It had successfully hawked its cultural wares in the global marketplace. K-pop!” He asked us to speak Korean, as though he might inhale the sounds along with the salty sea air. When I invited them over for a home-cooked Korean meal, they brought along a friend, another Latino Koreaphile, and a Korean cake garlanded in candied fruits.Ī few years after that, my parents and I were on a ferry in Greece, during a trip to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary, when a young Greek man in shorts came up to us, smiling broadly. They’d taught themselves the basics, and began texting with me in short bursts of Hangul, with emojis and exclamation points. Like Karina, they were the daughters of Latino immigrants and bilingual in English and Spanish, but it was Korean that they wanted to know. Three years later, a friend on Long Island told me that teen-age twins who she’d met in town were obsessed with all things Korean. One morning, a worker approached me and asked, apropos of nothing, if I was Korean-not “Chinese or Japanese?” This precision was new. Standing among the women on a street corner in a black puffy coat, I tried to make conversation in my terrible Spanish. I had heard that many employers paid low wages or didn’t pay at all some workers reported verbal abuse and sexual harassment. In the winter of 2012, I was writing a story about Latina day laborers in Brooklyn who cleaned Hasidic homes before the Sabbath-when women’s work accumulated to the point where outsourcing became necessary. I first glimpsed the swell of hallyu, the Korean wave, a decade ago. To continue ignoring the BTS phenomenon was to risk missing something bigger than Beatlemania. The group was everywhere, and everyone seemed to be into them. But, earlier this year, BTS became inescapable. I absorbed Western critiques of K-pop’s girl and boy bands: that they’re fluffy, manufactured, and exploitative of their members-as if the same weren’t true of New Kids on the Block.
BIG IN JAPAN LYRICS SKIN
When reporting on South Korea, I resisted the expected topics: Korean skin care, plastic surgery, dogmeat, and, yes, K-pop. He wrote it with his band mates, Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens.Īnd the track was produced by two of their regular collaborators, Colin Pearson and Wolfgang Loos.I’ve long been hesitant to write about BTS. “Big in Japan” was written by Alphaville’s lead singer Marian Gold. Moreover, “Big in Japan” was also moderately successful when it was covered by a German rock band called the Guano Apes in 2000. Ironically it seems “Big in Japan” didn’t chart in the Land of the Rising Sun itself (Japan). However, the song did top the Eurochart Hot 100, the Official German Chart (where it was also certified Gold), the Sverigetopplistan (Sweden), the Schweizer Hitparade (Switzerland) and Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play list (USA). This is in addition to charting in 11 other countries. And in most of those nations “Big in Japan” also made it onto the top 10. Warner Music released “Big in Japan” in January of 1984. It was the lead single from Alphaville’s first album, “Forever Young”. In fact this track was an unexpected success that blew up before the band had even finished writing the rest of the songs that were eventually featured on that project.Īlphaville also dropped some remixes of this track in 1992. And “the Zoo” is actually the colloquial name of a popular drug den in Berlin. And if they are to actually do so they would be “big in Japan”, as in being able to conquer their addiction in a foreign environment. But this is just a probable interpretation as once again the intended relationship between the title and the storyline of the track is not made abundantly clear. So all of this considered, perhaps what the singer is suggesting is that he and his romantic should perhaps flee “the Zoo”. It points to the idea of someone becoming a popular success in a foreign country while remaining relatively-irrelevant in their own homeland. And this type of phrase is commonly used in reference to entertainers, especially the likes of musicians. But stripped down to its most basic form, it means that a person is able to achieve something great away from home that they aren’t able to do in their familiar environs. And such would likely be the case in which Alphaville has applied that saying to the aforementioned narrative. Now as for the title, “big is Japan”, simply put it is more or less an idiom.