Notebook On Cities And Culture

In Seoul's Garosu-gil, Colin Marshall talks with Korean music industry expert Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a creative agency that provides digital media, marketing, and distribution services to Korean pop music artists. They discuss why the world now knows what K-pop is; how Korean youth culture, pop culture, and digit culture have become one in the same; Psy as outlier and representative of K-pop, "the bad boy who became the golden boy," who put a dent in the industry's pursuit of perfection; how "made in Korea" can work, internationally, as a label; whether the concept of "crazy Korea," like "weird Japan," has any traction; the big technological differences between the time of the 1990s J-pop boom and the modern K-pop boom; the musician's perceived need to break out of Korea for success; how, growing up in the United States, he became aware of Korean popular culture; his disenchantment with the "boo-hoo session" of Asian American studies; the accidental meeting that got him into music televisio