Bring on the competition! Lee Hyeon-ju "Julee" settles into a happy routine as an honorary eighth member of BLAZE. Deeply in love with her new husband, this phase brings its own challenges but she meets them with exuberance and determination. When the newlyweds accept the invitation to be judges in CG Entertainment's Second Annual Idol Competition, will this decision give them another way to share their talents? Or will it bring unwanted drama and unexpected danger into K-Pop Girl's life? Bae Yujin, from Oldest Trainee, returns in this second book of the K-Pop Girl series. Her introduction as a contestant in the competition sets off a series of events that shakes CGE to its core.
After an I-still-can't-believe-it brush with fame, teen singing sensation Storm Hall is determined to keep her star on the rise. She records a demo, and soon her all-time favourite label wants to sign her. And is mega-hottie rock god Jase Mahone flirting with her? A hotel suite in London, fancy cars, parties - Storm's finally living the dream! But life as a pop star means letting go of her old life, even the people she loves most. Is this really the dream she wants?
Fourteen-year-old Storm Hall lives to sing. Forget parties. Forget boys. When Storm is told she's going to miss a national competition, to go on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday to Hawaii, her life is OVER. What could be worse than having to give up singing to visit an island paradise? What if her (former) best friend is taking her place? A family trip to Hawaii is just the beginning. Storm meets a Hawaiian band who need a singer last minute. When the song is on local radio the next day all of Storm's dreams are coming true until the band introduce their singer on air. It's NOT her.
Little Miss Sunshine meets Room in this quirky, heartwarming story of friendship, loyalty and discovery. It's Newfoundland, 1986. Fourteen-year-old Bun O'Keefe has lived a solitary life in an unsafe, unsanitary house. Her mother is a compulsive hoarder, and Bun has had little contact with the outside world. What she's learned about life comes from the random books and old VHS tapes that she finds in the boxes and bags her mother brings home. Bun and her mother rarely talk, so when Bun's mother tells Bun to leave one day, she does. Hitchhiking out of town, Bun ends up on the streets of St. John's, Newfoundland. Fortunately, the first person she meets is Busker Boy, a street musician who senses her naivety and takes her in. Together they live in a house with an eclectic cast of characters: Chef, a hotel dishwasher with culinary dreams; Cher, a drag queen with a tragic past; Big Eyes, a Catholic school girl desperately trying to reinvent herself; and The Landlord, a man who Bun is told to avoid at all cost. Through her experiences with her new roommates, and their sometimes tragic revelations, Bun learns that the world extends beyond the walls of her mother's house and discovers the joy of being part of a new family -- a family of friends who care.
A Korean-American girl travels to Seoul in hopes of debuting in a girl group at the same K-pop company behind the most popular boy band on the planet, in this romantic coming-of-age novel perfect for K-pop fans everywhere! Candace Park knows a lot about playing a role. For most of her life, she's been playing the role of the quiet Korean-American girl who takes advanced classes and plays a classical instrument, keeping her love of K-pop to herself. But she has a secret that she's been keeping from the world: she can sing. Like, really sing. So when Candace enters a global audition held by the biggest K-pop label in the world, she doesn't expect to actually win. And convincing her parents to go against everything they believe in is nothing compared to what's next. Under the strict supervision of her instructors at the label's headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Candace must hone her performance skills to within an inch of her life, learn to fluently speak Korean, and navigate the complex hierarchies of her teammates. And the number-one rule? NO DATING - which proves almost impossible after she meets superstar idol One.J and fellow Korean-American trainee YoungBae. And when Candace finds herself in the middle of an international K-pop scandal, she must decide whether a spot in the most hyped K-pop girl group of all time is really worth risking everything ...
Focusing on female idols’ proliferation in the South Korean popular music (K-pop) industry since the late 1990s, Gooyong Kim critically analyzes structural conditions of possibilities in contemporary popular music from production to consumption. Kim contextualizes the success of K-pop within Korea’s development trajectories, scrutinizing how a formula of developments from the country’ rapid industrial modernization (1960s-1980s) was updated and re-applied in the K-pop industry when the state had to implement a series of neoliberal reformations mandated by the IMF. To that end, applying Michel Foucault’s discussion on governmentality, a biopolitical dimension of neoliberalism, Kim argues how the regime of free market capitalism updates and reproduces itself by 1) forming a strategic alliance of interests with the state, and 2) using popular culture to facilitate individuals’ subjectification and subjectivation processes to become neoliberal agents. As to an importance of K-pop female idols, Kim indicates a sustained utility/legacy of the nation’s century-long patriarchy in a neoliberal development agenda. Young female talents have been mobilized and deployed in the neoliberal culture industry in a similar way to how un-wed, obedient female workers were exploited and disposed on the sweatshop factory floors to sustain the state’s export-oriented, labor-intensive manufacturing industry policy during its rapid developmental stage decades ago. In this respect, Kim maintains how a post-feminist, neoliberal discourse of girl power has marketed young, female talents as effective commodities, and how K-pop female idols exert biopolitical power as an active ideological apparatus that pleasurably perpetuates and legitimates neoliberal mantras in individuals’ everyday lives. Thus, Kim reveals there is a strategic convergence between Korea’s lingering legacies of patriarchy, developmentalism, and neoliberalism. While the current K-pop literature is micro-scopic and celebratory, Kim advances the scholarship by multi-perspectival, critical approaches. With a well-balanced perspective by micro-scopic textual analyses of music videos and macro-scopic examinations of historical and political economy backgrounds, Kim’s book provides a wealth of intriguing research agendas on the phenomenon, and will be a useful reference in International/ Intercultural Communication, Political Economy of the Media, Cultural/ Media Studies, Gender/ Sexuality Studies, Asian Studies, and Korean Studies.
