One of the best mixes I've heard fusing K-Pop with American pop and hip-hop comes courtesy of a 2016 FADER Mix from pan-Asian artist collective Eternal Dragonz. It's a sparkling 40 minutes of fun that proves the often siloed K-Pop genre in the West should be a mainstay in pop. In our brief Q&A with Eternal Dragonz, V Kim of the collective said of their mission: "Asia’s a big place with thousands of cultures and languages. We often get cut short. We need to tell our own stories."
Today, The FADER is premiering the newest video from Eternal Dragonz co-founder Tzekin, off his recent project Skyline Death. "Hush" is understated and mesmerizing pop-R&B, and it features vocalist Alice Vicious weaving effortlessly between English and Korean. "This is our take on a K-Pop forbidden love song," Tzekin writes via email. "Veron (x/o) and I wrote the lyrics in English first, and Alice cut these lines in with Korean, which changed the flow of the melody completely." I see myself hitting play on this in the coming hot months, once the sun goes down.
The Vissukamma Ratsaphong-directed video features actors Deborah An and Tristan Young roaming the Australian "suburban wasteland that many immigrant families grow up in," Ratsaphong writes in an email to The FADER. "It focus[es] on the contrast between those abstract settings and the people that move here to inhabit them.” It makes me think back to the Eternal Dragonz mission and the power in crafting your own mythology. It makes me desperately wish the rest of the West would catch the fuck up.