From BLACKPINK’s K-Pop to ‘Squid Game,’ say hello to hallyu

Madelyn Fisher Contributing Writer

In recent years, Korean media including music, movies, TV, and food have made large strides across soil. So much so, in fact, it has even been given its own name.

Hallyu is actually a Chinese term that, when translated, means “Korean wave.” This wave began in the 1990s, first sweeping through Asian countries like Japan and China. The term hallyu came about specifically with the airing of the K-drama “What Is Love” in 1997, with its ratings skyrocketing the show to second place in China’s imported content. Korean wave then swept across Japan in early 2003 with the airing of another K-drama, “Winter Sonata,” which brought about a massive tourism boom to Nami Island in Chuncheon. This was only the beginning, as the wave made its way across the Pacific Ocean to Latin America and finally crashed onto U.S. shores in the early 2010s.

One of Korea’s most notable cultural impacts is K-Pop. Despite its name, K-Pop covers more than the pop genre and has become its own entity in the country with a myriad of agencies looking for the next big thing. With hundreds of young men and women across the globe dreaming of debuting in the next idol group, global fans alike have no shortage of bands and solo artists to choose from.

Although most Americans were first exposed to K-Pop by Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ in 2012, many stuck around to become longtime fans of some of the most notable current groups,including BTS, BLACKPINK, Twice and NCT, and older generation groups like BigBang, Shinee, and Girls Generation.

K-Pop has grown so popular so quickly it has become a massive source of economic growth for the country in recent years. In 2019, the Korean music industry drew in a U.S. export value of over US $756 million. With BTS drawing in $4.9 billion to date over their nine-year career and drawing in $1.43 billion alone with their hit song “Dynamite,” that comes at no surprise.

Although K-Pop might be one of South Korea’s most notable industries, in recent years both the nation’s film and television industries made waves with movies like “Parasite” and series such as “Squid Game.” In 2019, with the release of his acclaimed hit “Parasite,” director Bong Joon-ho became the first Korean director to win the Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival and he did so with a unani- mous vote. The film went on to take the most awards at the 2020 Oscars after winning four Academy Awards including Best Picture, Writing, International Feature Film, and Directing.

Following the success of “Parasite” came the Netflix series “Squid Game.”

Released in 2021 and written by Hwang Dong-hyuk, “Squid Game” is the streaming giant’s biggest original series launch to date. The launch was so massive that SK Broadband, a South Korean internet service provider, sued Netflix for the massive increase in traffic from viewers after the show’s release caused usage to shoot from 50 Gigabits per second to 1,200. The series went on to be the first non-English language television series to be nominated and win Emmy Awards. The series received 14 nominations and won six, including Lee

Jung-jae’s Outstanding Lead Actor win and an Outstanding Directing win for Hwang.

UCO student and member of the university’s Korean Student Association, Han Ji-woo, is happy that her country’s media is now massive in America.

“It’s started to boom, K-Pop and other K-things,” Han said. “If they don’t know BTS, they definitely know ‘Squid Game’ or ‘Parasite.’” Han expressed her surprise at Oklahoma and the Edmond areas offering authentic Korean restaurants, from boba tea shops to traditional Korean barbecue restaurants with grills embedded into each individual table for the patrons to cook their own meat.

“I used to have to go to Dallas to get some of these things, but it’s clearly growing and that’s exciting,” Han said.

In Bloom: Remembering Kurt Cobain as Nirvana is honored at Grammys

Sam Royka

Managing Editor

“Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. Nirvana means freedom from pain and suffering in the external world and that’s close to my definition of punk rock,” Kurt Cobain wrote in a journal entry.

Nirvana, who were honored this month with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2023 Grammy Awards, was one moving piece that spurred the grunge movement of the 1990s to explode into a global, cultural phenomenon. Grunge still has distinctive styles of clothing, hair, and attitude birthed from ’80s goth and ‘70s British punk, and before then, ‘60s beatnik music and spoken word.

Long before “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic founded Nirvana with drummer Aaron Burckhard in 1987. This occurred in Aberdeen, Washington, about a hundred miles from Seattle. The city is considered the birthplace of grunge, the “Seattle sound.”

The band shifted drummers until Dave Grohl, who would later lead Foo Fighters, joined Nirvana in No. 133 in the world on Spotify’s listening charts.

