Fatou sambe12/16/2023 ![]() One of the dancers suggested that Fatou, who stands at 5’7″, try out: “Why don’t you come back with me to the company so I can introduce you to the managers and everything?” After a successful meeting with those managers, she found herself signed to the agency just three weeks after arriving in South Korea for the second time. Coincidentally, the dance group she met up with also had a relationship with a modeling agency. Leveraging her passion for music and dance, she reached out to a crew that did K-pop dance covers. “But this is not something I could do for the rest of my life.” So she took a risk and left her job to return to South Korea, this time on a working visa. After six months or so, she realized that she had to go back. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m sticking out so much,’ People would look you stare.” She hardly left her hotel at first, but by the end of the trip she’d made some new friends by walking around, visiting parks, and trying out the little Korean she knew.įollowing that month-long trip, she returned home to Belgium and started working at an airport. “I could not see any people like me,” she says. “They were like, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ So since I like traveling, I love languages and learning about other countries’ cultures, I chose tourism.” After spending two years in college, she left school around 2017 and decided to go on a month-long vacation to South Korea.ĭuring her first visit there, she remembers feeling out of place. “Back when I was a teen, I actually asked my parents if I could attend a music school, but music is not a very stable ,” she says. She was interested in pursuing a life in music by this point, but she heeded her parents’ advice and went to college to study tourism. That’s what really caught me made me fall for it.” “K-pop is so bright, fun, and light-hearted, you know - all about being one and everything. “I was like ‘Oh, that’s something I’ve never seen before.’ After school, I went home on my computer, searched it up and there was a whole other world of music,” she recalls. Then, around age 14 or 15, a friend at school showed her Shinee’s “Replay” music video on their phone, changing her course entirely. ![]() At the time, Beyonce, Rihanna, and Michael Jackson were her favorite artists. It was also where she was introduced to Korean music. She spent her teen years in Belgium, where she learned to speak Dutch and English (she’s since largely forgotten her native tongue of Wolof). She hasn’t been back since then, but she remembers her childhood there as being “so carefree, so fun” and filled with “a lot of delicious food.” Their fall 2020 debut song, “Tonight,” brought the sounds and concepts of 2000s K-pop up to date - think the girl-crush aura of the Pussycat Dolls if they were G-rated and a little more pop-rock.įatou’s journey to becoming K-pop’s first African idol starts in her country of birth, Senegal, where she lived until age 12. The current line-up, consisting of six members (Fatou, Youngheun, Judy, Leia, and the newly added Gabi and Sriya), is part of a new crop of K-pop idols who came up during the pandemic. ![]() Signed to the label DR Music, Blackswan is a new rendition of second-generation K-pop group Rania. ![]() Today, Samba, who performs under her first name, is the main rapper and lead dancer of the K-pop group Blackswan. So she did something most K-pop fans only dream of doing: She became a K-pop idol herself. She loved how the music brought “a lot of happiness and confidence back” into her life when she was feeling down. Like fans around the world, she first encountered the genre through a friend, quickly falling in love with popular South Korean acts like Shinee, SNSD, KARA, and 2NE1. The 27-year-old Aries, who describes herself as a Myers-Briggs ENTP to a T, enjoys watching anime, Korean dramas, and Dylan O’Brien movies - and above all, listening to K-pop. There’s a good chance Fatou Samba is just like you. ![]()
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