OKPOP is a non-Korean, Korean-pop group consisting of Brto, Hanbon, Yuuta, Paige, and Sameer. They are a group of friends from Rutgers University assembled by Youtuber and short comedy skit creator Anthpo in October 2022, with the goal of creating the best K-pop music despite four out of five members not speaking Korean. Po left the group after he graduated college in 2023. The quintet prepared for 6 months before releasing their debut song, TAKE MY HAND on March 26th, 2023, followed by LOOK ME IN THE EYES on April 6th. Originally being a satirical group, OKPOP quickly gained attention, racking up millions of views on Tiktok and hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify. They began performing at coffee shops and campus events at Rutgers, leading up to their largest performance at a night market. Afterwards, OKPOP released a music video for TAKE MY HAND on April 30th and dropped their 1st EP, KINDA KOREAN on May 5th. Anthpo published a video on his YouTube channel titled “Can a White Guy make a KPOP Group?” on May 10th which detailed the group’s origins and journey to unexpected success. He had “envisioned this video ending with a pretty big event on campus” but did not anticipate how far the group would go. Four days later, Anthpo graduated from Rutgers and quit his YouTube channel, which he had been planning to do for two and a half years. He said that OKPOP was “the perfect way to end it because it was such a fun thing to do. It went so far and I did it with you guys, which I feel like making videos can be really lonely, and I feel like this was the first time I felt like there was other people there by my side, not just by coincidence.”