About the Author

Written by Youngdae Kim - Youngdae Kim is a music critic and an author, who serves as a member of Selection Committee for Korean Music Awards. Kim studied business administration at Yonsei University in Korea and completed Ph.D program in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington. Born and raised in South Korea, he moved to Seattle in 2007 where he has been closely observing American pop music trends and the development of K-pop for over a decade. Kim first started critiquing music in the mid-1990s under the online alias toojazzy, publishing widely through online magazines. Kim served as a Selection Committee member for "Top 100 Albums in Korean Popular Music" projects organized by Kyunghyang (2007) and the Hankyoreh (2018), two of the most influential daily newspapers in Korea. Kim contributes his critical columns in various mainstream media outlets, including Vulture by New York Magazine and MTV, and operates a YouTube channel that analyzes K-pop in depth. He is an author of multiple publications in Korea, including Top 90 Albums of the 1990s and Korean Hip-hop: The Footprints of its Passion, and translated American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 into Korean. Translated by H. J. Chung - H. J. Chung studied Korean history and political economy at UC Berkeley, Seoul National University, and University of Washington. She has been a K-pop music junkie for as long as she can remember. When she was a kid, her parents had to pull her away from the TV whenever Lee Ji-yeon--the prototypal solo female idol in the 1980s--performed "Wind, Please Stop Blowing." After immigrating to the United States, she started frequenting "Soompi Town," the initial version of today's Soompi.com, to spazz about H.O.T. with fellow Korean American fans. Currently, she is a translator of texts and multimedia in Korean and English on a wide variety of subjects, including K-pop and K-drama.