Switched on Pop - What BTS's "Boy With Love" ft. Halsey Can Teach Us About K-pop

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

How should we listen to K-pop? This music has become a global phenomenon, charting on the Billboard Hot 100, taking over social media feeds, and touring the world. In particular, the group BTS has captured the ears of millions, building an Army of fans along the way. As uninitiated listeners, the language and culture barrier left us uncertain about how to approach listening to, let alone breaking down their music. So we sought out the support of Dr, Suk-Young Kim, Professor of Critical Studies and the Director of the Center for Performance Studies at UCLA, and KCON's Vanessa Augsbach. Dr. Kim's research on K-pop helps to expand our ears and understand the genre's history and aesthetics, while Augsbach helps us better appreciate the fandom. Applying their insights, we listen to "Boy With Luv" as a first foray into the wonders of K-pop. Read Dr. Kim's book K-pop Live: Fans Idols, and Multimedia Performance, Watch Vox's Netflix series Explained on the history of K-pop Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So Nate, I think you'd agree that probably the number one most requested thing on our show has been to cover K-pop. K-pop, 100%. So I thought we should just jump right in on it. The biggest song right now, really in the world probably, is BTS's Boy with Love, featuring Halsey. Let's take a listen. is a catchy number. I've already got it rattling around my synaptic pathways. It is a super catchy track. But it's funny, I kind of feel like I wanted to reserve judgment about this song. And honestly, sort of K-pop as a whole, I just, I haven't figured out how to get into it. Like, it's a different language coming from a different nation. Yet it's this global phenomenon.

And honestly, I kind of feel like I've missed the boat and I'm almost embarrassed by it. But I thought what we could do is try to get some better backgrounds so that we can maybe have a more critical and tuned ear when we're hearing this music. I'm so down. There's a lot I have to learn about this genre that, as you say, is just inescapable right now. So I'm excited to see where this goes. I feel like I couldn't cover an entire band's history or genre without the help of someone who really knows this work. So I thought I would bring in a resident expert. My name is Su-Gyong Kim, and I teach theater at UCLA,

and I also direct Center for Performance Studies here on campus. So I spoke with Dr. Suk-jong-Kim, author of this great book, K-pop Live, fans, idols, and multimedia performance, and she really helped me better understand the genre by giving a more expanded definition of the music beyond just K-Pop. For me, K-pop is so complex that the best way for me to rephrase it is to think it as kaleidoscopic pop, Kedalt pop, keyboard keypad pop. Sometimes I call it Kleenex pop because, you know, it's so disposable.

Excellent songs are used once and they're forgotten the next week. And Korean pop in a way. And corporate pop as well with K. I love that. Okay, so what we're hearing here is, of course, the 5Ks of Ks of K's of K-pop. We've got kaleidoscopic pop, kiddalt pop, keyboard pop, corporate pop, and of course, Korean pop. And so what I want to do is work with Dr. Kim's definitions and see if they can enlighten our listening. Okay, right on.

We have to start from the very first one, kaleidoscopic pop. I love this word. And I asked Dr. Kim what she meant by it. I use that word to emphasize that K-pop is not just music that you listen. to, but more importantly, it's a spectacular show that you enjoy visually that comes through many different bodily presentations such as fashion, makeup, beauty practices, and spectacular choreography. It's not just sonic landscape that we're introduced to, but it's a panoply of visual landscape that is really attractive for many followers. So I use that term kaleidoscopic pop to really

emphasize the variety of senses that come together that appreciates K-pop. I'm buying this. I mean, we've outed ourselves as K-pop neophytes. So I'll be frank about, you know, my position here. What I do know about K-pop is definitely this kaleidoscopic angle. Like, it is such a visually rich medium. And I find when I am watching videos of BTS or Big Bang, and any of the other groups I like.

I'm as attracted to the incredible visual language of these groups as I am to the music itself. And you're totally right. You can go and watch YouTube videos, and usually they're going to have more plays than the equivalent song would on another streaming platform. It's just audio. So this actually for me kind of frustrates our entire purpose, Nate, right? We're like all about digging into composition. And from the beginning, we have to acknowledge that this is more than just the music. I'm totally comfortable stepping out of our orally focused worldview to embrace the visual as well.

So I think this raises an important question, which is, is it too late for us? Is it too late for us to get into? No, it's never too late, Charlie. With the five Ks to guide us, I'm sure we can find our footing in the, in the, in the, wild world of K-pop. Exactly. Second K. Kidalt. I introduced K-pop as primarily teen idol music, but it's fandom and performers are becoming multi-generational at this point. So that's why I call it kiddalt pop. I mean, it is introduced as something that teenagers enjoy, but if you actually look closely into who produces and who enjoys K-pop, it's actually people not only confined to

their teens, but in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. And, and much beyond. What K-pop does really well is to kind of provoke nostalgia in older fans. I mean, people who enjoyed their teenage years in the 80s suddenly re-encounter the similar kind of pop idols in current K-pop performers. And it's all strategically coordinated concepts

that the producers spin to kind of attract multi-generational fandom. In that sense, I think it will be a grave mistake to just confine K-pop. into teen idol music. Okay, that's a relief. And this is so interesting, too, right? I'm finding this idea that kiddalt is a cipher for the fact that it's music aimed at

a younger audience, but encompasses the kind of youthful nostalgia of older audience as well. I definitely get that. I feel like almost giddy when I listen to tracks like Boy With Love. Like, I feel like a kid. And I think here as well, we're going to start to see one of the important factors of K-pop, which is that it really works hard to reach a large audience. This is for a global audience and not just for young people. And Dr. Kim, I think, does a really great job of explaining how in order to reach a large audience, K-pop is also framed specifically for digital media.

K-pop actually was primarily born out of this digital ecosystem. It was a music performance to be presented on TV shows rather than primarily on recordings. And nowadays, we cannot think of K-pop as such without YouTube and Twitter. So I think most of, most global fans entry into K-pop is through the online cyberspace, whether that's their cell phones or YouTube channels on your computer screen or your iPad. So in order to really emphasize that K-pop's natural habitat is cyberspace,

I use that term K-Pad or keyboard pop as a way to see how we enter K-pop space. So we've established that the music is not all that matters. here and that the interaction amongst fans in the digital world is often what brings people to the music first. I think especially in a music which is in a language which is not spoken broadly around the globe. One of the essential ways that K-pop reaches people is through all of the brilliant marketing and communication that happens online.

I want to do something that we've never tried before, which is I want to watch a video together and see how is this speaking to us? Like what are we catching? Maybe what are we missing as well? Oh, okay. This is weird. It makes me uncomfortable, but that probably means it's a good idea. So let's try it. Okay, so let's just pull up Boy with Love. Okay, the song hasn't even started and I'm already seeing something interesting here. Big hit entertainment. So I'm assuming that's the management company behind BTS. Yeah, and then we go to Halsey at a movie theater. Right.

Now they're dancing and I'm transfixed. We've got like color matched hairs and costumes to a beautiful old movie theater called persona. Where are we now? I guess in a diner. Ooh, I like that transition to the all blue background. All blue suits. There's always something to catch your eye. There's never something not happening.

Super complex dance moves that are happening both in the foreground and the background. They're sort of like move between different characters, different spaces. Interesting blend of like, yeah, these digital backdrops and real life stages. Oh, there's a giant keyboard on the ground that feels like it's reminiscent of the movie big. Kidults, man. Right. Collidescopic comes to my mind once again. It is just such a like a visual feast.

Palsy is on a sofa with BTS and I'm like like, I'm like 90% sure is actually just green screened in. That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. She's definitely there with them. If anything, the conspiracy theory should be, does she actually sing anything on this track? I mean, she just doesn't play a major role in this track at all, really. That's true, yeah, right.

Is this sort of like crossed over with a lot of English lyrics and, you know, one of the biggest American stars, and yet her role is definitely subservient to the song. I mean, the other fascinating thing about, watching this is how irrelevant the language barrier quickly becomes. Huh. And perhaps watching it more than listening, so you know, you sort of supersede any incomprehension you might have because gesturally it all seems to make sense to me.

Dude, that was trippy. We were like, entered a movie theater. We went into the movie big. We then went into this like surrealist vision. It was almost like La La Land. It became like a Vegas nightlife show and finally ends up. on the entire band in perfect matching pink uniforms, up against a sort of pink and orange background.

