8 Asians

It has been a couple of months since we’ve last blogged about BoA, and her self-titled American album hasn’t become the mega crossover album that a lot of Asian pop fans have hoped for; it had a peak position of #127 on the Billboard 200, selling only 8,000 copies of her album nationwide.

But one fan base that has given BoA some much-needed exposure has come from the GLBT market. One of the few radio stations to have I Did It For Love on heavy rotation has been San Francisco’s Energy 92.7, one of the few dance music radio stations in the United States and actively targets the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian community — SF Badlands, a popular gay video dance club in the Castro actively rotates Eat You Up between Kylie Minogue and Ciara videos. (And not to gloat, but for the record, I totally called it.)

So it makes a lot of sense to have BoA perform on the San Francisco Pride Festival. Unlike other Asian American pop stars that have been relegated to the smaller Asian American Stage — sorry CoCo Lee, I’m talking about you — BoA will be performing on the main stage with other heavy hitters such as Solange Knowles, and is guaranteed an audience of tens of thousands of people, even if half of them are too busy getting drunk on $9 light beer or making out with the guy they just met hours before. (Oh come on, I’m gay too; I’m allowed to say these things.) No word yet on if the interaction between Pride attendees and heterosexual Korean guys only there to see BoA will be awkward or hilarious.