile ground for queer idols to thrive. Despite a number of K-pop stars openly supporting LGBTQ rights, the industry aggressively markets homoeroticism in its videos but remains generally homophobic. But progress is happening here, too: South Korea’s first openly gay idol just appeared on the scene in early 2018. His name is Holland, and his first single debuted to a respectable 6.5 million views.

Hip-hop tends to be a dominant part of the K-pop sound, particularly among male groups, a trend that has opened up the genre to criticism for appropriation. South Korea grapples with a high degree of cultural racism, and recent popular groups have come under fire for donning blackface , appropriating Native American iconography , and much more . Still, K-pop has increasingly embraced diversity in recent years, with black members joining K-pop groups and duo Coco Avenue putting out a bilingual single in 2017.

Last but not least, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention South Korea’s emergent indie music scene , which includes a thriving crop of independent rap, hip-hop, and, increasingly, R&B artists , as well as a host of grassroots artists who’ve made waves on SoundCloud .

Taking stock of all these changes and paradoxes, we might be able to extrapolate a bit about what the future of K-pop looks like: even more diverse, with an ever-increasing number of independent artists shaking up the studio scene, even though most of them will still have to play within the system’s rigid standards.

This gradual evolution suggests that part of the reason K-pop has been able to make international inroads in recent years is that it’s been able to push against its own rigid norms, through the use of modern themes and sophisticated subtexts, without sacrificing the incredibly polished packaging that makes it so innately compelling. That would seem to be a formula for continued global success — especially now that South Korea and its culture has the world’s attention. Hallyu may swell or subside, but the K-pop production machine goes ever on. And from here, the future looks fantastic, baby .

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Essays on Kpop

Often referred to as K-pop Korean pop is a catchy music genre that originated in South Korea. It combines singing, dancing, and rapping to create catchy music that is targeted at young audiences. The K-pop industry is a multibillion dollar one with hundreds of groups and a host of acclaimed individual...

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How K-Pop Helped Me Connect With My Daughter

Stray Kids perform onstage at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards held at Prudential Center on Sept. 12, 2023 in Newark, New Jersey.

I t started with BlackPink . One day my daughter happened to listen to the K-pop group’s “Kill This Love” and the next thing I knew, courtesy of a portable Bluetooth speaker, BlackPink became the soundtrack to our home. Hot on its heels came other K-pop girl groups: Twice, Itzy, Red Velvet, Everglow.

This was a shift from the music that had filled the house until that point, the days when all my daughter listened to was the Beatles —every album, every B-side, every BBC recording—over and over again. I loved the Beatles, partly because I had grown up listening to them. When my father first came to the United States from Panama he was captivated by their songs, and when I was young he used to play their albums on repeat, mostly on Sundays after church. So when my daughter, at age 11, fell under the spell of the Beatles as well, it was easy enough for me to sing along to “She’s Leaving Home” and “Dear Prudence” and all the rest of it.

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K-pop was a different matter. Not only was it completely new to me, but the majority of the time groups were singing in Korean, which meant that I couldn’t understand the words. The language barrier, however, did not deter my daughter. In no time at all she was singing lyrics in Korean and teaching herself how to write out the Korean characters one by one. Suddenly, we were ordering elaborately packaged albums that shipped from overseas. For Christmas my daughter asked for something called a lightstick (it is exactly as it sounds: a stick that lights up; it is meant to be taken to concerts and held aloft during performances). When I said something that she deemed strange or unbelievable, she had started answering, “Jin-jja-yo?” (in Korean: 진짜요, English translation: Really?).

She was also spending much of her free time holed up in her room, which is normal enough for a teenager, but what she was doing in there, I realized, was learning the choreography for the K-pop songs she loved. When she emerged for dinner, she was cheerfully referencing people I had never heard of before, talking about Ryujin and Sana as I smiled and tried not to appear utterly bewildered, not only by her enthusiasm but by my own exile from it.

She was 15 by then, which, as most parents will attest, is around the age when it becomes increasingly difficult to talk to your child. Gone were the days when my daughter was eager to cuddle up and watch a movie with me or sit at the kitchen table and draw together or talk to me in the car. Now, simple questions (Do you have homework? How did you sleep?) were met with a shrug. Gestures toward affection (I like your outfit; I got you your favorite juice) were met with, “K.” Other attempts at conversation were met with a blank stare brought on by the fact that the teenager in question once again had her headphones in and hadn’t heard a single word I had said.

K-pop, though, seemed to be the one topic that animated her, the one thing she actually wanted to talk about. It was not the style of music I typically gravitated toward, yet the option before me seemed clear. If I wanted to connect with my daughter, I had to start listening to K-pop.

