Coco Avenue duo (middle) with two backup dancers dance in "Good Girl." (Photo : YouTube / CocoAvenue)
Duo Jenny Lyric and Jena Rose of CoCo Avenue are contributing to K-pop and they are not even Koreans, but African Americans. K-pop is a big world apart from Psy and his phenomenal, "Gangnam Style." It is a world that has already been making a global wave, and there are other artists in the sphere who are not from South Korea.
Los Angeles-based CoCo Avenue are not even coming from Koreatown. Jenny Lyric hails from St. Louis, Missouri while Jenna Rose is from New Brunswick, New Jersey.
CocoAvenue makes the supposedly opposite Black people and K-pop go together, according to Black in Korea. They are two talented and beautiful black girls who wanted to ride the Hallyu wave, have made a name for themselves singing K-pop covers and are starting to make history.
The African American girls both found K-pop from YouTube, and admired the girl group Wonder Girls in 2009 who opened for them, other K-pop acts. They then created music videos each which they posted on YouTube, were able to build a following and fans started to be confused who is Lyric and who is Rose since their genres were the same.
Lyric then reached out to Rose and offered that they do covers together because they are like twins. Being non-Koreans, the duo feel they have opened a lot of doors about K-pop.
Then they made covers together and CocoAvenue was born. The group used to have six members. With each girl living far away from each other, or in different states, recording and rehearsing had been difficult.
Coco Avenue ended up with two members though they still support each other. The duo Lyric and Rose then relocated to the land of opportunities, Los Angeles.
However, just like other artists, they were not able to please everyone. Some criticized them for not really doing K-pop, mainly because they are not contributing money to Korea, USA Today reported. Yet, the girls just love to sing Korean and even gain fans in Seoul who love their covers of popular K-Pop songs, with some twist to add their own taste.
Here is Coco Avenue Lyric and Rose with two members of Coco Crew, covering GD and Taeyang's "Good Boy," obviously changed to "Good Girl."
