Nathan Kousol is a budding K-pop star from, of all places, Arkansas

In the 1960s, South Korea and North Korea, who were already more than a decade into their now 80-year war, entered into a new kind of combat.

The South, which allied itself with the capitalist west, began broadcasting news reports and music across the border at their estranged kin. The North eventually responded with their own propaganda.

Meanwhile, the Kim Sisters, a South Korean trio of singing and dancing pop stars, were introducing themselves to American audiences on the "Ed Sullivan Show." Their image—shiny, effervescent, fun—was the antithesis of North Korea's, which had grown more hermetic under the dictator Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of current North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Call them the first "K-pop" group.

Today, North and South Korea are still warring. In recent years, the South Korean government has been known to blast modern K-pop—a hyper-caffeinated blend of pop, R&B, and hip hop culture—across the border. The north, which considers pop music to be a kind of assault, retorted by amplifying eerie noises and the sound of howling animals.

It would be funny if the threat of actual violence wasn't so real.

Around that time, almost 7,000 miles away from all of that, in Bentonville, Ark., a midsized Southern city surrounded by rice farms and poultry, a skinny teenager named Nathan Kousol practiced his dance moves in front of his mirror.

Kousol, whose family is of Laotian and Thai descent, had fallen in love with K-pop, a music so shamelessly commercial and free, so hopelessly "western," that it's a crime to play it in North Korea. He just wanted to be an "idol"—as K-pop stars are called— and break out of Bentonville, a 9-to-5 business hub where Walmart, the largest big box retailer in the world, was founded.

A few years have passed and now Kousol is a budding star in the K-pop group 1Verse, which debuted this summer. 1Verse made headlines because, in addition to Kousol, a Southern American, the group features two North Korean defectors, a Chinese-American from Los Angeles, and a Japanese national.

Seok defected from North Korea in 2019; Hyuk in 2013, when he was 12 years old. Before he fled the totalitarian state, Hyuk gathered wood eight to 10 hours a day to cook rice and keep his family warm.

Despite all odds, Kousol says he sees himself in Hyuk and Seok. "Even though we come from different backgrounds, we share the same dream," he says, "and we did what we had to do to come out here and pursue that."

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From Walmart to K-pop

When you're a kid, dreams can come and go with the posters on the wall. The trick is finding the ones that stick. For Kousol, who was bored by sports and any other hobbies he latched onto, it was K-pop that stuck.

In 2016, Kousol's cousins from Texas introduced him to the music's blend of pop culture, its phalanx of girl and boy groups. It was new to Kousol, who sang along to Bruno Mars and Justin Bieber on the radio, and to the traditional Laotian music his family played.

The 2013 song "Growl" by the boy band EXO hooked him. It owed more to American R&B artists like Usher than it did to western boy bands like the Backstreet Boys or the New Kids on the Block. "So I was like, I wanna do this," Kousol said. "I wanna learn this."

"That performance in (the 'Growl') music video was just mind-blowing to me," Kousol says. "I was like, 'wow, they can sing and they can dance.' I already loved singing since I was a kid. Just throwing dancing in there is like something out of this world for me."

Some folks know "Gangnam Style" by the South Korean rapper Psy and think that means they know K-pop, but the 2012 viral hit is just a toe in the water.

K-pop has many sounds. Sometimes they shift in the space of a single song, but in general, it sounds like western pop but faster, bolder—like you just drained four Pixy Stix and jumped in a bouncy castle. The kids would call it "extra."

It's typically sang in Korean, and while artsy types might sneer at its bubbly energy, K-pop is undeniably music for young people, songs to serenade a crush with.

Once a curiosity on the western pop charts, today it's ubiquitous if you're under 18 and on TikTok. In America, it's never been more culturally pervasive, thanks in large part to the success of the 2025 Netflix movie "KPop Demon Hunters," an animated musical that's like a Gen Alpha "Jem and the Holograms" mashed with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Kousol says he's watched it three times.

Meanwhile, for many, K-pop's biggest stars, who come from groups like BTS and Blackpink, wield a kind of fame that rivals western stars like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift.

The genre has its critics too.

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Detractors don't like the consumerism—BTS' Jin sells an overnight sleep "mask" for your lips; Minnie from (G)I-DLE pitches collagen under-eye patches—but singling out K-pop stars for that seems myopic. The wealthiest western pop stars, singers like Rihanna and Selena Gomez, are big names in fashion and business too.