At first, I tried to pay more attention to the girl groups—which now included Aespa, Loona, and (G)i-dle—that were already in rotation. When my daughter half-jokingly asked if I wanted to learn the choreo to Dun Dun by Everglow, I gave it a try. I danced alongside her as the two of us followed a practice video on YouTube slowed to .5x speed. Actually, dancing may be too generous a word for what I was doing. My daughter danced while I moved like a wooden puppet coming undone. Still, we were doing it together, laughing and catching our breath and looking at each other in stupefaction when it came time to do Mia’s solo sequence.

The real breakthrough, however, came with the K-pop boy band Stray Kids.

They are eight members—Bang Chan, Lee Know, Hyunjin, Changbin, I.N., Han, Seungmin, and Felix—and the first time my daughter showed me one of their videos, it caught me off-guard. Stray Kids are part of what is known as the fourth generation of boy groups, and they were making what my daughter termed “noise music,” which was decidedly more aggressive and hard-hitting than the ebullient sound of many of the girl groups I was used to by then. Critically, though, according to my daughter, they were making it. Various members of the group were, unusually for K-pop, creating and producing their own songs. They were coming up with the sounds, they were writing the lyrics, they were in the studio directing the other members when it came time to record. I found myself interested in them, if only for that.

Read More: Stray Kids Found Global Success by Embracing a New Sound

Quickly I discovered that in addition to their many music and dance practice videos, Stray Kids had a seemingly endless stream of content online—interviews, concert footage, live streams, videos of them eating and playing games and hanging out backstage. Sitting next to each other on the couch and in front of phone screens, my daughter and I started watching it all. Before I knew it, I was in deep—an official, middle-aged, mom-core Stay (the term for a Stray Kids fan).

I learned that Hyunjin hates eggplant, that Changbin has his own bowling ball, the names of Lee Know’s three cats. For Mother’s Day, I announced that the only thing I wanted was an SKZ hoodie. In addition to a cup of coffee and Spelling Bee, checking YouTube for new Stray Kids content became part of my morning routine. At breakfast, my daughter would say, “Did you see?” And I would grin. “I know. Let’s watch it as soon as you get home from school.” I started listening to the Stray Kids channel on the SiriusXM app even when it was just me in the car. At the sound of my laughter from another room, my husband would walk over and be baffled to find me watching some new SKZ short or a fan compilation video called “Stray Kids being chaotic for almost 8 minutes.” It was a beautiful turn of events. I had spent the last 16 years trying to introduce my daughter to all manner of things, and now she had introduced me to something instead.

Part of the appeal of Stray Kids was watching the way the members interacted with one another. They were charming and boisterous and warm, and I found myself liking their music more because I liked them . Unlike many K-pop groups that are assembled by their labels, everyone in Stray Kids was chosen by their leader, Bang Chan, and they have a genuine chemistry that’s impossible to ignore. Or, as my daughter said once, “I want a group of friends like that.” I put my arm around her and thought, “Don’t we all?”

We did have each other, though. As soon as anything happened in Stayville—a new post, Hyunjin cutting his hair, Han doing a birthday live stream—my daughter and I would rush to tell each other about it. When we watched videos together, it prompted conversations about creativity and about the glare of criticism that accompanies fame and about the meaning of the lyrics, which are largely about growing up or about finding strength in being different. Stray Kids gave us a new context in which to relate to each other. When we marveled over Bang Chan doggedly making music on his laptop day after day, it gave me the opportunity to explain why I seem so consumed by my own work at times. When she told me that she gets emotional each time she hears “Levanter,” a song about being oneself, it gave me the opportunity to ask her to tell me more about that.

In October 2022, Stray Kids released a new mini-album called Maxident. The day it came out I baked a cake in the shape of the Heart Monster that had appeared at the end of the album trailer. Because of the time difference between the United States and South Korea, it would be 11pm when the video for the lead single dropped. At 10:55pm, my daughter and I eagerly settled next to each other on the couch. We had been swooning over teasers for weeks, and we were ready finally for the big reveal. When it started, we both watched, transfixed. The video was not even four minutes long, but the bond that my daughter and I had forged by then, I knew, would endure.

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Understanding the Influence of K-Pop on Filipino Teens

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    Essay Topics. K-pop, also known as Korean pop music, has taken the world by storm in recent years. With its catchy tunes, vibrant choreography, and charismatic performers, it has captured the hearts of millions of fans worldwide. Therefore we will discuss some K-pop essay topics, ideas, and tips for writing a K-pop college essay.

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    K-pop is an abbreviation for Korean pop, which, as the name suggests, is a genre of popular music coming from South Korea. Besides integrating traditional Korean music, this genre has accepted elements from rock, jazz, experimental, hip hop, gospel, reggae, R&B, electronic music, folk, classic, etc. Essays on research topics about kpop music might analyze its uniqueness and distinctive ...

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    Below are popular kpop essay topics and angles to explore for your article: The globalization of K-pop: A study of the factors that have contributed to the global popularity of Korean pop music ...

