NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

I arrived in South Korea at the end of August 2012, about a month after Korea’s biggest viral hit had been released. I taught elementary school, and I was aghast to hear a chorus of  7-year-olds dancing the horse dance and singing in English, “Hey, sexy lady!” I was teaching at a Christian school among other young conservative missionaries. I thought about how sheltered the Christian schools were that I grew up in. I had arrived in South Korea, the land of electronic boy and girl Idol groups--boys and girls who had dieted, trained for years under questionable conditions, and undergone plastic surgeries and treatments to look magazine-worthy, yet it wasn’t BIGBANG , SHINee , Girls’ Generation or  2NE1 who popularized K-pop for the world. It was Park Jae-sang .  LONG TIME, NO SEE, HUH? Psy ’s “ Gangnam Style ” was simultaneously the quintessential K-pop song and the most anti-K-pop song ever recorded. Psy was a Korean rapper and only achieved modest airplay in South Korea before his v

Last year, RIIZE (라이즈) debuted on SM Entertainment with their single “ Memories ” from the single Get a Guitar . The group was comprised of seven members until a scandal broke out with Hong Seunghan (홍승한) who was placed on an indefinite hiatus from the group. The boy band has released four singles so far, with January 5’s “ Love 119 ” as their latest. Rather than a rap, the song features a catchy chant, lamenting a girl who has done the speaker of the song wrong. The speaker frantically dials 119, the emergency number in South Korea, to declare that “the girl’s a killer.”   SAVE MY LIFE, SAVE MY LIFE. Shortly after RIIZE’s debut, the K-pop community started calling Anton , one of the group’s members, a “ nepo baby .” Anton is the stage name for Lee Chan Yeong (이찬영). His father, Lee Yoon Sang (이윤상) is musician who started his musical career playing bass for singer Kim Wan-sun ’s backing band. In 1900, he began a solo career. After releasing his 2002 album Migration ( 이사 ), he began

People that complain that there is no talent in music today are overlooking quite a few artists. My blog is full of talent young musicians from Betty Who to Charlie Puth who may not be the most popular musicians, but they have used classical and technical training to write and produce their own songs. Of course there are tons of other examples, but I mention both Who and Puth because, like  Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, Icelandic singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, these artists are all alumnus of Berklee College of Music , a prestigious school that has just as many famous graduates as famous dropouts. ME AND YOU AND AWKWARD SILENCE.  Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir, better know by her first name Laufey, was born to a Chinese mother and an Icelandic father. Laufey was raised on classical and jazz music. Her mother is a classical violinist, and her grandfather, Lin Yaoji was famous a violin instructor at the Central Conservatory of Music in China from which he graduated and also studied at