K-pop is a genre of popular music that originates from the culture-rich country of South Korea. It encompasses a wide variation of music styles, from dance music to acoustics, jazz to classical, even ballad to electro. It is also involved with a diversified form of audiovisual components. Through this a great variety of people from all around the globe has been well enlightened with the rapid popularity of such music, even a MAST Media Feature Writer of Pacific Lutheran University, Kiana Norman-Slack has been hooked-up by such diverse musical society.
According to her article, in Mast Media, where she proudly calls herself a K-pop enthusiast, she emphasized the idea that K-pop is not only a musical industry but a culture or a way of living. Eventually, she claims that it all started back in the year 2012, in a competitive group of hip-hop dancers, where she primarily heard her first Korean music, through her choreographer's shuffled playlist, but failure on catching the song's title, she hoped to be able to hear the same song again. Eventually, through recurring dance rehearsals, her choreographer presented a dance video in which they might be able to copy some moves for their dance routine, and surprisingly such video is what Ms. Slack has been looking for.
The culprit of Kiana Norman Slack's very first involvement to K-pop is due to a member of BIGBANG, a group of Korean men unofficially referred to as the Kings of Korean Pop as stated in a post in USA Today, named G-Dragon in his song "One of a Kind".
During such moments, the Hallyu wave, common term for Korean cultural wave, came with the swift growing popularity of Gangnam Style by Korean icon PSY with its 1.5 billion views in YouTube, cited in an online post in Globeone, but as how rapid the wave came, is the same speed of how it ceases. Even so, Korean pop-curious minds, like Kiana, still continues to look further into Korean culture.
Recently, in a Korean convention, KCON LA Festival, held July 29-31, 2016 at Los Angeles, Korean fanatics, along with Ms. Slack, got the chance to meet-and-greet with their favorite Korean artists live, like Astro, Block B, BTS, Dean, Eric Nam, F(Amber), GFriend, I.O.I, Monsta X, SHINee, TTS, Twice and more special guests. They also got to try new Korean stuff like the food and meet along with other K-pop enthusiasts.
K-pop fans believe that the Korean culture had been a great influence in their lives, it has been their way of being able to find and express themselves. In depth knowledge of the culture made them come up to the conclusion of being able to fall deep in love with its beauty, and feel great passion towards the language, the music, pop culture and Korea as a whole.
