Music Challenge --Day 15 -- I am the Best -- by 2nE

Today I am choosing the classic K-Pop song. " I am the best." I choose this not because I like it, and not because I listen to it often, (although it is catchy) but because I consider it important. Back in 1986, I went to Asia for the first time and stepped off the plane into Korea, a place i'd never been on a continent I'd never been, and just found the place fascinating. (This is actually a common part of culture shock.) OTOH, Korea was much poorer, much less important globally then than it is now. At one point, I had a conversation with another traveler (a Canadian perhaps? I barely remember) and he said that in the past all cultural and pop-cultural influence had gone from West to East, our culture (in the global sense where Europe, Canada, and the USA and other Western outliers can be considered one massive mono-culture for some purposes) was influencing theirs and not the other way around. "This is starting to change," he said. "Asian culture is starting to influence our cultures. You can see it in many ways, such as Karaoke -an Asian export to the West -an in many other ways as well. Over the next few decades this Asian to Western cultural sharing will increase."

And it is happening. Ask almost any American high school kid if he or she knows someone who is into K-Pop, the answer most likely will be "yes." This is incredibly significant in a historical sense. So I choose this song, not because it is a favorite, but because I consider it indicative of some major global changes that are happening.