Female K-pop Stars Who Brought Girl Power in 2012

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With the 27^th Golden Disk Awards approaching, we can’t help but to bring ourselves to know a little more about K-pop. Hence, we did our research on the many changes in K-pop industry. Much to our surprise, we noticed one of the changes is the concept of idol groups especially girl groups has changed drastically over the years. Call it the return of Girl Power, where female groups nowadays seem to have dumped the innocent and cutesy concept and replaced them with the fierce, edgy and empowered version of female concept.

Back in those days, K-pop was e a male-dominated industry with most of the male idol groups such as TVXQ, Big Bang, and Super Junior dominating the music charts in Korea and some other Asian countries such as Japan. The female groups struggled to survive in the industry and even the most popular girl groups, Girl Generation and Wonder Girls also faced the problem of topping off the music chart. However, they made it through the obstacles and they are now one of the most successful girl groups in K-pop industry. Girl power is growing even more steadily stronger with different rookie groups debuting since last year.

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To prove our point, we stumbled upon a poll, namely “Which Female Idol Group Brought the Most Girl Power in 2012?” which was made by Mnet Korea that best define this new cultural movement. We are very much aware that most of the ranking in Korea are based on the popularity (as in the fan votes), thus the result might seems a little bit unfair. We also noticed that some of the girl groups were actually left out in the poll as they also contributed the effort in bringing the girl power. We are no experts but we unanimously agreed that some of these girl groups have definitely brought the feminism through their music. But once again, not all of them here represent the majority female in the society nor did they want to inspire feminist movements. As the target audience is usually young women and teenagers, some of these songs were able to express how they feel about themselves in the society, thus indirectly make them feel empowered. In the mean time, we would like to share our top 10 female K-pop stars which brought the most girl power in 2012!

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