Everything is just like popping with color and imagery the entire time. Yeah. And this, honestly, this seems pretty tame compared to a lot of other K-pop videos I've watched. You know, it's also interesting, there's that moment at the very end, which catches them more candidly

and just sort of like enjoying each other's company, not doing any choreography. And it's like, that seems like such an important part of this formula too. like there's always, it needs to be those moments where you sort of peer behind the curtain and see these stars as they are without any trappings or mediation. It's no surprise that we were taken in by this video because it was the most viewed 24-hour debut in YouTube history.

BTS continues to just constantly break these sorts of records with their music, with their videos, with their ticket sales, with their concerts. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah, at this point, BTS seems less. like, I don't know, some kind of novelty and more just a sort of given fact of the international pop ecosystem. Like, they are just part of that landscape. And what I want to do after a quick break is look at, I think, sort of the two most essential parts of this five-part K-pop definition. An answer, is this actually just a corporate behemoth or some kind of nationalist project that is

pushing this music forward, or is there maybe something more there? Cool. See on the other side. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness.

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So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security? period. I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. One of the core tensions that I brought up here about K-pop music is, you know, does the music here even matter? Right. If this whole thing is meant for a digital ecosystem and multimedia kaleidoscopic sort of experience, is the music important? And I think that this is a frequently sort of challenged concept. And Dr. Kim speaks to it really brilliantly in her definition of what she calls corporate pop.

Corporate with a K. Corporate with the K. K-pop stars are not really born, but they're made. And who makes K-pop stars? I mean, it's the corporate forces behind this kind of, many people have called it factory model system. So I think the closest analogy that we can draw upon is Motown or Golden Age of Studio System in Hollywood, where stars were attached to their producers or corporations behind them and were groomed to become stars. rather than just emerging out of nowhere.

And BTS is one of these groups. They were formed by big hit entertainment, and they were molded. They were originally going to be a hip-hop group and then formed more into a teen- idol group with hip-hop influences. And we could sort of fret about the sort of authenticity of that sort of a formation. But I'm curious, is this really fundamentally different from contemporary Western stars like Beyonce and Justin Timberlake who came up through similar systems in the West? perception about K-pop is even more so married to corporate forces, to the point that vast majority of idols would be introduced as, oh, idols from such, such production company. Up until recently, there have been three major corporations which produce K-pop idols, train them, produce them, and also produce their record labels. and they were SM, JYP, and YG.

And when idol boy bands or girl groups are introduced to public for the first time, they're mostly known as YG idols or SM idols or JYP idols, even before we get to their kind of idiosyncratic, you know, musical kind of orientation and whatnot. So that kind of corporate labeling seems to be very important part of understanding the idol's career trajectory as well as their musical kind of orientation. So this is fundamentally different. Inasmuch as record labels would like to have that sort of brand identity, they don't intentionally try to have a singular brand association or sound as exists in K-pop. To sort of dig deeper into that, I wanted to go into, you know, specifically what are those kind of brand qualities that these companies try to associate with?

SM idols are known to have perfect looks, and their kind of social identity is forged around them being role models for younger generation. Whereas YG Entertainment, which is struggling deeply nowadays, mired in these all big scandals, is known to be based on hip-hop music, and their idols are seen as rebellious, dark, almost kind of harboring on criminality. And a lot of those concepts make into their music and music videos. So this brought out a really important question for me. She talks about how one of these labels intentionally associates with hip-hop. And I think this gets something that you and I had actually talked about the other day.

And I actually grabbed you on audio while we were having coffee. Here's what you said. Are there features of Korean pop that separate it as its own. stylistic genre or is it more accurate to see it as US mainstream popular music with Korean lyrics. Wow, that guy sounds incredibly intelligent and somehow I just sense dropped at handsome but I don't know I could be wrong. Here's what Dr. Kim had to say. Tough question. My only answer is that there is no logic to K-pop. Anything and everything goes. And the funny thing about K-pop, perhaps,

that differentiates from mainstream American music is that I don't think it really starts with music or sound. I think it starts with concept, overarching concept. So this will be, for example, 1950s retro feminist look. Start with that. Costume design starts with that. Music video directors start with that, and songwriters start with that. And this is very prevalent way of making music in SM entertainment, where the visuality is really the triumphant force in driving K-pop. So I would say that that's kind of different. Maybe things are done differently in U.S. popular cultural scene nowadays,

but the place of a songwriter seems to be a little different. You know, the songwriters are part of a team who plays around this main concept that visual or artistic directors come up with. That is super interesting and really highlights the capital K corporate nature of K-pop and makes me think maybe to revise my question in a less reductive way, not like are there musical stylistic features of K-pop writ large, but rather go on a case-by-case basis from artists to song. and see if there are certain things jumping out in a given song rather than across the board. That's exactly what I want to do. First, I actually asked Dr. Kim about this question of are there musical qualities that we can identify? And I want to see what she had to say and then maybe do some listening. In terms of musical spread, it's everything and anything.

It's so eclectic. Starting from very traditional kind of urban hip-hop music. to R&B and Seoul to actually Europop dance music from the 70s and 80s. All of that is somehow meshed into it. And especially SM Entertainment has this kind of phrasing that transitions from one to the next. So there is no consistent pattern to it and that's one of the challenging modes. So you're kind of always like surprised. One example is a girl's generation, a popular girl group from SM Entertainment.

I got a boy. It starts with an EDM dance, and then it turns into hip-hop song, and then comes back. And it's that unpredictability that kind of throws you into this kaleidoscopic kind of sonic field, where you feel really disorientated. But then, you know, maybe you need it because K-pop's kind of currency, cultural currency, also comes from the accrued numbers of YouTube viewing, numbers of tweets that it generates. And to have this kind of unpredictable passages and progression in is a way for fans to listen to it so many times to accrue those cultural currencies in terms of numbers of viewing and likes and retwits and whatnot. Okay, so we need to accrue some cultural currency.

And I'm going to ask you how many genres can you identify in these clips? Okay, I'm ready. We're going to start with CLC's me. What are you thinking? I think. Okay. In the beginning, I don't know if this is a genre per se, but I was like having flashbacks to turn of the 21st century pop music like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys.

Yeah, definitely. Okay, in the chorus, I'm definitely hearing, you know, echoes of like EDM dubstep kind of sounds. Yeah. Definitely. You want more, though. Yeah. I don't know. That's all I got.

That's all I got. Charlie. Do you not hear maybe like even like a little bit of Latin pop here? Oh, check it out one more time. Do you hear those offbeat synthesizers? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or like Caribbean dance hall music kind of. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, I'm with you. I'm with you. I'm hearing that. This music is broad, right? Like we've jumped from thing to thing to thing. It's engaging. Yeah, this track is. a really exciting brew of all these different musical influences. All right, let's go to another one. Let's listen to Super Junior, Leslie Grace, and playing skills, Lo Siento.

All right, I'm just starting there. What are you here? Wow, that's really fun. I'm not going to name a specific genre, but what do we have? We've got like a mix of kind of like acoustic guitar and then these wordless vocals. I don't know. I'm not going to, I can't locate it anywhere in particular, but it does, it sounds reminiscent of something.

What is it, Charlie? A little scatting. I don't know. I hear like honestly sort of touches of jazz fusion. Sure. Let's go with that. All right. Let's keep moving.

What are you here? If in the last track we had sort of a, you know, subtle, buried Caribbean rhythm. Now here it's like, this feels like reggaeton to me, just like straight up. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and this is literally like a trilingual track. This is cool. You can hear Korean, Spanish, English, and you also hear all those musical influences as well.

Absolutely. And we're going to hear maybe one more genre when we get to the pre-chorus. Okay. Whoa. That was fun. I'm maybe I'm gonna I'm gonna peg that to like you know 90s R&B or something because ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding oh nice nice yeah totally first of all like the chord changes right chromatic lush directional like very moving and then the vocal quality and these kind of swooping malizmas yeah the whole thing just screams like you know late Whitney Houston slash early Beyonce or something it's really cool it totally does I want to go to to our original song. And now that we've learned a little bit of our larger definition of K-pop and we can

think about it more broadly, what are you hearing genre-wise or other references when you listen to Boy with Love? Hmm. I don't know. This is, this one is trickier, to be honest. Yeah. But that's only in terms of assigning, you know, these very narrow genres. There's a little bit of house maybe in there with that four on the four bass drum and

those kind of like lilting, dancing syncopation. And yeah, I don't know how to describe it's kind of, it's this really infectious but kind of light groove that makes me think a little bit of certain house tracks. Do you hear the like sort of chic style funk guitar that think what we heard on Def Punk's Random Axis Memories, which had that exact sound? Yeah, yeah. House, okay, so maybe stretching back even further to disco a little bit and 70s funk. Yeah, yeah, I'm persuaded by that.

