Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Wednesday, March 29. I’m Jeong Park, a reporter covering Asian American communities for The Times, coming from Mid-City.
When I introduce myself and say what I do for a living, people have asked me: Do you cover K-pop?
No, I don’t — or at least not in a way you would expect. I’m not writing about the latest albums or reviewing concerts.
Still, I’ve found myself putting K-Pop references into many stories, from one on the rebirth of Koreatown to another on Korean Americans’ mental health. For many Asian Americans like me, K-pop is a big part of our identity and how we live.
“K-Pop Dreaming,” a recently launched podcast from LAist Studios, explores that dynamic, looking at how Korean Americans shaped the genre, and vice versa.
Vivian Yoon, a 2.5-generation Korean American writer and actor, hosts the podcast. She grew up in Koreatown, where K-pop has long been a staple in grocery stores and restaurants.
“You can’t escape the music when you’re growing up with it,” she said.
The podcast looks at the evolution of K-pop from Trot, a music genre that emerged from the Japanese colonization of Korea. It also looks at events such as the 1992 L.A. riots, and how Korean rapper Tiger JKplayed a role in promoting interethnic harmony in the aftermath.
I spoke with Yoon as she wrapped up an episode of the podcast. The interview is edited for length and clarity.
You said you used to hide your love of K-pop because you wanted to look different from a typical Korean girl. What did you mean by that?
Yoon: Nobody was making fun of me for listening to K-pop. But that internal shame came out of a sense of really wanting to be seen as an American. A lot of that came from the fact that my dad grew up in the States, and he served in the Army. He was a self-proclaimed “Twinkie,” where he’s yellow on the outside and white on the inside.
My dad was my hero, and my dad was the most American Korean person I knew, and that’s what I saw that made him so different. That really was what I wanted for me, too.
How did Korean Americans shape K-pop?
Korean Americans from L.A. were bringing Black American music and culture from Los Angeles to Korea. Korean American kids who spoke both languages ... helped Koreans access Black American music and culture in a way that was maybe seen as more authentic than Korean locals who had never been to the U.S.
As those Korean American kids from L.A. joined first-generation groups, they totally influenced the sound, the style, the swagger.
How did K-pop shape Korean Americans? Koreatown?
I can only really talk maybe about my own experience … where the music represented the side of me that American music couldn’t access. Korean music hit a certain spot that American music just didn’t.
[In a future podcast episode], we also talk about how businesses and the landscape of K-Town have changed because of K-pop. There’s this music store inside Galleria [shopping mall], and when it opened in the early 2000s, they were selling American albums because the clientele was older Korean people who wanted Elvis or Michael Jackson CDs.
But over time, gradually, more non-Korean K-pop fans started going to the store and asking for certain albums or merchandise. That’s when the two brothers who owned it decided slowly to shift their inventory … until eventually, by 2016, they were all-in on K-pop. Places like that, you see how the organic growth of Hallyu [the Korean Wave] has really shaped actual businesses and the economy of K-Town.
You’ve also looked at how Korean American acts navigate being seen as foreigners in Korea.
When we were talking to [Korean American R&B group] Solid, they said, ‘We were obviously not from Korea, and it showed,’ because when they sang and they rapped, they had an accent or they dressed differently. For them, it was important for them to maintain their identity as Korean Americans from L.A. County and not necessarily trying to assimilate because they had their own sense of what was cool or what was interesting to them, and they really stuck to that.
You’ve said that in the course of working on this podcast, you’velearned a lot about your own family. What was that like for you?
It allowed me to answer some questions that I had about my own identity. And it allowed me to see that as Korean Americans, we don’t have to be fully Korean, and I don’t have to be fully American. And if there is no space for our stories in either camp, we make that space to tell our stories and to preserve our history and to understand ourselves. Understanding how special that, as Asian Americans, we can occupy this third space — that was surprisingly powerful for me.
Yoon’s favorite K-pop song at the moment? “Ditto” by NewJeans.(And if you’re curious, my favorite is “Vibe” by Taeyang feat. Jimin of BTS.)
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