Set up cameras, react, edit, and repeat. Do this well enough and you just might rack up a million followers on Youtube.
JRE is a K-pop Youtuber: he records himself reacting to K-Pop music videos and uploads them on Youtube. He asked WLRN to not publish his real name, due to security and privacy concerns. His channel, JREKML, has more than a million followers.
K-Pop or Korean Pop is growing in popularity, with boyband BTS making history in May as they topped the Billboard 200 chart with their album Love Yourself: Tear. It is the first chiefly non-English No. 1 album on the chart since multinational vocal group Il Divo’s “Ancora” in 2006.
Behind this growth is a massive online remix culture. Youtube is home to countless dance covers, song mashups, vlogs and other parodies. Reaction videos, the kinds that JRE is known for, are one such branch.
Most of this creative community is located in Los Angeles and New York, but JREKML is based here in Miami. Sundial spoke with the channel’s host and producer JRE about his life as a full-time K-Pop Youtube content creator. He says the K-Pop scene in Miami has grown exponentially over the course of his 7-year career.
SUNDIAL: I'm curious as to when you got into K-Pop. You're a Miami native, your mother is from the Philippines, your father's from Jamaica. When did K-Pop come into your life?
JRE: I'm half Asian and Jamaican. In Jamaica, I look up to Bob Marley. My Asian side didn’t know what to look up towards musically. So at that time I was into RnB, there's Usher and Ne-Yo and there was an artist named Taeyang who has a similar style. So I started looking on YouTube, and YouTube was a big part of it too, the Internet was. So I typed up like Asian Usher, and Taeyang popped up, which led me to Big Bang, and I just kept on. It's like a snowball effect.
You are on the road a lot now, you're getting invited to conferences and festivals. This goes back to this idea that you’ve become a celebrity in this field. Is there a memorable moment? All this traveling, all this that happened to you?
Literally, every time I meet up with people that watch my videos and tell me how much they make their days, that's a memorable moment. It sounds cheesy but each time that happens, it inspires me to make different types of videos to make their day, because I never expected this to become a thing.
So do you want to keep doing what you're doing and try documentaries and other storytelling or is it time for JRE to go in a new direction completely?
A little bit of both. I know I'm not going to stop because I like what I do. Reaction videos are reaction videos, they are pretty easy to do. I always know I can have time to do reaction videos. I just want to tell [my audiences] I'm going to slow down a bit. K-Pop is always updating 24/7. My channel, I have like so many videos, like 1500 or 2000 almost, and that's me trying to keep up with K-Pop. So I just want to slow down and make something that takes time.
You can see JRE's creative process in this video:
And here's the finished video https://youtu.be/_j5ARNXzECY">posted by JRE on YouTube: