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BoA

Has BoA succeeded in North America? That is a question that I have been asking myself tonight due to a random turn of events that caught me off guard.

I was in the local shopping mall in order to get some pictures taken. While I was waiting for the pictures to be ready I took my wife into a clothing store called Garage. I hadn’t taken her shopping since we got back from our trip to Chicago and felt that she could find something nice. While she was shopping around I did the typical guy thing and found a spot that I can sit down and wait for her to finish… and here is the random part. Like all retail stores they have some music playing loudly with the hopes to attract some lucky customers who are passing by.

 However, this music was different because they were playing BoA’s song “I did it for love”. I thought that it was pretty cool that they would play her US song as it is quite catchy if not repetitive.

It didn’t quite stop there as the next song was her song titled “My Sweetie” and that had me curious. You see this place is the last place that I would expect to hear any Kpop. I live in the Toronto suburbs and there is only a select few Korean people who live in this area… and I know them all. So since my curiosity was killing me I went up to the girl at the counter and asked her who was singing this song (I already had the answer but I wanted to se if she had could tell me) and she told me that it was BoA and looked at me as if I was a complete noob. She then proceeded to tell me that she heard a song by BoA on the radio last month and she liked the song so she picked up some of her music from the local HMV.

It was bugging me so I after I picked up my pictures I went to the music store and sure enough, some of her CD’s were featured in the import artist section…

So this is what brought on the question… has BoA succeeded in North America? Based on a 5 minute conversation I found out that someone who had no clue about kimchi let alone Korean pop music heard a Kpop artist on the radio, bought a kpop cd and was playing it in a Canadian woman’s clothing store…

Sure, this isn’t breaking news… but then again, I am not known for breaking news. However, I think that this is much bigger than news about learning the wondergirls dance in front of a tour bus. This is an actual sign of an Asian pop star actually penetrating deep into the North American pop culture.

Well done Boa!