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They don’t just call a singer a singer or a lead, they call them an “idol”.
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She was speaking some new form of English. The career trajectories, names and numbers of each band member and artist appearing on stage (okay, she doesn’t have their phone numbers, but may as well have). With her unbridled passion for everything Korean, she gave me the low-down on the culture of K-pop and its followers worldwide. Then, slowly, she started giving me the context of things - the winners, the nominees and the whole mechanics of the Korean entertainment machine. We were just shooting the breeze as Zara watched ‘her’ stuff. I was safely ensconced in my Anglophone experience of pop culture as any average ‘English-medium’ Pakistani is in their postcolonial complacency. After having binged on some Korean variety shows, she began streaming the TMA, which are Korea’s equivalent of the Grammys, I suppose. I was initiated into the weird and wonderful world of Korean entertainment by my friend and K-pop-meister Zara Asif, on one of her visits from Canada to Pakistan. A global phenomenon, the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. This was not the usual boy band fan following. My 13-year-old niece, who we thought was interested in nothing about life, was suddenly gushing about Kim Tae-hyung from BTS every time she saw my face. My friend sent me a photo of her 12-year-old daughter sporting a haircut and glasses to emulate her favourite K-pop star. My teenage nephew one day complained how a group of girls in his school obsessively put up K-pop posters in the classroom and the boys take them down in irritation. But I was still illogically surprised to discover that it’s not just one Korean group that had a huge following right here in Pakistan. Some three years ago, I was aware that BTS was a global phenomenon young artists the likes of One Direction, Backstreet Boys, or even earlier, The Beatles. The superstar group’s management agency, HYBE (previously Big Hit Entertainment), had a market valuation of 7.61 billion dollars last year, according to Reuters. Estimates say 3.6 billion dollars in 2018 and higher in the successive years. The boys, the oldest being 28, are President Moon’s pride for their unbeatable talents and maybe because they manage to contribute some billions of dollars to their country’s GDP. They have made it so big around the globe that they were appointed South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s special presidential envoy for future generations and culture. Their following is of such bizarre magnitude that when Spotify launched in Russia, BTS became one of the country’s top-streamed artists, according to the platform.
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These boys are basically up against themselves. Only to be replaced by ‘Permission to Dance.’ Which was then again knocked off by ‘Butter’. ‘Butter’ was the longest-running number 1 song of 2021 on Billboard’s Hot 100 charts, ruling the charts for seven weeks. And, this September, more than a million viewers worldwide tuned in to stream a seven-minute speech by BTS members ahead of the UNGA and to watch a recorded video of them dancing to their hit song ‘Permission to Dance’ in an empty UN Assembly Hall.īTS is a seven-member all boys group which is currently synonymous with what we know as K-pop. On FM radio, you will hear at least one Korean pop song during your drive, at any given time on any day of the week. On TV, the latest Samsung phone commercial is set to ‘Butter’, the latest number by the biggest boy band from Korea known as BTS. It’s safe to say K-pop, short for Korean pop, has become mainstream in Pakistan and there are plenty of fans here that demand more of it.
#Bts dark and wild song still everything tv#
If you’re an occasional viewer of local TV channels or a semi-regular radio listener if you know more than three teenage girls in your family or in your school and, more strikingly, if you follow the annual United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) held in New York, you have inadvertently caught the K-pop frequency. You’ve heard K-pop even if you think you haven’t.