It’s been a good couple of days for people who like to read my ramblings about Korea (admittedly a rather small sub-section of humanity). First, I was quoted a fair bit in an article in the Scotland Sunday Herald about K-pop. And now the latest New Yorker, as John Seabrook’s feature article about K-pop, “Factory Girls,” references Pop Goes Korea a whole bunch — sadly, though, Seabrook’s story is behind a pay wall. (UPDATE: I nearly forgot, I also was quoted in an Ad Age article about the marketability of Psy and “Gangnam Style”*).
“Factory Girls” was interesting, as I got to experience the famed New Yorker fact-checking regime. Plenty of calls and emails asking about all sorts of K-pop details, sometimes basic facts, but other times more interpretive. They were nice enough to have uncovered a couple of errors from my chapter on Lee Sooman … in part because there is so much more information from the 1980s and 1990s online now than when I wrote the book. Luckily, none of the errors were crucial to my book — mostly they were details (like the number of times one K-pop star was arrested for drug use), the kind of things I hope to clean up should the book ever get another edition.
Anyhow, if you are interested the New Yorker’s fact checking culture, John McPhee’s article “Checkpoints” is also paywalled, but you can read it for free here.
* (How scary is it that when Anita Chang Beattie filed her story late last week, “Gangnam Style” had 283 million Youtube hits, and already it is at 335 million?)
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In other news, Park Jihyun and Gord Sellar’s short film, “The Music of Jo Hyeja,” just won the Audience Pick Award at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Los Angeles. “The Music of Jo Hyeja” is a spooky, atmospheric short film that re-tells Lovecraft’s story “The Music of Erich Zann.” It looks great and features music by Jambinai, so how can you go wrong? Hopefully it will come to a film festival near you before too long.
Your quote about Goths in the Sunday Herald was spot on, I’d say, with the added benefit of not having to constantly advertise it to your surroundings.
It seems the Gangnam Style fad has yet to reach is peak even though it’s been a couple of months already. Spent most of last week in Ireland, where I on my second day was told that Ireland was a Gangnam Style free zone, as illustrated by a friend having asked for the song in question to be played at a night club a few days back without the DJ having even the faintest clue what he was talking about. Nevertheless I heard the song played on radio just a few days later before the woman introducing it claimed that “it’s gotten 400 million views on YouTube in just a week, so you can expect to hear much more of it soon.”
Hi Anna:
Thanks for the comment, as always. Interesting to hear about Ireland. I remember back when La Macarena was the big craze, feeling like it was following me all over the world. In those pre-Youtube times, those big viral hits took a lot longer to get going, and then went on interminably. USA, Canada, France, Korea… wherever I went, that song popped up again and again. At least with Gangnam Style, 90% of the world is dealing with it at the same time.