Start Here: Your Guide To Getting Into K-Pop

The last half-decade of Western pop music has been dominated by whisper-singing: a deliberately dry, almost ASMR-like performance style popularized by the likes of major label "indie pop" artists Julia Michaels, Selena Gomez, Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish. The sound is hushed and pacifying, a response to the chaos of the world, the millennial's music equivalent to minimalistic interior design — why belt when you could soothe?

K-pop idol music, meanwhile, took hold in the United States during the exact same era, and it was the opposite: a maximalist dreamland full of color, high concept-performances and videos, a plethora of performers and unrivaled choreography. If Top 40 in America wanted solo singers so soft every breath was caught on mic over a mid-tempo chorus, K-pop appeared to offer a genre-less alternative: constant stimulation, euphoria delivered in eight to 10 melodies and fantastical harmonies in a single track. (That is, K-pop idol music— in the West, "K-pop" is frequently used synonymously with Korean idol music, pop with a high-production value and produced in a deliberate studio system, as it is in this piece.)

K-pop is music that is stuffed but never bloated; music that is fun and meant to elicit joy when listened to and seen (K-pop is (three of which hit that particular benchmark in ,) history-making and music videos that double as . K-pop fans themselves have dominated headlines in and outside of the pop culture arena for their : using their digital native understanding to overwhelm white supremacist hashtags, crashing President Trump's Tulsa rally and police apps meant to solicit information about Black Lives Matter protesters, pressuring their Idols to take a stance and contributing . For those Anglophone audiences learning about K-pop for the first time, this particular music discovery probably feels like missing the boat on a voyage you didn't know was taking off. How could the needle shift so quickly? K-pop is overwhelming.