and that is my take on the current rave-fication of k-pop girl groups! i'm done now.

ok no i'm being disingenuous. i mean, i've been looping KATSEYE's PINKY UP since i first played it via my navidrome server last week.

immediately after my excited shock at hearing the drop in BLACKPINK's JUMP, which i only really listened to because people called it eurotrash (it absolutely is eurotrash music, BTW, and that is a good thing for BLACKPINK, please refer to the archives), i told my friends via discord that the eurodance revival was happening and it was going to come via k-pop girl groups. i am so happy to be right!

before writing this, i did some required listening: ILLIT's It's Me, which i'm half sure only hit streaming mere hours ago, and LE SSERAFIM'S CELEBRATION. i'm going to save CELEBRATION for later because i think i need to talk about these other songs before i get to that one.

JUMP and PINKY UP both have a distinctly 1990s europop sound to them. i'd argue that the latter is more modernized, but the former wears those influences very proudly; when i first listened to JUMP, it immediately evoked Blümchen to me. on the other hand, even with verses that sound more modern dance pop than straight-up europop, PINKY UP has such stupid lyrics and a beat that slams so fucking hard that i really can't deny the eurobeat/para-para influence. (PLEASE tell me you catch this vibe in PINKY UP, i would be overjoyed.)

the through-line between these two songs is that they start their momentum and they (mostly) do not let up on it. in fact, by the time both songs near their unnatural conclusion (as mandated by the current pop music meta of We Need Every Stream Possible), they hit the gas and go harder. JUMP has this insane instrumental break near the end that makes me wish that the post-choruses did not do a half-time break and instead carried a similar energy throughout.

PINKY UP makes similar mistakes to JUMP, the most annoying of which being that the verses seem to go in a more melodic direction¹, but then it pulls the same move as JUMP in having a crazy ass ending break that makes me wish the song went that hard the whole time. they even have similar eurodance synths! just go listen to, like, Rollergirl or something, if you want to hear a similar sound (but without the k-pop sprinkles).

ILLIT's It's Me, which, again, just came out today, has a similar hyper energy to PINKY UP, but (on my early impressions alone) seems to harness that energy far more evenly. it literally starts with an ear-worm of a cheerleader chant that goes "WHO'S YOUR BIAS? I'M YOUR BIAS!" before launching into a beat that i can only describe as INNA on speed. if i were to rate the songs i've covered so far on a scale of zero to "SMOOTH BRAIN GIRLY would mix this into one of her sets," then it'd be a pretty even tie between the ILLIT and KATSEYE songs— though, hilariously, JUMP wins by having already been used in a SBG set.

ok let's talk about LE SSERAFIM's CELEBRATION.

i had heard murmurs of a hardstyle influence in this one: in bluesky posts from mutuals, or one-off discord messages, all of them complained that the hardstyle didn't last long enough. when i hear hardstyle, especially in an idol context, i immediately think of DEVIL NO ID's BEAUTIFUL BEAST. like, once you've heard that song, you'll have no other association between the genre and idols. it just goes that crazy.

if you're one of the (likely few) people that have listened to both CELEBRATION and BEAUTIFUL BEAST, you don't need me to say that the former does not go nearly as hard as the latter.

friends, i tried really hard not to psych myself up for a hardstyle track by one of my favorite k-pop groups. unfortunately, that description alone lingered in my head long enough between reading reactions to the song and actually listening to it myself, and i inevitably ended up disappointed.

that's not to say that CELEBRATION fails at its sound immediately. sure, it's no It's Me; it's not as relentless in its energy, for sure. hell, it doesn't even go as crazy as, well, their song of two summers ago, CRAZY. but it still has these touches to it, these early-to-mid 2000s trance synths and laid-back melodic verses, all of which are book-ended by a hardstyle drop that, while not lasting as long as many of us wished it did, still leaves us wanting more, which is what every k-pop group is supposed to achieve in every aspect, but for this post, its music especially.

what's the point of all this referential waffling? well for one, my main entry-point into talking about music is by comparing it to other music. the other component is that i hate the thesis i'm about to make:

THEY AREN'T GOING HARD ENOUGH! and more specifically: THEY WILL NEVER GO AS HARD AS I WANT THEM TO BECAUSE THEY ARE CONFINED BY THE LIMITATIONS OF THEIR INDUSTRY!

see, i can never trust a k-pop song to execute a genre as accurately as i wish it would. this is for one big reason, one i always have to remind myself of: that these are k-pop groups and not straight-up genre artists.

we as k-pop fans are buying into² a ton of promises made to us by the companies and marketing material behind each group and subsequently each member: the most crucial of which being that we will get music out of this. but that promise, as any fan will tell you, is a fucking lie, because we are routinely handed our knockoff slop of the latest trend on a cardboard and/or shiny plastic plate with a photocard inside, and we may whine about the taste this time, but we're still chowing it down and already talking about the next comeback.

as fans, we love to hate the music our faves give us; there's entire youtube channels dedicated to analyzing the comebacks of these groups³. and while you could argue that the incentive for the average annoying k-pop analysis youtuber to keep tuning in is for video fodder alone, the incentive for the average fan is different, because the stakes are different: they're emotional.

when you attach yourself to an idol, any perceived slight against them becomes a slight against you; be it an imbalanced line distribution that favors other members over your bias, or what appears to be blatant favoritism for newer, younger groups in the company over your ult group, anything can become a "mistreatment" case for fans to trend a hashtag over. but that mistreatment does not only hurt your bias/ult group: it hurts you too.

thus, when a group puts out some dogshit and calls it a title track, no matter the amount of hate comments that bleed over from tiktok "criticism" accounts onto the song's official music video upload⁴, we still come back. because k-pop is more than the music, no matter the lie sold to us by the marketing. it's never been about the music, or about artistry of any kind, no matter how many lyric credits your bias has; it's about the bias herself!

so is it just this: this clubby trend in k-pop, hearing these beats and being disappointed, it's something i should get used to, because these groups are built around vacuuming up our money in exchange for fancy album photobooks and photocards, rather than giving us good music?

my pessimistic side has already exploded into this essay more than i wanted it to. and i can't really help it, when the k-pop industry is so nakedly capitalist that i pretend i don't care about it as much as i do, and instead withdraw into more of the same veneer of artistry that japanese idol companies like hello project give me.

but i think i'm being dishonest in my assessment, for a very simple reason: if k-pop were as artistically disinterested as i'm saying it is, only pretending to care about the music that comes from it... well, then every group would sound a lot more boring and repetitive than they do.

in the end, i do think that the creative directors in the k-pop machine— and the idols who perform this art for us— care about their craft. the industry at its core may be carefully developed to milk as much money out of us in the process, but, that money has to come from a dedicated fanbase, and you only get fans crazy enough to write essays like this if there's a hook at all.

most of the time, that hook starts less with the idols and more with a catchy song.