Extra Good Things Happened in Kpop Today

First we'll start with..

(Link to the Bad Boy video here)

The Real Perfect New Pop Song Is This K-Pop Hit, ‘Bad Boy’

Some here at Gawker argue that Canadian Power Puff Girl Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe' is the new perfect pop song. While I have listened to that song twelve times in a row today, I have to disagree: 'Bad Boy,' by K-pop boy group Big Bang, is even more perfect. It's so perfect it transcends language.

'Bad Boy,' the first music video from Big Bang's new album Alive has the group twirling around underneath the JMZ subway tracks in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, dressed in outfits that would draw stares even in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Why, for instance, does G-dragon, Big Bang's leader, have half a bath mat sewed on the back of his jacket?) But the weird outfits obscure a perfect pop R&B song, with delightfully tag-teamed verses that make you wonder why we haven't had a hit boy band in the states since the beginning of the Bush Administration.

South Korea has been churning out K-pop groups like Big Bang and Girls Generation with scary proficiency, gradually conquering most of Asia with a potent blend of R&B, European dance music and hairspray. K-Pop boy groups inspire a frenzy in their fans that puts most Beliebers to shame. One fan's exhaustive catalogue of more than two-dozen groups' average height took over the Korean web, and fans donated 12.7 tons of rice to charity to honor of the launch of Big Bang's 2012 world tour. Now that hip hop mogul Swizz Beatz has signed a collaboration deal with one of South Korea's biggest entertainment companies, K-pop might conquer America, too. I don't expect the giant crystal skull pendant thing from the video to catch on, though.

Read the whole article with video @ gawker


JoKwon from 2AM Kkabb's like noone's business and I love it: 

Source: monmonsnowSeason9

Edited to add:

How Jay Park Became the Face of a 'New Breed' of    KPop R&B

The Washington-State born Korean pop lothario on his unusual career and Jeremy Lin

March 9 2012, 9:45 AM ET
by David Bevan

In the March/April issue of SPIN, David Bevan ventured to Korea to explore the country's fruitful system for producing top-flight pop stars. He'll be writing additional K-pop stories right here at #1 Crush.

"I got off the plane, and there was a different scent in the air." That's how Jay Park remembers his first seconds in Seoul, in January of 2005, just months before he graduated from high school back home in suburban Seattle. Park had been flown over to begin training for JYP Entertainment, one of three major entertainment companies headquartered in the South Korean capital. Only 17 at the time, he spoke little Korean and knew even less about Korean pop music — his passion was b-boying, which he utilized during a local JYP audition he attended at the behest of his mother. "I met all these people and I couldn't really communicate with them," he says of that first day. "I didn't even know what to eat."

As part of JYP's trainee program, a highly calibrated system designed to prepare dozens of teenaged recruits for the demands of increasingly international pop stardom, Park essentially went back to school. He practiced choreographed dance. He took vocal lessons. He took intensive classes on acrobatics and Chinese. And in 2008, he eventually found himself on Korean television for the first time, as part of MNET's Hot-Blooded Men, a documentary series that allowed fans to watch him and fellow "trainees" as they vied for spots in what have become two of JYP's most successful bands/brands to date, 2PM and 2AM. "It's pretty cutthroat," he says of the trainee system. "You have a bunch of guys who are trying to debut, and you don't know who's going to make it or who they're going to choose. You have to be on top of your game." By the show's conclusion, fans would vote "Jaebeom", as he's known in Korea (also his birth name), to lead seven-member boy band 2PM in September of that year. "[My friends] made fun of the outfits and all that," he says. "They were used to seeing me chilling with sweatpants on. All of a sudden, I'm wearing eye makeup and crazy clothes."


Read the rest of the article at  Spin Magazine blog.  

My faves are getting quite a bit of American media attention.  Gotta love it.