Growing Up With K-Pop

Then there were the Korean church parties–huge potluck gatherings where someone always brought homemade bulgogi or japchae. After dinner, the adults would haul out a bulky, personal karaoke machine that someone had lugged all the way from Korea, and the room would fill with ballads from the eighties and nineties. Our childhood drummed to this steady beat until 2006, when Minji’s family left for California and I moved to Korea the following year.

eunice

Around that time, I also discovered Super Junior and felt, for the first time, the peculiar intensity of a boy band obsession. I bought their album Twins and found inside the CD a booklet with each member's face staring back at me, names printed underneath like a roster you were supposed to memorize. We didn’t call it “bias” back then—that language hadn’t reached us. But we understood, somehow, that you were meant to choose (ours was Kibum).

By then, Minji and I were staying in touch over e-mail. One day she wrote that she was an ELF (“Everlasting Friends”, the official Super Junior fandom), and I couldn’t believe it! It was thrilling to realize that we were both caught up in the same thing, in completely different places, and it became another thread holding our friendship together.

In 2012, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube video to hit one billion views. At its peak, “Gangnam Style” was generating over 11 million views per day, prompting YouTube to upgrade its view counter system, which had maxed out at 2,147,483,647 views—a limit based on 32-bit integer coding. Suddenly, Psy was everywhere; for many people around the world, it was their first exposure to K-pop.

I remember watching Psy teach the “Gangnam Style” dance to Britney Spears on Ellen and getting chills. There was something thrilling about watching the world finally catch up to what we already knew. Korean music wasn’t just “foreign.” It was fun, silly, catchy, and unmissable.

eunice

Until around 2012, K-pop expanded at a pace that felt possible to keep up with. The industry was carefully managed by a handful of labels, and only a few groups debuted each year. From 1992 to 2002, often referred to as K-pop's first generation, just 33 groups debuted.

The second generation of K-pop (roughly 2003-2011) marked a shift from the industry's earlier restraint. 81 new acts emerged in just over 9 years, including generation-defining groups like Girls' Generation and BIGBANG. These artists pushed K-pop beyond domestic borders and into broader regional consciousness.

I must have felt this on some level, because the early 2010s was when my attachment to K-pop began to fade. By the time I returned to the U.S. for college in 2014, my attention had already started to drift elsewhere—mostly toward Chicago, the city I lived in, and a place alive with its own rising artists. Louis the Child had released “It’s Strange” in 2015, and Chance the Rapper had come out with “Coloring Book” in 2016. These albums formed the soundtrack of my college years.

eunice

Not long after, the world was shut down by a global pandemic. Hundreds of planned K-pop concerts were cancelled, and groups started releasing more online content than ever to continue connecting with fans.

Through all of this, we had each other to witness it with–someone who had been there from the beginning, who remembered what it felt like before it was the world's. K-pop changed so much over the years, but so did we.

That was its own kind of gift.