Clad in black and dancing in near-perfect sync to Korean pop music, the ASU dance group Nyx can be seen shooting dance cover videos on campus.
East Asian studies senior Heather Vaughn, supply chain management sophomore Isabel Hernandez and civil engineering sophomore Baily Alka capture a unique part of Korean culture — K-Pop — through an equally unique form — YouTube videos.
K-Pop, a genre which relies heavily on music and dance, drew the girls into the culture before they formed the group.
The genre got a major boost in fan base after the song "Gangnam Style" went viral in 2012 and has built a huge Internet following since its take-off.
With more than 15 million video views to date and more than 110,000 YouTube subscribers, Nyx embraced this Internet following covering famous songs with their pin-point accurate dance moves.
“K-Pop is great because it brings a lot of different cultures together," Vaughn said. "A lot of people who wouldn’t think about Korea or their culture, they listen to a song that has a great beat and they want to know more about it."
Hernandez and Alka fell into the genre together when they got to know each other on their high school dance team. Hernandez asked Alka to form a dance group and they began dancing together to the music.
However, their group wasn’t complete until they met Vaughn in 2013 while they were both competing in the semifinals of the Gangwon Festival in Los Angeles.
Vaughn began her own YouTube channel, Jellybeannose, in 2012 with the simple intention of showing her friends her K-Pop dancing video. The channel sat stagnant but she later uploaded more dance videos after a year when she saw a positive response from her YouTube audience.
Before she met Hernandez and Alka, Vaughn had gained around 15,000 subscribers on her channel.
When they met at the festival, Vaughn discovered Hernandez has seen her covers and they were all going to ASU in the fall. They decided to form a group and produce content together.
“We didn’t think we were going anywhere, we didn’t even have a group name, we just said, ‘OK, we’re doing this because we’re here,’” Alka said, “We started off with less than 20,000 subscribers, and just a week ago, we hit 100,000. It’s been a big journey, and we never expected it to get this far.”
Their channel really took off after they uploaded a cover of the group EXO’s song "Overdose." Vaughn said it was one of their most technical song covers, requiring a great deal of camera work and nearly a month of rehearsal before it was ready to post. The video currently has 727,000 views.
“It comes in spurts, it feels like," Vaughn said. "We’ll upload a certain video and just be like, ‘Um, we just got 5,000 subscribers overnight from this video?’”
Along with racking up their video views, the group also racked up a significant fan base, with YouTube comments and social media interactions inspiring them to continue their dancing.
Their following became so massive that in 2014 they got invited as special guests to KCON, an annual K-Pop convention that hosted around 42,000 fans. Nyx even held a panel and performed on a side-stage.
“When we were at KCON, people would come up to us and be like ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe it!’ They would take pictures with us, some people would start crying when they saw us, and we were just like, ‘Ohhhhh OK,’” Alka said.
However, the group finds value not just in the dancing they do or the fans they’ve gained, but in exposing the culture and pure individuality of the music itself.
“It’s different. It’s unique. It has a different feel. I don’t feel like it’s just talking about sex or money. It’s new. It has a fun vibe to it,” Hernandez said.
Reach the reporter at megan.janetsky@asu.edu or follow @meganjanetsky on Twitter.
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