Huntr/x don't quit until it's DONE DONE DONE
A couple of months ago, I was texting with my best friend, and he asked me what I was up to. I told him that I was watching BTS music videos with my kids. He commented that he was still wrapping his head around the fact that K-Pop is now as much of a part of American pop pop music as Taylor Swift, with fans of all ethnicities all over the globe. I mentioned that it's because K-Pop is a lot easier to access in the age of streaming and YouTube videos, but obviously the answer is more nuanced than that.
It did make me think about how hard it was to find K-Pop back in my teen years. I was never a huge K-Pop person, but there was always someone in my orbit that was, so I'd tag along to go to a Korean stationary store like Morning Glory that would also sell K-Pop CDs. This was the most common place to find K-Pop in San Diego and Irvine, at least. You couldn't find K-Pop at your local Sam Goody or Tower Records. Unless you lived in a city with a large centralized Korean community like Koreatown in Los Angeles, you were reduced to small boutique shops or kiosks at the Korean super market. If I was still living in Minnesota, I'm not even sure what the options would have been in the 90s.
Obviously, with the lack of shelf space at a stationary store, there weren't a huge selection of albums to choose from. They carried the most popular albums at the time, so you were out of luck if you wanted an older album or something off the beaten path. In the mid 90s, H.O.T. was the big boy band of the moment. I had no idea that H.O.T. stood for High-Five of Teenagers. I did know that the girls were all hot over Kangta.
The big groups of the mid to late 90s were H.O.T., DJ-Doc, SES, and Fin.K.L. At least these were the groups that people in my orbit were listening to. We just were just a tad too young to listen to Seo Taiji and the Boys. Seo Taiji is considered the godfather of K-Pop and is quite fond of nu-metal. In junior year of high school, a new kid that I met gifted me Seo Taiji's self titled solo album as a way to bond over his love of K-Pop. It was definitely more rock focused and it was the first time that I really sat down and listened to anything from the K-Pop genre. I don't know where that CD went or what ended up happening to that friend. We never had a falling out, so I think he might've moved away suddenly. I don't even remember his name, sadly enough.
In college, equipped with high speed internet and Napster, I expanded my musical horizons, even dabbling in downloading some K-Pop. (A girls was probably involved). While I didn't end up a K-Pop fanatic at the end of college, I did end up picking up a copy of S.E.S.'s 2001 album, Surprise. It still has some bangers. I may have picked up their 2002 album, Choose My Life-U as well, but I don't remember anything from that album.
After college, I returned to being K-Pop agnostic, so I missed the beginning of BTS's meteoric rise. They probably didn't hit my radar until they started regularly collaborating with American music artists around 2017. I know that by the time they collaborated with Coldplay on the 2021 song, "My Universe", I thought Coldplay needed BTS more than BTS needed Coldplay.
This of course was after BTS' US media blitz for their albums, BE and Map of the Soul: 7, where they staged many different elaborate performances of songs like "Dynamite" everywhere from America's Got Talent, to The Tonight Show, to SNL, and The Grammy Awards. They kept the momentum going with the hit single "Butter", which has a very cool Grammys performance where they were spies or something.
BTS is not the only K-Pop group that crossed over, of course. BLACKPINK is selling out arenas and launching a BLACKPINK x MLB merch line so you can rep BLACKPINK and your favorite baseball team at the same time. BLACKPINK member Rose brought a Korean drinking game to the states via her top 10 single, "APT" w/ Bruno Mars, while Lisa had her acting debut in season 3 of The White Lotus. Twice just headlined Lollapalooza, and had Sabrina Carpenter asking for their hand in marriage.
Obviously, since we're talking about Twice, we have to talk about K-Pop Demon Hunters, the Netflix film that has captured the zeitgeist. While it's technically a kid's film, the fact that Netflix sponsored a drone light show after the Twice set at Lollapalooza, means that Netflix knows that it has captured the attention of all ages. While Huntr/x is a fictional group, the songwriters behind the soundtrack are some of the best of best within the K-Pop genre so it's not a surprise that the songs have become huge hits. I can't get them out of my head and there are countless covers on YouTube.
The K-Pop explosion probably seems sudden if we viewed it in a silo, but Korean culture has been increasing it's presence in the US for some time. In college, Korean movies started having crossover success with the release of films like My Sassy Girl, Oldboy, and Memories of a Murder. Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim were part of the cast of Lost, and while that is not a Korean show, they had many flashbacks that were primarily in Korean with English subtitles, which I felt was a big deal for representation in the aughts. In time, we'd get Parasite winning the Oscar for Best Picture, along with films like Snowpiercer and Okja. On TV, we'd have Steven Yeun become a star on The Walking Dead, and it felt like everyone was watching Squid Game. K-Dramas also have been a huge presence on Netflix.
Korean cuisine also became more popular. Celebrity chefs like Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern were champions of Korean food, and not just of Korean BBQ. Now Korean-American chefs like David Chang and Roy Choi have shows on Netflix and Hulu, and chefs like Stephanie Izard have incorporated Korean influences into their cooking. Korean makeup techniques and skincare also have a huge presence on YouTube, so It's not like we all woke up one day and people were more aware of Korean culture.
I remember a conversation with my late Uncle Danny (not Korean) in my 20s, when he proudly told me that the grocery stores in Minnesota started selling Kimchi. Little did either of us know, that was just a sign of things to come.