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    When writing a college essay about Kpop, one of the best ways to stay on track with the main essay prompt is to implement this rule: every time you write a sentence, look back at the prompt to see if your sentence answers or at least follows into the prompt's question. If your sentence either answers the prompt or leads into it, then you know ...

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    K-pop the Korean Pop is a discourse community that every member in the discourse has the same taste for music and the same goals of supporting the band they follow. K-pop has created many different groups that are actively performing tasks for supporting music groups. The most famous of these groups are Allkpop, Dispatch, etc.

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    Kpop still prevailed due to the majority of the Korean public taking a liking to the new music introduced through Seo Taiji and Boys. "However, it was not Seo, but SooMan Lee, the founder of SM Entertainment, who realized the huge potential of Korean pop music, which he later called K-pop, in Japan and other parts of Asia."

  11. Korean Pop Music (k-pop): Culture, and Global Influence

    The Korean Pop Music (K-Pop) has its own way to connect to its fans both in Asia and the world. K-Pop is a whole production industry that comes with high profiled artists, variety of music genres, videos and well-choreographed dances. K-Pop is a well packaged industry of music as it contains singing, dances and rapping.

  12. The Literary Life of K-pop Lyrics

    Eating hot tears. Do those stars know my heart, my dreams. When I'm sad I want to close my eyes. And listen for the fragrance of home. The speaker in "Dream" probably left their home deep in the country and now lives a life among concrete buildings, holding onto their dreams as they endure a meaningless daily grind.

  13. How K-pop became a global phenomenon

    K-pop has become a truly global phenomenon thanks to its distinctive blend of addictive melodies, slick choreography and production values, and an endless parade of attractive South Korean ...

  14. Free Essays on Kpop, Examples, Topics, Outlines

    Often referred to as K-pop Korean pop is a catchy music genre that originated in South Korea. It combines singing, dancing, and rapping to create catchy music that is targeted at young audiences. The K-pop industry is a multibillion dollar one with hundreds of groups and a host of acclaimed individual... Kpop. Words: 591.

  15. An Essay on K-pop: Korean Wave, Idols, and Modernity

    There will be blood : the darker side of K-pop fandom. Renata Iwicka. Sociology. 2014. In recent years 'Hallyu', that is 'the Korean Wave', has been sweeping across the globe. In this essay, the term will serve almost exclusively as the synonym to 'Korean music'. As every music genre,…. Expand.

  16. How K-Pop Helped Me Connect With My Daughter

    The real breakthrough, however, came with the K-pop boy band Stray Kids. They are eight members—Bang Chan, Lee Know, Hyunjin, Changbin, I.N., Han, Seungmin, and Felix—and the first time my ...

  17. Understanding the Influence of K-Pop on Filipino Teens [Free Essay

    This essay explores the growing influence of Kpop on Filipino teenagers, delving into both its positive and negative impacts. The author addresses various aspects such as music, choreography, visuals, and social interactions, highlighting how Kpop affects Filipino teens' lifestyles, language learning, fashion choices, and social dynamics.

  18. How To Actually Write Well, When Writing About K-Pop

    BTS on VLive, celebrating the release of Butter. It's no secret that writing about K-Pop catches an audience's attention. Unfortunately, that seems to make every person in the world who can ...

  19. I wrote an essay on K-Pop! : r/kpop

    K-Pop (Korean popular music) is a musical genre consisting of pop, dance, electropop, hiphop, rock, R&B, and electronic music originating in South Korea. In addition to music, K-Pop has grown into a popular subculture, resulting in widespread interest in the fashion and style of Korean idol groups and singers. ... I wrote an essay on K-Pop ...

  20. Argumentative Essay About Kpop

    Argumentative Essay About Kpop - Free download as Word Doc (.doc / .docx), PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. This document discusses the popularity of K-pop (Korean pop music) among Filipino teenagers. It provides background on how Korean dramas and music videos first entered the Philippines and became popular through television channels.

  21. How to write about K-pop for a final essay? : r/kpophelp

    It's much easier to find sources first, then pick a topic based on a common issue/problem/topic that you see in your sources. Eg find papers on kpop, read/skim all your sources, then decide on a topic that pops up in at least 4 of your kpop sources/sources that you can quote or paraphrase for your essay.

  22. Would it be weird to write about K-pop for an essay?

    As you have mentioned, K-pop is important for you, so it will be appropriate and honest to write about this part of your life. You can share your thoughts about being part of the fandom or mention idol or certain song that have inspired you. However, you must remember that main focus of the essay is different aspects of your life, not only K-pop.

  23. Kpop Essay

    Kpop Essay. Decent Essays. Improved Essays. Superior Essays. Great Essays. Brilliant Essays. Page 1 of 5 - About 48 Essays Improved Essays ... Media industry bring success to K-pop music sales and attract Malaysian teenagers CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION South Korea or officially named as the Republic of Korea, is a country in the East Asian ...