The Washington-State born Korean pop lothario on his unusual career and Jeremy Lin
In the March/April issue of SPIN, David Bevan ventured to Korea to explore the country's fruitful system for producing top-flight pop stars. He'll be writing additional K-pop stories right here at #1 Crush.
"I got off the plane, and there was a different scent in the air." That's how Jay Park remembers his first seconds in Seoul, in January of 2005, just months before he graduated from high school back home in suburban Seattle. Park had been flown over to begin training for JYP Entertainment, one of three major entertainment companies headquartered in the South Korean capital. Only 17 at the time, he spoke little Korean and knew even less about Korean pop music — his passion was b-boying, which he utilized during a local JYP audition he attended at the behest of his mother. "I met all these people and I couldn't really communicate with them," he says of that first day. "I didn't even know what to eat."