The first time that I heard this song, I also heard other contemporary reference. is that not just genres, but other songs that I thought were perhaps inspirations. I mean, the chorus, right? That reminds me of a song we've covered on this podcast. That's right. Oh, my, my, my by Troy Savon. I love that song. Yeah, yeah, cool. So that, oh, my, is definitely redolent. Okay. I even heard a little bit of the pre-chorus of Boy with Love. Something, that's kind of another far reach, another song we've covered

Charlie Puth's attention. Check this out. That part where he descends. He's going to come back around and do it again. That part? Yeah, so check this out. All these songs are in really different keys and tempos, but I mash them up together. I think you're going to see that there's actually some connection between them. There you go. Okay,

there's definitely some overlap. I mean, I'm inclined to just chalk that up to another one of these, you know, there's only so many notes in the scale and we're all going to eventually sing the same thing if we're all, you know, making a million songs a year. But you've shown, if nothing else, that this is very much, you know, exists firmly in the landscape of late 2010's hop. When you first were going over Professor Kim's 5Ks and you said keyboard, the first thing, I now know that what she's referring to is the

fact that this is like an incredibly digital experience, this, this k-pop scene. But my first thought was it was like, oh, this is music made on keyboards. And that is kind of true, actually. I mean, one thing that ties all these tracks together from Troy Savon to Charlie Puth to Boy with Love is like, these are all not only digital products in the sense that they're, you know, we stream and we watch videos, they're like made out of computers too. I don't know if there's any acoustic instruments in any of these songs. Exactly. This music fits right in with what's happening throughout the rest of certainly Western pop music and global pop music. And I think that's why it's so easy to throw into playlist regardless of what the primary language might be. I want to, before we move on to the final

definition, though, expand beyond this idea of corporate pop. Because I don't want to suggest that this music, though, designed by corporations, is exactly top down. So to learn a little bit about how actually the fandom contributes back into the music, I went and chatted with someone who helps coordinate communications for one of the biggest K-pop fandoms. I am Vanessa Augsbuck, the digital media manager for K-Con. Vanessa works at Kekon. It's one of the largest Korean cultural and music festivals. It started in 2012 in Irvine, actually, and it's now global.

In Thailand, Japan, Australia, Abu Dhabi, it's all over the place. And she helped me appreciate that K-pop. Pop creation is truly multi-vector. The fans do so much work, making sure that people have that kind of base knowledge to get into it. Fans do a lot of the work of content creation. In terms of forming this kind of bond with lyrics or with the artist itself, the fans who will make videos about, oh, like, these are the song lyrics, you have to know by Black Pink, or these are kind of the funniest Black Pink moments.

So that gives you kind of a basis of, oh, I really like this, this, band. She told me that when new songs go online, within moments, people are uploading lyrics and are helping broaden the access to this music, to the entire fandom. People actually sort of wait anxiously for translations when these songs come out. And I think it's a really sort of fascinating relationship between musician and fan and gatekeepers of fandom. Yeah, I love this idea. You know, the fans, don't just play this passive role of like receiving content from the musicians they idolize. It's like they take an active role and it becomes this feedback loop rather than a sort of

unidirectional relationship. I think you're spot on. This music is global and it takes the global audience to make it work. We only went through four of the five part definition of K-pop. and the thing that we actually didn't talk about is to the degree that it actually is Korean pop music. And I think what's fascinating about this is that when we look at its history,

K-pop as a genre movement music actually starts internationally, not domestically. Dr. Kim explained to me where the term actually originated from. The term comes from actually outside of Korea. Many scholars would agree that Hong Kong cable channel called Vchannel had a special corner on K-pop, which was basically trendy music coming out of 1990s Korea. So the term itself has a really embedded

kind of global perspective of how Korea is looked by the outside world and non-Korean. What's fascinating to me here is that not only is the term K-pop invented internationally, but it actually required domestic crisis and upheaval to build K-pop as a movement beyond its own borders. Korean pop singers had crisis in mid-90s, partly because MP3 files were being introduced to music scenes and traditional means of gaining income from your CD or cassette tape sales or live music tours.

suddenly became untenable because so much of music became freely downloadable. We all downloaded music for free without paying royalty to the artist. So there was a big crisis as to how to survive as a music artist. And the Korean music industry had to really look into global market as its primary market. This is very illuminating and raises this idea for me of K-pop not just being Korean pop, but really being a kind of global music, which in turn brings me back to the question I had originally, like, which is, is K-pop just, you know, US pop in a different language? And the answer is, no, it's not.

It's this much more, you know, hybridic and border crossing style, which then in turn is the same thing you could say about U.S. popular music. So this is, I need to step back and like, and do some soul-surging for sure. Well, those, I mean, stepping back, like, I think we've got to look at, like, okay, so we've learned that K-pop is kaleidoscopic. It's cadult. It's for a broad audience of all ages. And it's also global by being keyboard pop connected to the digital ecosystem of pop culture beyond just music. It's corporate pop.

And it is Korean pop. It's motivated by sort of a national recording industry necessity to grow beyond its own small domestic borders. And this is all really helpful to me in listening, realizing that so much of what we are already bringing as music fans is applicable. I think I had sort of intentionally sort of held back out of a place of respect and wanting to learn more about the music first. And I think Dr. Kim's model really helps me feel more confident in sort of approaching this music.

It also makes me wonder, like, what does it take to be a fan? Because I know that one thing that does sort of stand out amongst K-pop is that it has a just ravenous fandom. If you go to K-Con, it's a spectacle. People are engrossed in this culture. And I was sort of like scared. Like, how can I even get started? Like, do I have to be a total stand of K-pop in order to take the next step? Right.

Like, I feel like we're just tipping our toes in. What should we do next? And so to get some validation, I asked Vanessa from K-Con, what would be? it take for me to be a fan? So I think it's okay to just be a fan of like K-pop in general. And I think a lot of our fans have like very diverse interests. So I think you don't have to be a stand of a certain band. I think you just have to like be a fan of the fandom itself.

Like are you like supporting and like saying like it's amazing that K-pop is getting big here that like this niche content keeps growing, then I think you're a K-Paw fan. it's okay for us to be a casual K-pop fan. It's not too late for us to get into it. Totally. This conversation has just sort of ignited my appetite to go out and learn more. And I feel pretty confident in doing so because I know there's a whole world of fans out there who can guide me through this world. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that it invites both of us to think about referencing what's happening in the K-pop world, which is really what's happening on the U.S. charts at this point. anyway in our conversation about all popular music. It is so deeply interwoven. And so I look forward to, you know, as I said, this feels like really the first step. Like I am just totally coming into this, mostly naive and excited to go and listen a lot more and get further into this music. Amen, Charles. If you want to get more background on where K-pop came from, what its sound is, why it matters. I have two recommendations. One, check out Professor Suk Young Kim's book K-pop Live, fans, idols, and multimedia performance.

I really enjoyed it. Also, definitely check out Vox's series on Netflix, Explained. Estelle Caswell, Vox's great video, music journalist, did an amazing piece on K-pop. It's a great companion to this conversation. I think you'll really enjoy it. Check out, Explained on Netflix. This episode of Switched-on Poff was produced by me, Charlie Harding. And me, Nate Sloan.

We're mixed and engineered by Brandon McFarland. Our production fellow is Megan Lubin. Our community manager is Sarah Terry. And our executive producers are Nashak Hurwa and Liz Nelson. We're a production of Vox Media. You can find more episodes at switchonpop.com, iHeartRadio, Spotify, the Apple podcast app. Wherever podcasts are chilling, we will be there amongst them. And chat with us on social media.

We are at Switchdon Pop on Twitter and on Instagram. And really doing this piece came about from all of your requests and interest in K-pop. So we really do get a lot from talking with you there. We'll be back again in another week next Tuesday. And until then, thanks for listening.