COVID-19 couldn’t stop K-pop’s global rise – National Geographic UK

The moment was undeniable. BTS was the first group since The Beatles to land three number-one albums on the Billboard 200 chart in a single calendar year. Then Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite stormed the Cannes Film Festival (before winning Best Picture at the Oscars in 2020). Retailers such as Target had been selling Korean face masks next to copies of People magazine for years. And a mouthwatering episode of the Netflix docuseries Chef’s Table turned a 60-year-old Buddhist monk named Jeong Kwan into South Korea’s most unlikely breakout star.

A country of 51 million people had somehow seized the global spotlight, dictating what people around the world were playing in their earbuds and watching on their screens. (If you were one of the 296.5 million people around the world who bought a Samsung phone in 2019, they also built that screen.)

The media had long ago identified this trend, dubbed hallyu, or the Korean Wave. And there was proof that hallyu had been doing for South Korean tourism what Lord of the Rings had done for New Zealand. According to a study by the Hyundai Research Institute, 10.41 million people visited South Korea in 2017. Of those, 7.6 percent cited BTS as the primary reason.

But as the pandemic closed borders and cancelled events, tourism fell to a 32-year low of just 2.5 million people. Now even 2021 appears to be a wash. South Korea may be cautiously opening up to international visitors (with a mandatory 14-day quarantine for most tourists, at press time), but K-pop bands like MonstaX and BTS have delayed even their local shows.

As I sat up in bed in June watching BTS’s tight choreography along with more than a million fans from more than 190 countries, I realised a more surprising story had emerged: Even COVID-19 couldn’t stop K-pop.

Catch the Korean wave


During quarantine, the Korean wave became a tsunami—notably in the West. After George Floyd’s death in May of 2020, BTS and its management donated $1 million (£724,000) to the Black Lives Matter movement, only to watch the band’s legion of fans—known as ARMY, or Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth—match that donation in just 25 hours. Kathryn Lofton, a professor at Yale University, likened BTS to a “religion project,” due to the community’s devotion.

A year later, McDonald’s—the biggest fast-food chain in the world—teamed up with the biggest band on the planet for the limited-edition BTS Meal. It was the restaurant’s first-ever global celebrity collaboration, available in 49 markets including Colombia and Lithuania, and it was almost too successful.

Meanwhile, those online concerts? BTS did a string of them, raking in so much money that Rolling Stone magazine declared they’d changed the music industry forever: “BTS just proved that paid livestreaming is here to stay.”

During lockdown, Netflix premiered a documentary about the all-female group Blackpink, charting the band’s rise from obscurity to a 2019 performance at Coachella in front of more than 100,000 fans. I didn’t have to set an alarm for that one; it was streaming at my leisure.

And I was the perfect audience. Shortly before COVID-19 hit, I’d flown to Seoul, where I took a K-pop dance class for tourists, learning the steps to Blackpink’s “Ddu-Du Ddu-Du,” complete with finger-guns. The $50 (£35) class, held at a glass-box studio called Fanxy, advertised on TripAdvisor and Airbnb. (If you want to try it out for yourself, they pivoted online during the pandemic.) Perhaps one day I’ll find the courage to post the music video we shot in class.

Thank you
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.u...1/07/covid-19-couldnt-stop-k-pops-global-rise