Has Your Heart K-Popped Yet?

Music is an emotion. Be it on a hard day after work, or at a cousin’s wedding, after a tough break-up, or on a long weekend travel; music is always the best companion. No matter what you feel on the inside, music helps comfort your feelings.

Music has waxed and waned in its outreach over the years, with disco/rock music being popular in the eighties, urban/hip hop music in the nineties, emo/metal punk in the early 2000’s. Currently, the most popular music style that is throbbing hearts all over the world is K-Pop.

Korean Pop or K-Pop as it is called, originated in South Korea in the nineties; it generally means "popular music" within Korea, but it is a genre of music that has been influenced by a number of other genres like jazz, rock, hip-hop, electronic dance, etc. While it mainly contains elements of pop music, large traces of experimentation with other genres is evident.

The highlight of the K-Pop music industry are their idol groups. These groups can consist of anywhere between 2-9 members or more. Each of these members are extremely talented and have amazing music and dance backgrounds. The members are referred to as idols and are generally recruited by entertainment agencies when they are as young as 13. These recruits undergo intensive training in various fields- dancing, music, public relations, etc before they are paired up with other recruits, who the agency believes make the right team and debuted.

The impact of K-pop music on the world is indeed breath taking. The amount of attention garnered by this music style has sky-rocketed since the beginning of this decade and has only been climaxing since then. The K-Pop boy/girl bands have massive fan bases all over the world, who identify themselves with a fan-made name such as "Army" for the popular boy band BTS, "Blinks" for the girl band BlackPink, "V.I.P" for the boyband Big Bang and so on.

There is no doubt in claiming that it is the golden age for the Korean economy, and that the K-Pop music industry is a major contributor in this regard. The global increase of Korea's cultural economy has been termed as 'Hallyu' which is the Chinese term for the Korean wave. Subsequently, this has flourished various other industries such as the television industry, which has been gaining increasing attention in the recent years.

K-Pop music is light and refreshing to hear; it is also very visually attractive. Many popular Idol groups have taken it upon themselves to not only produce quality music, but also help spread awareness regarding various social issues such as mental health, self-love,etc. This appeases the global audiences and is also one of the reasons why K-Pop has massive out reaches.

Its true when they say, If you K-Pop then you can't K-Stop!
So are you a K-pop fan yet? Or will you be one soon?