Swizz Beatz Is Bringing Korean Pop To The States

WE ARE HIP HOP! ARE YOU?

By Nadeska Alexis

Swizz Beatz wears many hats--producer, designer, sometimes-rapper--but his latest venture is focused on bridging the gap between Korean pop artists and stars in the U.S. The super producer has teamed up with Korean entertainment group O&Media for a new venture that he hopes will make K-Pop a phenomenon stateside. "My goal is to migrate the cultures," Swizz told MTV News.

"It's not about me being a feature or just producing K-Pop music; it's about migrating musical cultures around the world. And I just felt like starting with K-Pop, starting in Asia and opening up different outlets to something cool and new."

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To spearhead this project, Swizz teamed up with popular Korean entertainment group O&Media. "That partnership has been coming about for a couple of months now," he said, detailing the progress they've made together so far. "We have a TV show component, a tour company component, a production company and a label. We're just active as the tunnel for artists that want to do things in the West, or artists in the West that want to do things in Asia. This is about a whole migration of cultures coming together under our umbrella to have an outlet to express themselves."

Part of Swizz's goal is to use elements from each music culture to help grow the other. "They still do artist development [in Asia], where back here in the States, the labels and our culture lacks artist development," he said. "Nowadays, an artist can go into the booth, put out a song the next day, and that person thinks that they're a superstar. But within the K-Pop movement, artists actually go through artist development. They take music classes that allow them to be ready for when they do become that big star.

"I think that introducing different cultures of music can help everybody out, and that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing hip-hop or R&B music," he added. "I have love for all genres of music, because it's all art, and I just want to take the boundaries and lines of segregation and make them invisible."

In the simplest terms, the super-producer wants the love to be spread evenly across the musical world. "When we go to these different countries — Korea, Japan, China — as artists from the United States, we get treated like kings," he said. "We get treated like real stars. And I feel that when they come over to the States, as successful as they are, they should get treated the same."

Tags k-pop, Swizz Beatz

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