What RANIA’s New Black American Member Means for K-Pop

Black people in Korea?!?! Yes, it’s true folks, despite the fact that BNP has been on team Blasian for a minute (check out this article, for instance), the Internet’s pop music sector is just now catching up and it’s all thanks to girl group RANIA who are making K-Pop history through the addition of member Alex Reid. For those of you not familiar with the glitter-encrusted world that is the Korean Wave, though, let your official BNP Blasian-in-residence explain just what this momentous occasion might mean for all of us. Believe it or not, what was once a cute anomaly may be the future of pop music as we know it.  A few years back National Public Radio’s “Planet Money” produced a fascinating podcast (which you can listen to here) detailing how the Korean pop music industry has been able to achieve in a few years what took Americans decades to learn: how to create visually captivating acts with language-transcending earworms and then build the music factories to replicate them ad infinitum. This impressive feat explains why songs like Psy’s “Gangam Style” could dominate American radio for so long or, more recently, why Microsoft would market a commercial challenging Apple to the tune of 2NE1’s “I Am The Best.” As if this weren’t a significant enough symbol of a world takeover, PopCrush’s annual Battle of the Bands competition proved last week that 2NE1’s fanbase is massive enough to take out the likes of One Direction while another K-pop group, T-ARA, crushed Beyonce in Billb…