Hey y'all, DJ Louie here just dropping a preview of this week's Pop Pantheon All Access episode.

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Instead, go to Patreon.com slash Poppantheon on your desktop to subscribe. You will still have access to all of the features of Patreon, including listening to our bonus episodes on your Apple Podcast app. We wish we had more control over this, but sadly we don't. So that's our recommendation to save you a couple bucks. You can also, of course, subscribe for the audio only directly here in the Apple Podcasts app. Enjoy this preview. Today, we are going to be exploring a part of the pop world that we don't often cover

here on Pop Pantheon, the ever-expanding and shifting world of K-pop.

This exploration comes in the wake of the comeback of two groups that I think have really

helped to define what K-pop is, at least in the imagination of the West or of the globe, Black Pink, and

BTS. I have called in an expert to join me. Crystal Bell is a journalist and editor who

has written about K-pop for Rolling Stone, Enemy, Teen Vogue, and more. She just wrote a cover

story profile of a BTS member, Junkuk, and also did a review of the upcoming Netflix documentary,

BTS, The Return.

You can read that on Matchable.

I will include links to both in the show notes of this episode.

Important to the topic at hand today,

Crystal is currently in Seoul, South Korea,

where it is late.

Crystal, thank you for coming in overseas and late at night to join me.

My gosh, thank you so much for us. I would not miss this. So thank you for having me.

I should also say, BTS is new school to me. It is the generation that broke through in the U.S.,

but it's the one that hasn't,

I actually have not spent the most time with. I actually don't know if I have talked about this

on the podcast at all before, but I lived in Chonan Asan, which is a suburban city in Chungchung

...