My First Encounter to K-Pop

Vezio Zenobia Wiramihardja

Communications

I knew about K-Pop ever since I was in elementary school, which was in the late 2000s. At that time, the ‘K-Pop’ genre was not widely liked by people, including myself. Back then, there was Super Junior who introduced me and a lot of other people into the K-Pop genre. I did not like it because the music was not my style because what I like back then was rock music, such as Linkin Park, Avenged Sevenfold, and Paramore. Another reason is that I thought their hairstyle was not good to look at. They used to have spiky hair and mohawk cut like my father used to have when he was a teenager.

It all changed in early 2016. It happened coincidentally when I was watching a TV show at home in Nickelodeon called The Loud House. At that time, there was a commercial break in between shows, so I have to wait for the commercial break to end to continue to watch the show. Suddenly, there was a song played in the commercial break. Nickelodeon used to have songs played in the commercial break to help promote the song and to help waste time during the commercial break. The name of the song was ‘Rhythm Ta’ by iKON. At first, I thought it was a hip-hop song because the singers were dressed as it was a hip-hop music video but later I found out that it was a K-Pop music video. Then I thought to myself “Wait a second.. this is not a K-Pop song… at least not the K-Pop I heard a few years ago.” To be honest, I liked the song because it was hip-hop related and I liked the hip-hop genre at that time and that made me change the perspective of K-Pop songs.

The reason why it was my best moment is that that kick-started a series of events that are related to K-Pop. At that same year, I liked someone in high school. The girl that I like was a K-Pop fan, which motivates me even more on liking K-Pop because I have a reason to like K-Pop that time. That is to impress her using the K-Pop songs that she liked, either I sing it to her or I dance it to her. So, I asked my male friend who liked K-Pop, and he recommended me the songs that were liked by my crush. In the process of memorizing the songs and practicing the dance moves, he also recommended his personal favorites to help me like K-Pop at that time. Still, the reason why I wanted to like K-Pop back then is that I want to impress my crush with it, but I took the offer anyway.

As time goes on, I stumbled upon a few, to many, to hundreds of K-pop songs because of the so-called ‘K-Pop’ genre that the old me hated, revolutionized and evolved into the K-Pop that is influenced with many other genres, such as rock, house, jazz, hip-hop, EDM, and many more. That made me realize that a person cannot judge a book by its cover because back then, I hated K-Pop because people said that it was bad but when I heard it for myself a few years later, it is not as bad as I thought it was. With all the songs that I got, I now like K-Pop not to impress my crush anymore, but because I genuinely like it, until this very day.