24. Gangnam Squabbles

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/02/gangnam-squabbles-why-asias-pop-music-superpowers-are-trading-disses/272847/

            Patrick St. Michel, the author of "Gangnam Squabbles: Why Asia's Pop-Music Superpowers Are Trading Disses," starts out his article with a very interesting argument: tensions between musical fan bases have increased as much as political tension between South Korea, Japan, and China. There was a controversial article which said that kpop would soon stop being successful in 2013 and the reason was that now there was a lack of Korean kpop artists promoting in Japan; in other words, kpop was slowly vanishing. Jay Chou, a Taiwanese artist famous in the Chinese-pop industry told people to stop dancing the "gangnam style horse dance" and to not let kpop wave overcome chinese pop. Korean groups like SNSD and KARA have been getting a lot of attention in Japan but tensions have only heightened. There was a lot of controversy also when Japanese artists waved flags such as the Japanese imperial flag which was very offensive to the once politically controlled Korea. The political conflict now mixed with the cultural.
           Patrik Michel used several rhetorical devices in his writing. He included the picture of a Japanese artist which had provoked a lot of offensive views due to its political meaning. The author was successful in portraying both the cause and the effect of such tensions. The cause was mainly due to the political history of Japan, Korea, and China and also the fact that kpop had been booming much more than the two other nations. As a result, tensions broke out between musical groups. The author also used several facts to exemplify his arguments and used dates and statistics too. The author included lot of examples such as artists.