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The road to stardom has not been an easy one for Korean-American entertainer Jay Park. Today, he’s a K-pop idol and hip-hop mogul. Park, 36, is recognised as one of South Korea's most prominent entertainers.
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He released a string of hits, founded two of the country's largest hip-hop labels, launched his own beverage brand and was the first Asian-American to sign with Jay-Z's Roc Nation.
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He told AFP in an interview that success didn’t come easy. His first shot at fame — debuting as the leader of a K-pop band — resulted in a scandal that led him to flee Seoul for his native Seattle. "I faced a lot of backlash," Park told AFP, adding he was once "kind of blacklisted from the industry".
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The backlash emerged with a few comments Park posted online — then in his late teens — assailing the intense idol training regime, the K-pop industry and South Korea itself. The Korean media went berserk. The pushback against Park was intense. This forced him to quit 2PM, a seven-member boy band under major label JYP Entertainment. Above: Jay Park, with SOYEON - South Korean rapper, singer and Rapper BIG Naughty
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He went back to Seattle, and found himself working at a used tyre shop. However, this didn’t prevent him from doing what he loved best, eventually posting a cover of “Nothin' on You" — a B.O.B and Bruno Mars song - on his YouTube channel. "I just wanted to show my fans that I'm doing well, and also I wanted to show people what type of music I'm into, what type of artist I am. So I just put up a cover and it just kind of blew up," he said.
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Viral video: This took him back to the limelight as the video went viral, with more than two million views a day, and marked "a new start" for Park. With that is a change in his musical style. Quite inadvertently, his move from pop to rap helped transform South Korea's nascent hip-hop scene. Nothing was planned or carefully executed design, but simply an attempt to move past restrictive labels, he said. "If I say I'm a rapper, then I can only rap. But I like to rap, I like to dance, I like to sing," he told AFP. Park said he would be "always grateful to the hip-hop culture" for helping him relaunch his career.
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Struggle for survival: Its an unconventional story: going from K-pop failure to launch a musical career — and hitting remarkable success — after turning his back on big agencies around which the industry is structured it is rare. "It didn't happen overnight. Obviously it took a lot of work," Park told AFP of his musical comeback. Above: Jay Park and Yoo Si-ah, better known by her stage name YooA is a South Korean singer, and is a member of the girl group Oh My Girl under WM Entertainment.
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Improving industry: Park is currently attempting to improve the industry — or at least his small portion of it. Two of the most renowned hip-hop labels in South Korea were already formed by him. And with the founding of a third label with the intention of creating a boy band, his career has finally gone full circle. But Park is going about it his way: he says he thinks real connections and
“freestyling together” are the keys to success This is contrast to the meticulous training and obsessive levels of control pioneered by the major agencies.
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Park will serve as a mentor to his new trainees, something he says he yearned for when he first entered the field at the age of 18. "I'm not bitter over anything. I don't hate anybody. I don't dislike anybody. I don't have time for that. I don't have time for thinking about stuff in the past," he was quoted as saying. "I can't change the past, so what I can change is the future, so that's what I work on."
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