Please Listen to These Korean Slow Jams
A little-to-well-known fact about me is that there is nothing I love to waste more time on than watching foreign soap operas. Chalk it up to being South American, but nothing makes my lil heart thrill more than a pair of sullen teenagers who hate each other so much they end up together, butlers named Braulio, or a classic evil twin reveal. And nothing makes my lil heart skip a beat more than when the setting for these dynastic dramas is Seoul, South Korea.
I began watching Korean soap operas (or dramas, as they're called) during my senior year of high school. At the time, my sister was obsessed with Korean pop, so I picked it up in the slow, disinterested way older siblings will pretend not to like things they haven't discovered first. Five hours of rich boarding schools, extremely chic Devil Wears Prada-esque in-laws, and a class system to rival Argentinean aristocracies later, I was hooked. To this day, they are my primary sick day activity of choice, even though reading subtitles is literally the last thing you're supposed to do when your brain is operating at 5% capacity.
Like many fans, one of my favorite part of Korean dramas is the music. But I'm not kind of person to get swept away by the grand pop numbers of the title credits. No, I'm a big fan of the filler music. You know, the slow, acoustic songs that always seemed to follow our heroine when she's aimlessly walking around Seoul, languishing the fact that she's the daughter of The World's Most Embarrassing Dry Cleaner, or staring at her crush with longing from across the front desk of a porridge restaurant. Ahhh, young love!
The thing is, nothing soothes those quiet moments of youthful melancholia quite like the soft filler music of Korean dramas. It's like the elevator music you'd hear if you were stuck on the Goldman Sach's elevator on Valentine's Day. Still, the genre of these tunes eluded me when I tried to create my own playlists. I can't read or type Korean, and I can hardly google "Elevator Music But Korean" on the internet. Where was I going to find the perfect soundtrack to my unrequited porridge crush????????
Enter Oohyo (apparently, not pronounced "ooooooh, yoooo!" like I want to pronounce it). Like the Korean dramas I consume during my sick days, her music is equally soothing and dramatic, the perfect soundtrack for those moments where you find out you and your porridge crush can never be together, but your only response is to gaze sullenly at a river somewhere nearby. Spotify classifies Oohyo's music as "K-Indie", but I think that shortens the scope a bit. The truth is, I don't really know how to classify her music. Is it a compilation of Korean slow jams? Music to contemplate your class-driven love triangle to? Elevator music playing in a future Seoul Glossier showroom? Honestly, all of these situations fit the bill. For me, Oohyo is my companion in late night subway rides and the soundtrack to my nightly Korean skincare routine. I can hardly ask for more.
I mean, man! How about that Spotify algorithm? When it knows, it knows!