I tried out fan-made choreography tutorials (embarrassing but fun) and watched mini-lectures to learn the seven members’ names. They sent links to music videos, concerts, and the band’s self-produced variety show, “Run BTS,” of which there are more than a hundred and fifty episodes. for Youth” and describes both individual fans and its fandom worldwide-delighted in making recommendations.
BTS.Īcquaintances who proudly identify as members of BTS’s ARMY-which stands for “Adorable Representative M.C. Still, I knew nothing of its best-selling product: BangTanSonyeondan, a.k.a. It had successfully hawked its cultural wares in the global marketplace. K-pop!” He asked us to speak Korean, as though he might inhale the sounds along with the salty sea air. When I invited them over for a home-cooked Korean meal, they brought along a friend, another Latino Koreaphile, and a Korean cake garlanded in candied fruits.Ī few years after that, my parents and I were on a ferry in Greece, during a trip to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary, when a young Greek man in shorts came up to us, smiling broadly. They’d taught themselves the basics, and began texting with me in short bursts of Hangul, with emojis and exclamation points. Like Karina, they were the daughters of Latino immigrants and bilingual in English and Spanish, but it was Korean that they wanted to know. Three years later, a friend on Long Island told me that teen-age twins who she’d met in town were obsessed with all things Korean. One morning, a worker approached me and asked, apropos of nothing, if I was Korean-not “Chinese or Japanese?” This precision was new. Standing among the women on a street corner in a black puffy coat, I tried to make conversation in my terrible Spanish. I had heard that many employers paid low wages or didn’t pay at all some workers reported verbal abuse and sexual harassment. In the winter of 2012, I was writing a story about Latina day laborers in Brooklyn who cleaned Hasidic homes before the Sabbath-when women’s work accumulated to the point where outsourcing became necessary. I first glimpsed the swell of hallyu, the Korean wave, a decade ago. To continue ignoring the BTS phenomenon was to risk missing something bigger than Beatlemania. The group was everywhere, and everyone seemed to be into them. But, earlier this year, BTS became inescapable. I absorbed Western critiques of K-pop’s girl and boy bands: that they’re fluffy, manufactured, and exploitative of their members-as if the same weren’t true of New Kids on the Block.
#Jyp global audition 2022 skin
When reporting on South Korea, I resisted the expected topics: Korean skin care, plastic surgery, dogmeat, and, yes, K-pop. I’ve long been hesitant to write about BTS.
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