In “Serving the Servant,” author Danny Goldberg, who managed Nirvana, Hole and other acts, writes that “many who knew Kurt emphasize those aspects of his life that reinforce their particular notion of who they think he was,” and he admits to the same. In the field of communication, interpretive theory suggests the nature of human perspective may prevent an entirely objective view of any given topic.

In so many words, we’re only human.

Goldberg was personally Cobain’s friend and profes- sionally Nirvana’s co-manager, a relationship that he described as completely in service of the band’s wishes.

The success that Nirvana achieved was “all the more remarkable because they had emerged from the insular world of punk rock, which up until that moment had faced indifference from most American rock fans,” he wrote.

They shifted the face of punk rock and grunge subculture, cementing recognition by mainstream culture and creating the musical reality that exists today.

The particular success of various anti-establishment movements like punk rock could be attributed to the fact that music was their art form.

Goldberg wrote that “musicians have more individual cultural power than other artists.”

Explaining further, he wrote that “even the biggest movie stars, novelists, and painters can’t meet their audience in adoring groups of thousands on a nightly basis or get into their fans’ heads every day the way a hit song does. Hence the power of the phrase ‘rock star.’ Because he was that rare rock star who stood for something more than sex appeal or entertainment, Kurt was viewed by many journalists and fans as a savant,” Goldberg wrote.

Genre Talk:

In his last interview, a journalist asked Cobain where the term ‘grunge’ came from.

“Some of the rumors are that Jonathan Poneman said it one time sarcastically, and it just caught on,” he said. In this way, Poneman is credited with putting a label on the grunge phenomenon.

Poneman founded indie record label Sub Pop, which signed Nirvana to their first record deal for $600 in 1989. The band fulfilled this contract with the album “Bleach.”

In another journal entry, Cobain wrote that “Nirvana try to fuse punk energy with hard rock riffs, all within a pop sensibility.”

Love and Cobain:

The story of Cobain’s love life typically picks up with his girlfriend Trudy Marander, who supported them while he wrote songs and slept. While she wanted him to get a job, he felt weighed down. He wrote “About a Girl” about her during this time.

After they broke up, he dated Tobi Vail, drummer of Bikini Kill.

In “Heavier Than Heaven,” author Charles Cross wrote that while many Nirvana songs are about Vail, the pairing didn’t work because Vail regarded Cobain’s desired relationship structure as sexist and unaligned with radical punk values.

Finally, Cobain met Courtney Love.

There are multiple accounts of how this romance began. No matter how they met or who introduced them, Love quickly began her advances.

Cobain, however, said that he wanted to remain a bachelor just a little longer. This was expressed by him ignoring her calls and dodging some but not all of her advances in the beginning.

Soon, however, they bonded over music, art, and drug use.

Love’s band Hole released the album “Pretty on the Inside” one week before “Nevermind” catapulted Nirvana to the top of the charts in September 1991.

They were married in Honolulu in 1992 with eight close friends bearing witness. Cobain wore green and white plaid pajamas, while Love wore a gauzy white satin-andlace dress.

On their anniversary in

2020, Love posted a tribute to Cobain on Instagram.

“28 years ago I recall feeling, deeply, delighted, dizzy, so in love, and knowing how lucky I was,” she wrote, calling the man her “angel.”

Cobain’s death:

There is no way to erase the pain of the end of this story, but it can be said with certainty that his legacy continues his story to this day.

Cobain and Love’s connection included a shared addiction to heroin. In connection with the addiction but with other factors at play, Cobain died by suicide on April 5, 1994 at the age of 27.

The wound is still raw for many that he knew in his life,

Goldberg wrote.

In his last note, Cobain wrote “Frances and Courtney, I’ll be at your altar.”

Aftermath:

Goldberg ends his biography with these words.

“Notwithstanding Kurt’s dark side, I keep returning to the last chorus of “All Apologies,” where Kurt sang, ‘In the sun I feel as one / All in all is all we are,’ and to these lines from his journals: ‘No True Talent is fully organic, yet the obviously superior talented have, not only control of study, but that extra special little gift at birth, fueled by passion. A built in totally unexplainable, New Age, f–king cosmic energy bursting love.”