Here's What You Might Not Know About K-Pop

Here’s what you might get wrong about K-pop, as explained by KCon attendees.

KCon is the world’s largest Korean culture convention. Thousands of K-Pop fans gathered there in NYC to hang out with other fans and see their favorite artists. K-pop generally classifies “popular music” within South Korea, but the genre has recently skyrocketed in popularity outside of the country.  

“A lot of people think that I listen to K-Pop because I don’t like my own culture of I want to be Korean, things like that,” explained one KCon attendee. “I don’t deal with that as much now because I’m more mature and I know how to carry myself as a person and as a fan of this music.”

“When we say K-Pop a lot of people just assume, you know, it’s Asian music, it’s for Koreans only,” said another attendee. “But actually what we’ve seen on Soompi [the longest-running K-Pop site] is this huge, diverse audience.”

“There’s a very strong stigma against people that are not Asian or people that aren’t Korean,” explained another. “A lot of the misconceptions are like, there’re people, you know, idolize Koreans or sexualize Koreans, and it’s a really weird thing. It’s easy how that could be you know, said.”