Nathan Kousol is a budding K-pop star from, of all places, Arkansas
A kid from Arkansas and two North Korean defectors make up a new K-pop group with a remarkable origin story.
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.
