To K-Pop And Beyond
(3 min read)
K-pop continues to take over the world. Even stubborn Americans are coming around to the jubilant and kaleidoscopic music. Groups like BTS are finding success and spreading the energetic sounds of K-pop around the world.
The music of K-pop is impossible to define in a word or two. Hooks are everywhere, styles change within seconds, the energy is exclamatory but not chaotic, and everything just feels positive. In NPR Music’s “Start Here: Your Guide To Getting Into K-Pop,” writer Maria Sherman states:
“K-pop music traverses genre with incredible ease — in one moment, taking cues from the dubstep drops that defined pop in the early 2010s, or Swedish hitmakers, or hip-hop, or R&B balladry, or new jack swing, or soul, or euro-pop, or Caribbean dancehall, or salsa and beyond — border-less eclecticism identifiable by the performers themselves, their seismic aesthetic judgments, and their multi-lingual singing.”
With all of those pop music elements jammed into K-pop, perhaps it’s not so far-fetched to understand how the United States is finally embracing non-English or white-washed artists.
Sherman continues:
“For many, a dominant pop form that isn't in English is inconceivable. And yet, here's K-pop, music largely recorded in Korean, born in the early 1990s and now one of the most popular forms of music on the planet, enjoyed by multiple generations of listeners.”
This has been a long time coming. While you may remember the artist Psy more for his dance moves and pistachio-slinging commercials than his music, his hit song “Gangnam Style” was one of our country’s first introductions to K-pop. With a record breaking music video and viral pop culture impact, Psy laid the groundwork for the movement happening today in the United States.
And while some production music companies may have jumped on the bandwagon when they noticed everyone dancing to “Gangnam Style” at weddings and bar mitzvahs, we had already released a collection of K-pop tracks for quick and easy licensing. No joke. Our K-Pop album on HypeKit was released just a few short weeks prior to the horse dance phenomenon of 2012.
That’s part of who we are. We do our damndest to stay ahead of the curve, to blaze trails into seemingly obscure genres and styles, trusting that those tracks will make sense someday. We’ll never be predictable or the everything-for-everyone music library. We take risks, trust our guts, and trust the music.
And don’t even get us started on our Moombahton album that was released even earlier.
Yeah, we’ve got trend-setting game.
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