What's your kpop story? And how did you get yourself into liking kpop?

[queenyoona]

I honestly thought that people were mentally insane and I thought how could people listen to kpop their music sucks!

 

But then years later when I was in 9th grade my friend kept on showing me his kpop videos and I was dude stop I'm never gonna like them ever!!

And my friend is like yes you are watch you're gonna be so obsess like me.

I think like a week ago I had like 2ne1 fire stuck in my head "eh eh eh 2ne1" and I was like OMG why do I have this stuck in my head so I started listening to something else but then it kept playing in my head. So I finally went to YouTube and listen to this song and I got obsessed.

And my friend doesn't even know that I'm obsessed because he moved to Washington Junior year.

 

What's your kpop story? And how did you get into kpop?

[sunggyuluver]

I randomly came across Heechul dancing to rising sun. That was back in 2009 ~

[Cutie patootie]

Saw Fahrenheit vs. DBSK...fell in love with DBSK and ditched fahrenheit 

[Ambi]

Ashley.

[Tee]

copy/pasted from my About Me, which is copy/pasted from another thread

 

 

I saw SHINee's Juliette back in 2009 after looking up some stuff about Corbin Bleu. Didn't know what Kpop was or whatever, but I downloaded/ripped the song and for more than a year it was the only Korean song in my library. I might've seen Ring Ding Dong as well, but no. I also saw Wonder Girls when they were on Wendy Williams' show, whenever that was, but I was still pretty oblivious to Kpop.

 

In summer of 2010, a friend of mine posted Gee on Facebook. I thought it was cute and whatnot. They also posted 2NE1's Go Away after that came out. In September of that year, someone's avatar on Last.fm caught my eye and I asked what it came from (Moon Ji Eun's Hibiye Hibiyo). The song grew on me and then I got addicted to it (my "first Kpop addiction" as I call it). My interest also grew then. After I found out that it was Korean, I showed it to my friend. Then in a class that we had together, we talked a little bit and she asked me if I had seen any more 2NE1 (which I hadn't). I eventually looked their videos up on YouTube and that's how I started getting into Kpop.

and Fire was my shit

[Brand New Sakurakou]

Jpop got me into Kpop ...BoA openning for inuyasha anime I searched for the song then BAM I found BOA then DB5K then Kpop and now after 7 years I am done cuz Kpop not what they used to be

[kay268840]

was a k drama fan, my friend told me about kpop ... now she doesn't kpop anymore but 6 years later i'm still here  i should quit kpop too

[I L J I N]

Anime what got me into kpop, 5 years ago

I was more active before, nowadays kpop has been meh for me

[Shota]

I watched Gee on Youtube and instantly fell in love with SNSD back in 2009. Then I started searching for more videos about them and other groups. It was such a great era for Kpop.

[SlayingSeohyun]

I listened to cpop and then found kpop.

[Skibop!!]

K-drama recommendation on Netflix, watched it because I had nothing else to watch, noticed GiKwang, thought he was sexy so I looked him up on Wikipedia, found out about his solo days and B2ST, watched Boys Over Flowers, catchy music, remembered B2ST, looked them up again, became a fan, discovered SHINee in related search, found out they sang for BoF, then from GiKwang discovered Ailee, from voting for Ailee in MAMA 2012 discovered Miss A, and then H8 happened and that's how I became engulfed in k-pop.

[Tae]

Well I liked Korean Dramas before I liked Kpop and I believe I heard a song and looked it up. I think after that I still didn't fully get into Kpop until several dramas later then one night I looked up kpop on my phone and found Sixth Sense by BEG and that's when it took off. But most of the kpop i listen to usually has a R&B, Ballad, or hiphop sound. I still can't get into the real "poppy" music

[iheartkyu]

I used to only listen to chinese music (cantonese and mandarin) and whenever my friends told me to listen to kpop, I would refuse because I did not understand the language. One day, I was watching a Taiwanese variety show and Super Junior M's Perfection was playing. I thought it was pretty catchy and decided to look them up. I then realized they went on one of my favorite Taiwanese variety shows before and decided to check them out. 

