“K-Pop Dreaming,” a new podcast series by LAist Studios that explores the rise of K-pop and the Korean diaspora in Los Angeles, released its first two episodes on Thursday.
Listeners are guided by host, writer and actor Vivian Yoon, a second-generation Korean American immigrant who spent her formative years in the city’s Koreatown. Yoon’s personal narrative serves as a cornerstone memoir that blends the realms of pop culture and geopolitical history to form a profound love letter to the city of Los Angeles.
A mixtape and a secret
Episode 2, for instance, is framed around a mixtape that Yoon created with K-pop tracks ranging from artists such as SM Entertainment boy group H.O.T. – considered by many as the first K-pop idol group – to Psy and his seminal 2012 song “Gangnam Style.” Each selected track is both an informative historical artifact and a key to a pivotal moment in Yoon’s own life.
“That episode was so hard. That episode actually didn’t exist when we first came up with the outline for the series,” Yoon tells NextShark ahead of the “K-Pop Dreaming” premiere.
A challenge in the podcast was: how do we introduce all these concepts to listeners? In a way that’s not overwhelming. We wanted to introduce big K-pop ideas so that everybody starts at the same place, like whether you’re a super fan, or whether the only K-pop song you know is BTS’ ‘Dynamite.’ How do we get everybody caught up to speed? The idea for Episode 2 was like a quick overview of K-pop. From the ‘90s to the present day.
According to Yoon, Episode 2 took at least 10 different rewrites to appear more like a podcast episode and less like a lengthy article.
The quickest way to get away from boring is to just anchor it in something personal. I then figured, why don’t we just use the songs that informed my childhood and teen years to get us into these bigger concepts?
When it came to picking the songs, it was a no-brainer: here are all the songs that I…
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