K-Pop is a worldwide phenomenon, with over 2.28 billion views on Youtube for different artists and it’s doubling each year. The most popular video is, of course, Oppa Gangnam Style by PSY, with over 500 million views and counting. Following him are bands like Girls Generation, Big Bang, Shinee, and the Wonder Girls. Countless people are obsessed with K-Pop so I sought to answer why the growing popularity.
Using a combination of tear-jerker videos and melodic voices, I can’t but help feel the effect and shed a tear or two. Mainly delving in love songs, the videos are what make them amazing. When you mix a sad love song with a video of a couple, it’s going to be heartbreaking.
One of my favorites is by “Lonely” by 2NE1. It’s basically a Korean drama packed into a music video. Again, it’s a tear jerker.
On the other side of the genre, there are artists where their videos have too many things going on, to the point where you’ll go, “What just happened?” One of them is the overrated, popular Oppa Gangnam Style. Once you watched Oppa Gangnam Style, you knew it was too random and that people would only like it because it’s catchy.
Just because a song is catchy, doesn’t mean the artist can sing. Another bad example is “Fantastic Baby” by Big Bang. The music video didn’t make sense whatsoever. I wasn’t even sure if they were singing because the video was just all over the place. The fans only cared about how “hot” the band members were. This goes for most of the other K-Pop bands which is saddening.
The biggest problem about K-Pop is that most of it is in Korean. About half of the fans are English speakers and most of the people listening don’t even understand what they’re saying. Sure, a majority of the songs are catchy, but how do you know what they’re really saying? Some songs were translated into English, but that completely changes the genre into regular pop.
All in all, it’s a pretty laid back genre. For me, it helps to really calm me down. You can listen to it when you’re doing homework or taking a drive in your car. It’s the perfect genre if you like Asian people and their music.