Stephanie Trinidad

Breakout Stars Korean Artist, K-Pop, and the American Music Industry          The emergence of Korean culture in the United States isn’t something that is new. For years artist from South Korea have slowly become a part of American culture, such as Rain a K-Pop and R&B artist who starred in the movie Ninja Assassin and was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People Who Shape Our World.” Bryan Walsh wrote in the 2006 article on Rain that, “ Rain is the face — and well-muscled torso — of pop globalism” (time.com). Although Rain didn’t debut with an English language album he was able to establish himself in the United States and bring over the Hallyu Wave to the Western World. In Choe Sang-Hun and Mark Russell’s article “Bringing K-Pop to the West” they describe what K-Pop means “ K-pop is part of a broader trend known as the Korean Wave and called ''hallyu'' in Korean. The Taiwanese were among the first to notic...

PSY: The Rise of a Korean Superstar             When the music video for Gangnam Style debuted on YouTube, PSY the artist behind the song wasn’t known to anyone outside of South Korea and its neighboring countries. Since its debut Gangnam Style has garnered over 2 billion views making it one of the most played songs in YouTube history. PSY’s global breakout success is still a mystery to people in his home country. Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Yang’s article “Gangnam Style’s U.S. Popularity has Koreans Puzzled, Gratified” Yang writes that “ the unlikely emergence of Park Jae-Song, the chubby, 34-year-old rapper known as PSY , as the face of K-pop, after the explosive success of his rollicking video for “ Gangnam Style ,” has been greeted by Koreans with a blinking neon “WTF” (blogs.wsj.com). Yet PSY has done something that was still a not yet achievable dream for Korean artist and that was to break out in a marke...