Sang-Hyun Park Talks About Solo Career After MBLAQ

Sang-Hyun Park is better known by his stage name Thunder (Cheondung). Born in Busan, he is the younger brother of 2NE1’s vocalist Sandara Park. The siblings grew up in the Philippines and, in addition to Korean, Thunder is fluent in English and Tagalog as well as conversational in Mandarin and Japanese. After training under one of South Korea’s greatest singers and dancers, Rain (Ji-hoon Jung), Thunder became a member of the South Korean male quintet MBLAQ, as a vocalist, lead rapper and lead dancer. Besides becoming idols in South Korea, they made their Japanese debut in 2011 and have sold singles and albums exclusive to Japan. Thunder has also had a successful modeling career encompassing both photo-shoots and runways. In December 2014, he announced his departure from MBLAQ to focus on studying music. Thunder talked to Seoul Journal's Executive Editor Anthony Al-Jamie about his career and future plans.

Asia’s Korean band fad is going global with top Western entertainment venues hosting performances by Korean dancers and musical artists.

K-Pop Goes the World

Surprising Attendance in California

The lights go on. The pounding dance beat starts. And 12,000 screaming fans rise to their feet in the Honda Center in Anaheim, California. Acclaimed record producer Quincy Jones watches from his suite. Is this Beyonce? Rhianna? Lady Gaga? Nope. It’s an all-star concert featuring the likes of Girls Generation, Super Junior, BoA, TVXQ, f(x), EXO and SHINee. How can bands not played on American Top 40 radio fill a U.S. arena? Well, these are Korea’s top pop bands, and they played S.M. Entertainment’s third world tour on May 20, 2012. SME, a Seoul-based independent record producer, has held previous world tours with stops in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing and Taipei. Yeah, but was Anaheim’s Honda Center filled with 12,000 Koreans and Korean Americans? Nope. Around two thirds of the fans were non- Korean, a sign of the spreading popularity of Korean pop.

Click here to see a Photo Gallery of the SM Town World Live III Concert in Anaheim, California

YouTube Sensations

If K-Pop music isn’t being played on the radio, how are fans discovering these acts? YouTube. An unlikely emergent is called “Psy.” He is a flabby, middle-aged looking guy, who with his “horsey dance”, came out of nowhere and took the world by storm in 2012. At the time of print, he had the most watched and most liked YouTube video of all time with over 815 million views and the Guinness World Record for breaking 2.9 million “likes” on YouTube with “Gangnam Style.” Psy knocked viral legends such as Rebecca Black and Lady Gaga down the charts in his international hit count, and became the #1 downloaded song on iTunes. No wonder Schoolboy Records (the label of Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Brown) signed him. Korea’s JoongAng newspaper has reported that K-Pop videos on YouTube were viewed nearly 2.3 billion times from 235 countries in 2011, three times more than the previous year’s record of 800 million views. The majority of clicks were from Japan with 423 million, followed by 240 million views in the U.S., 220 million in Thailand, 180 million in Taiwan and 170 million in Vietnam. But is K-pop growing outside Asia and the U.S.? Interestingly enough, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait brought in 4.8 million and 1.7 million views, respectively.

Two of South Korea’s biggest bands, TVXQ! and Super Junior, have taken their tours global as demand for K-pop grows around the world.

K-Pop Continues to Go Global

TVXQ!

TVXQ!, known as Dong Bang Shin Ki in South Korea, Tong Vfang Xien Qi in China and Tohoshinki in Japan, has twice held the Guinness World Record for the largest fan club in the world, with more than 800,000 in South Korea alone. They hold the current Guinness World Record for being the Most Photographed Celebrities in the World with more than 500 million photos taken. TVXQ! launched their “TVXQ! Live World Tour ‘Catch Me’” in November 2012 in Seoul before heading to China, Taiwan and elsewhere around the world. They made history by touring 11 cities in Japan between January and April 2012, doing a total of 26 shows as part of their “TVXQ! Live Tour 2012 ~TONE” with more than 550,000 in attendance.

K-POP girl group EXID taking on 2018!

EXID is a girl group that got their start in February 2012 with the single “Whoz that Girl.” However, they did not gain popularity until a live recording of their single “Up&Down” went viral in 2014. They went on to release their first album, Street, in 2016. Following the album’s release, it was announced that one of the members, Solji, had to go on hiatus after being diagnosed with hyperthyroidism. Yet, with the release of the mini album, Full Moon, on November 7th, 2017, Solji was able to start helping with the recording process again. EXID currently monthly releases remastered versions of b-side tracks from their old albums as a part of their “Re:Flower” project. Their latest installment was a remake of the track “Will You Take Me” from the album Street, which was released on February 12th, 2018.

MAMAMOO’s fantastic performance exceeded 170 million likes on Facebook

On July 10, MAMAMOO appeared on KBS 2TV ‘You Hee-yeol's Sketchbook"...