 

I was slayed by how much they made me laugh even though they were hardly able to speak/understand Chinese. I saw how much effort they put into learning a language just to interact with fans. Then Kyuhyun sang a Mandarin song and his mandarin and singing was flawless. I started looking up their other taiwanese variety shows and when I finished those, I went onto their korean ones. Their variety skills was unlike anything I've seen in cpop. Then I started listening to super junior's music and fell in love. Everything about them just grew on me. 

[SoshiStar]

random heechul and sohee video 

oh and wonder girls nobody 

wait sistar alone got me here

[kpoopoo]

ive known kpop since foreverrrr but just got into a group over the summer

mom's korean and we always have the kbs channel on, so if music bank is on we would watch it

my dad used to like girl groups (it was 2009 so it was girl group peak days back then) so he'd play the songs (gg, after school, kara, etc) so i only knew girl groups 

my sisters and i would make fun of kpop so much (i was ashamed to admit that i liked most of the songs tho) and after kpop kinda went downhill (for my dads fave gg's at least) he would bash it a lot too.  we basically all made fun of it, but we still would watch music bank anyways lmao.  so i knew all the kpop hits before actually getting into kpop, but i didnt know which group made which songs 

 

then over the summer i caught this interview with infinite and it went through all their title tracks and i was shocked that all of their title tracks i recognized because i really liked them and i was impressed that they were all from the same group.  so i checked out their music videos, dances, finally variety shows, and here i am today

[Emi95chan]

I was ( still am) a Jpop/Jrock/anime/manga fan since 2006 I think and I was using jpopasia.com a lot back then and this site intruduced me to Kpop as well.  I made a long story short :D

[Nev Schulman]

copy/pasted from my About Me, which is copy/pasted from another thread

 

and Fire was my shit

Hibiye Hibiyo is a good bopper just seeing it made me sing it

[churndownforwhat]

My friend showed me Korean dramas and I really got into K-dramas. When looking up OST to heirs, I saw in the corner 'MAMA' by exo. Thinking it was about moms, I clicked on it and really liked the depth of the lyrics. Soon, SHINee came along with cool dances, and eventually I slowly discovered more and more, causing me to be a multi-fandom fangirl ^^ Before hand, even before Korean Dramas, I hated HATED!! music on the radio, so I wasn't only listening to 50's music and underground music, and now I'm here listening to Korean songs that have meaning behind them 

[愛��る]

My kpop exposure started a long time ago, actually. Way back when I was in eighth grade, BoA made her English debut with 'Eat You Up' and that song became my shit for a while, but it was the only Korean song I knew (I was mostly into jpop before that). After all that, Korean music completely left my mind until Psy's Gangnam style came out. I liked it (and Gentleman as well), but hadn't really gotten into kpop at the time.

 

A good few of my friends were into kpop then as well, but I can't really remember which groups they were into (except one who was really into Bigbang). Around this time, though, I heard f(x)'s Electric Shock and really got addicted to it for a while (when I decided to give kpop a try). However, like BoA's song, it eventually left my mind.

 

When I got into college, I had a friend who really loved kpop as well and she sent me a video of SHINee's 'Colorful' music video and that was all she wrote.

[Sana Muñequita Linda]

First of all, I watched My Girlfriend is a Nine-Tailed Fox before I showed any interest in Korean music. Now I know Seung Gi Lee and Min Woo No are also singers, the series featured a (former?) member of T-Ara...

 

It all began when I met this friend, who was friend of a friend. We began to talk to meet each other and she asked me if I liked Kpop. Back then, I was totally out of the scene (only listening to Western acts and.... the only Korean songs I had listened back then were Lucifer by Shinee and Breath by Beast. I liked them both).... but I became interested in the genre and she made me a HUGE LIST of acts to check out. Then one evening I looked them up on Google. She is first and foremost a Beauty and an A+ (also a diehard fan of HyunA), so it was natural that she fangirled whenever they had a new release, how the lyrics are beautiful or how handsome the members are. I can say I started my Kpop adventure when I turned 20yo (I will be 23 in less than one month) and this Kpop. As time went by, our Kpop tastes began to differ............ I became a fan of Rain, BoA and 2PM while she had her favorite groups. And still, we get along and comment on each other's faves. Now I no longer consider myself as a Kpop fan, but rather of individual acts, not the whole scene. Still, I like to know a bit of each act and chitchat about things that happen in the scene.

