Let’s have a drink! – A look at the Korean drinking culture

A scene often appearing in the Korean TV dramas is people drinking alcoholic beverages and getting drunk. When you travel to South Korea, you can often see people drinking alcoholic beverages in green bottles called soju. According to a survey by the Korea Alcohol and Liquor Industry Association, in 2010, 93.8% of men and 83.8% of women said they regularly consumed alcohol. Alcohol is indeed an integral part of the Korean life.  Let’s talk about the Korean drinking culture in this blog post. Continue reading

Evolution of K-pop Series – 2000’s and beyond

**Last updated on 17 October 2020**

In the last blog post, I talked about the K-pop revolution brought by Seo Taiji & Boys who laid the foundation for the modern K-pop and the creation of the first-generation young idol groups in the 1990’s.  From then onwards, K-pop has been designed to target the teenagers.  In this post, I will talk about the 2000’s in which we saw the aggressive large-scale expansion of K-pop to other countries as part of the Korean Wave. Continue reading

Evolution of K-pop Series – An overview

When talking about K-pop (케이팝 – Korean pop music), you may think of the songs sung by K-pop idol groups like Girls’ Generation, EXO, Super Junior, etc. However, if you watch the variety show, Immortal Songs (불후의 명곡), and the Korean drama “Reply 1994” (응답하라 1994), you may hear names like Shin Joong-hyun, Pearl Sisters, Patti Kim, Seo Taji & Boys and many other names who contributed to the development of the present-day Korean pop music. Looking at the evolution of the K-pop can help us better understand the characteristics of the present-day K-pop music and also gives us a chance to appreciate the K-pop music of the past, which is still very nice to listen to.  So, I will start a blog post series on the evolution of K-pop. Continue reading