During the last decade, I’ve met a whole lot of American Okay-pop followers as a Okay-pop ethnographer. My first query is all the time the identical: “Why do you want Okay-pop?” The query carries an assumption: “If Okay-pop is merely a duplicate of American pop, as some critics dismissively declare, why take heed to the duplicate reasonably than the unique?”
Their responses had been surprisingly comparable, as if that they had in contrast notes. Okay-pop was “magical” and “catchy,” whereas American pop was “boring” and “all the time the identical.” In line with these followers, whereas American pop stars sang “an excessive amount of about intercourse, medication, and events,” Okay-pop supplied “goals, fantasies, and self-growth,” typically by means of elaborate various “universes” by which idols developed distinct personas and narratives.
This concept of “universe” was first systematically launched to Okay-pop in 2012, when SM Leisure debuted EXO as aliens from “EXO Planet,” every endowed with a supernatural energy. Since then, world-building has turn out to be more and more intertwined with Okay-pop’s integration of music, dance, costume, stage design, vogue, magnificence, digital media, and extra not too long ago, digital idols and AI manufacturing, making Okay-pop an more and more audiovisual, narrative, and participatory cultural kind for audiences worldwide.