K-pop critics also don't like the corporate star-making machine that trains K-pop stars from a very young age. The training can be expensive and grueling.

On its website, Kousol's label Singing Beetle seems to at least acknowledge that criticism. "We care about our music," they say. "And we care about how our artists are treated."

K-pop is going through some growing pains too—fans who worry that its global reach has diluted the genre's Korean roots, and executives who grouse that its commercial momentum has stalled.

But if K-pop has evolved, and it has, 1Verse is one example of how. Despite the constant threat of war in the Koreas, K-pop tends be breezy and politically anodyne. But in 1Verse's debut single, "Shattered," they are unusually candid. It's about the passing of 1Verse singer Hyuk's father, who died in North Korea after Hyuk escaped in 2013.

The song "captures the feeling of my life breaking apart," Hyuk told PBS this year. "I'm sharing the story for the first time. I wrote it drawing on the emotions when I heard my father in North Korea passed away."

Kousol might come from a world away, but he said his bandmates' story inspires him. Joy and art, in some places, in some times, can be revolutionary.

"It's always inspiring to see people, no matter what background they come from, come out from somewhere that, you know, it feels like it was impossible to achieve what you want," he says.

Carrying K-pop for Arkansans

Bentonville is a lot of things: fast-growing, relatively diverse for the Deep South, tied at the hip to Walmart. But it's not a place to become a pop star.

"I did try to find singing classes, dance classes," Kousol says. "They kind of do have stuff like that, but not towards like what would be catered to K-pop, you know? So I didn't really have the opportunity to really train my skills for K-pop."

"If I wanted to become an idol," he adds, "I kind of just had to do it on my own, which is what I did. I watched videos. I looked at myself in the mirror trying to copy their moves, and then just singing for fun."

If social media exists for anything, it's to cross borders.

On TikTok or Instagram, if you're good enough, you could reach all the way from Arkansas to Seoul, which is what Kousol did—setting up a camera on his porch, in his bedroom, in the street—wherever there was space and a wifi signal—to sing and dance.

Kousol's cute and talented, so he massed tens of thousands of followers. When he dances, he's all arms and legs. His movements are fluid, sure, effortless-seeming.

In his videos, he spoke directly to the Korean companies and record labels who are behind K-pop's biggest stars. He sent emails. He got rejected, a lot. One time, he was invited to an audition in California, but that didn't pan out.

"So I kind of like gave up on the idea of becoming an idol for a minute," he says. "I was like, maybe this is not the path. Maybe I'll just do something else and do music on the side, which is not what I wanted to do, but I just, I had to accept something."

His parents, who worried about the financial stability of trying to be a pop star, agreed.

Then came an Instagram message from Michelle Cho, a K-pop producer and CEO of Singing Beetle, a Seoul-based music label. Kousol got an invite to join the label's new boy band, 1Verse.

Kousol and his family were stunned. He's 24 and living in Seoul now, the capital of South Korea. He misses his family, the lack of traffic back home ("I couldn't drive here!" he says), and even the farm smells of Arkansas.

But the audience has gotten much, much bigger.

"My dad, he was also a musician growing up in Thailand," Kousol says. "He wanted to pursue the career of being an artist, but it didn't work out for him. ... So I feel like in a way I'm kind of living his dream right now."

"It's something that, if I didn't do, I'd probably regret," he adds. "And it's just my dream. So it's like you don't get that opportunity that much in life."

Kousol's story, that of a Southern kid turned international K-pop singer, seems farfetched but it's not unprecedented. He recently met an "idol" from Oklahoma. But as far as he knows, he's the only K-pop performer from Arkansas.

"If I am the first, that's awesome," he says. "It's not like some type of job that I have to carry for Arkansans, but it's just like I'm doing it and, you know, people in Arkansas are supporting me and they feel proud for me and it's just a great feeling."

In a recent fan call with 1Verse, it all came full circle.

He met a group of young fans from Arkansas, even some from rural northeastern Arkansas, who told him they play his music in the school library.

Kousol tells the story, and just like that, he's overwhelmed by the whole thing. He grins big. He's a kid again, dancing in front of his mirror.

"Like, oh my gosh," he says. "I never thought I would hear that from someone's mouth."

The Living South was created by North Carolina journalist Billy Ball in 2025. It centers on the most interesting stories and people in the American South. Share this story with your friends and help The Living South grow.