RAIN KRÓNIKA: 2006.01.27.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

A strong forecast for Korean pop's Rain

By Deborah Sontag
Published: Friday, January 27, 2006

Rain, a Korean pop star, actor and pan-Asian heartthrob, is preparing for two concerts at Madison Square Garden this week by studying. Day and night, an English tutor trails him through Seoul, peppering him with conversational phrases as he labors to polish his singing, his martial arts-inflected dancing and, presumably, his chest baring.

You can never be too prepared to go global.

At 23, Rain, who has been labeled the Korean Justin Timberlake and the Korean Usher, is a serious and driven performer (with washboard abs, winsome looks and a Gene Kelly-like ability to leap through puddles while performing his hit song, "It's Raining"). He wants nothing less than to break down barriers, build cultural bridges and become the first Asian pop star to succeed in America.

"The United States is the dominant music market," he said through an interpreter in a recent phone interview from Seoul. "I would really like to see an Asian make it there. I would like that Asian to be me. That's why I'm studying the language, reading up on the culture and practicing every day to correct my weaknesses."

Since his debut in 2002, Rain, whose real name is Ji-Hoon Jung, has been riding what is known as the Korean Wave. As South Korean products, from cellphones to the music known as K-pop, have swept across Asia, Koreans have coined a new term, hallyu, to describe the phenomenon. Through his leading roles in soap operas and his music, Rain has become the personification of hallyu, which some see as a high-quality regional alternative to American cultural dominance.

Rain is inspired by American pop music, but his interpretations provide, at the least, an Asian face and filter. His producer, Jin-Young Park, describes Rain's music as more "sensitive and delicate" than American R&B and says that his choreography is crisper and more precise, influenced by classical dance and martial arts.

"In Rain, Asians might see the spirit of Usher or Timberlake or even Michael Jackson, but he makes the music theirs," said Nusrat Durrani, senior vice president and general manager of MTV World. "He is a huge star in the making, but, at the same time, he is a very indigenous artist and a source of local pride."

Last year, Rain sold out arenas across Korea, China and Japan, playing to more than 40,000 in Beijing and 20,000 in the Budokan in Tokyo. America, with its growing interest in Asian popular culture, from Pokemon to Bollywood, was the obvious next frontier.

But Park - a 34-year-old impresario who is Rain's Henry Higgins - said that Rain will be not be officially ready to cross over until approximately October. That, according to a meticulously devised business plan, is when he is expected to achieve basic fluency in English, to release an English-language album and to smite the hearts of American young women.

The performances at the Theater at Madison Square Garden on Thursday and Friday are merely a prelude. "This is for the American music industry," said Park, "basically introducing Rain, giving a taste, and everybody is coming."

Most of the 10,000 people coming, however, will need no introduction. Like Julie Cho, 25, vice president of the Young Korean American Network in New York, who considers Rain "a really good dancer" and "very humble," they are already fans.

Immigrants or children of immigrants, they live in an era when technology makes it easy to connect with their homeland. Small-time entrepreneurs have long catered to the immigrant appetite for culture from back home. But what used to happen on a neighborhood level - a Colombian dance troupe at a Queens community center - is now taking place on a much larger scale. Like Rain, foreign artists are filling mainstream venues, their fans primed by the songs, videos, television shows and films that are ever more accessible through the Web, satellite television and new media outlets targeting hyphenated Americans.

Thus, word spread very quickly through New York's Korean community that a Korean pop star was coming to town. "There is definitely a sense of Rain-mania washing across the 32nd Street land here in Manhattan," Minya Oh, a D.J. on New York's Hot 97 radio station, said, referring to the city's small Koreatown.

This is not Rain's first performance in the United States. He played at a Korean festival at the Hollywood Bowl last year, and Susan Kim, a sociologist in Los Angeles, regrets that she missed the show.

She and her American-born children discovered Rain, whom they refer to by his Korean name, Bi, on a Korean music Web site called Bugs. Then they sought out videos of a Korean mini-series, "Full House," in which Rain plays a pop star.

As of this month, "Full House" became available with English subtitles on New York cable, too, through ImaginAsian TV, which bills itself as America's first Asian-American network.

And soon, Rain's music videos will find a platform on MTV-K, a channel catering to Korean-Americans that will begin later this year.

MTV-K will feature a diverse array of Seoul music, including hip-hop artists like M.C. Mong, boy bands like HOT and melodic harmonizers like SG Wannabe (the SG stands for Simon and Garfunkel).

Inevitably, non-Asian Americans are discovering such easily accessible foreign culture, too. Because of the "multidirectional flow of cultural goods around the world," there is a "new pop cosmopolitanism," according to Henry Jenkins, professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In an essay in "Globalization" (University of California Press, 2004), Jenkins writes that "younger Americans are distinguishing themselves from their parents' culture through their consumption of Japanese anime and manga, Bollywood films and bhangra, and Hong Kong action movies."

Indeed, Michael Hong, chief executive officer of ImaginAsian Entertainment, said that 60 percent of those who watch his company's Asian channels are not of Asian ethnicity. Similarly, at his company's two-year-old East 59th Street movie theater in Manhattan, which shows only Asian films, 70 percent of the audience is non-Asian.

"There is a great deal of interest in Asian content right now," said Hong, who helped set up and promote the Madison Square Garden concert. "Rain is just the tip of the iceberg." In the recent interview, Rain said that he had been dreaming about Madison Square Garden since he was a child imitating Michael Jackson's moves. "It is an incredible honor to perform there," he said. And yet he is preparing himself for failure: "In the case that my music is not loved by the American people, I will work very hard to fix things and hope to please them the next time."

Park said he believed that other Asian pop stars have failed in the United States by trying "to impersonate what was going on here." He said that he and Rain wanted to avoid "being another couple of Asian dudes trying to do black music" by embracing their inner delicacy and letting their Asian-ness show.

The moment is ripe, Park said. "Every market has been tapped except for the Asian market, and that's 5 percent of America," he said. "That's our base. But I believe that we can move beyond that."