[Grape Soda]

Saw the trailer for ninja assassin at the movies and my friend was all liked 'ahhh rain' and I was like what. And she told me he was a singer. I saw Rainism and then heard he was making a group (which turned out to be mblaq) loved oh yeah and that's how it happened.

[Róisín Dubh]

Early 2010, I came across some users that were spamming kpop MVs for fun in random threads on a forum about games. These MVs were Gee, Oh! and Bo Peep Bo Peep, firstly I thought that the songs were weird but the girls were charming, but then I got addicted to the songs and started to follow girlgroups since then.
 

[jvng]

mine's really weird and indirect

 

when i was looking for a new mmorpg on a youtube channel, they had a review of a game called lucent heart. in the video you could hear nyan cat from the beginning 'till the end.. i went and googled it and i found out it was sung by a vocaloid. then i was into vocaloid for a while. then i found out a video about vocaloids dancing to gee or smth and then i found the m/v and became a fan. 

[GUILD]

Saw DB5K looooooong time ago. Talking about years.

 

Then, little later in life, I discovered anime. Through that culture and community I discovered Youhna  (I saw this and loved everything. 

@1:13 onwards bc it was on some top Bleach Opening video or something. I had to find more so I looked up the source and it was from this intro's game:

). The song's name was "My Lover" and I downloaded immediately. Through research I discovered that she was not Japanese, but Korean.

 

Yearish times later, I was shown "Gangnam Style". In the related videos was KARA's "Mister" 

In the comments was a link to Brown Eyed Girls' "Abracadabra" Performance Version 

. The ones who I hooked onto were, in order (chronologically bc of their parts in the MVs lol), Seungyeon @0:35, Nicole @1:36, Gain throughout, and Narsha kindof. "Are they even...Asian???!! What are they?? What kindof Asian even are they?? I didn't know they could be that way??" I had some lava like strange  zap of emotions.

 

Then I went about the path that most K-Pop fans do when discovering K-Pop; searching names of the ones who catch your eye (later to be known as "biases". the one I actually remember searching was Nicole), finding out what these entertainment agencies are, what idols are and searching lives and before I knew it, I was on my way to becoming a slight "enthusiast" so to speak of K-Pop.

 

Then I happened to find this video in the suggestions, HOOKED onto Sunny and I was like wtf...is this even real? Wtf is this stuff?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-i1KynlZUw

 

Then this video sometime after

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVUiM5U-XAA

 

like a crane to my heart and with that last wink, a shot gun. Like how is she real..and so cool. A bunch of Sunny related videos and boom I was a follower of Sunny (in the "yeah, I'm a fan" sense) and by default and association, when someone would ask who my favorite group was, I would just say "SNSD 0.0". Then.. things spiraled... and *boom*, here I am.

[yeongwonhi]

the first kpop song i ever listened to was love song by bigbang. me and my dad found it on youtube (on our apple tv) and we thought it was kinda weird, but in a good way.

after that (in 2013) i discovered i got a boy, by SNSD, of course. it was my jam for a while and i would try to copy the dance while singing along. sunny also stood out to me in the video, so i guess you could say she was my first bias. some time after this, a friend was listening to SHINee while she did a livestream and i added it to my playlist because i kinda liked it. 

fast forward to december of 2013. i was on vacation in florida, and i had brought my (now dead) laptop with me so i was still able to go on tumblr, and stuff like that. i don't know how, but that same friend from earlier said "oh, you should check out hyuna, i love her songs." i was like "cool" and listened to bubble pop on spotify. i thought that it was pretty good, so i added that song to my playlist. i eventually found miss a's breathe, and then i discovered 2NE1.

that's basically it. i just kinda looked through youtube videos and added them to my youtube playlist. since girl groups were the first ones i were introduced to, i kinda liked them more and listened to more of their songs. yay.