The entire production of KiiiKiii's "Debut Song" reeks of maliciousness, or maybe that's just a kneejerk reaction to watching the K-pop machinery discover irony. To start, "Debut Song" is not actually a debut song; it is a "pre-release single," or additional promotional material that happens to come in the form of a song, as part of a prolonged rollout before the group's official launch. KiiiKiii—that’s three i's, twice—started promotions on February 24 and will only officially debut a month later on March 24. Both "Debut Song" and its music video aren't meant to be taken very seriously. It's a referential satire on the industry; it's all in good fun.
The song is a loose collection of beats, a smatter of discordant melodies on top of it, and well under three minutes, though the last bit is to be expected—in this TikTok-dominated industry, if you make a song over three minutes, you may as well as be blacklisted. It's not that sonically unique: It has a similar cadence to "Mukkkbang!" by rapper Lil Cherry, though with arguably even more active trolling, and weird change-ups dog even typically great K-pop singers. The meat of the release lies in its music video, which has glittering captioning swallowing up the frames of intentionally filtered, retro shots of the members, all with dark hair, all looking like normal high schoolers, one of them with a Lizzo-style flute. The cultural conditioning of horror movies explains some of my kneejerk response—your fight-or-flight instinct should kick in when "Happy Birthday" is sampled over shaky phone shots of high schoolers.
More than that, the music video tries toward presenting a version of authenticity: Here are some normal girls, just hanging out. And the more openly K-pop releases strive toward some version of authenticity, the more uncanny it becomes. K-pop is an industry that has historically worn its fabrication on its sleeve. The knowledge that all groups are borne out of a hyper-produced industry can peacefully co-exist with its previous norms of dyed hair and stage outfits and boisterous choreography and aegyo. But the end result becomes unsettling when the final image being manufactured is Just Some Normal High School Girls.
In the past few years, hyped girl-group debuts from a wide array of labels have been dogged by this aesthetic, or one very similar to it. Get ready for some proper nouns: There's TripleS (of Modhaus), Illit (of Belift Lab, a sublabel of HYBE), Hearts2Hearts (of SM), and now KiiiKiii (of Starship Entertainment) and AtHearts (of Titan Content). The aesthetic—which is best summarized not as "schoolgirl" or "cute," which has been done time and time again, but rather "normal"—traces directly back to the girl group NewJeans, the radical and wildly successful brain child of Min Hee-jin. Min was a former SM creative director who, after a brief hiatus, became the head of ADOR, a subsidiary of HYBE (HYBE is home to both BTS and that Scooter Braun PR firm), where NewJeans was conceptualized.
NewJeans invented the radical concept not of debuting a "girl next door"–style group, but of actually making its members look, at first glance, like random girls next door in both hair and style. (As an imperfect contrast, take boy group BOYNEXTDOOR's boy next door concept.) Immediately after their debut, a controversy arose over the sexualization of the members, at the time all underage, in songs like "Hurt" and "Cookie." This did not bar NewJeans from immediate stardom, or prevent a subsection of girl groups' releases from following the NewJeans aesthetic model.
None of the imitation is unique to NewJeans. K-pop, like most industries, is inherently a copycat business. The BTS boom kicked off with a trilogy of releases, and then everyone and their mother was ascribing to the rule of three. The popularity of Produce 101—and before that, Sixteen—started a scourge of trainee survival programs. The trends in the music echo the Western mainstream, usually a year or two later. But the over-saturation that results from mass-printing an aesthetic, especially one that is gender-segregated, incites a visual nausea that album release stylings and TV programs do not: all long black hair and stage outfits little different from what a fashionable teenager might wear, again, and again, and again. Where K-pop used to go extreme lengths to distinguish members through hair color and style, homogenized visuals are now an expected feature.
But put the aesthetics aside, and the similarities start to end—kind of. The true radicalness of NewJeans as a K-pop project was not limited to its visuals. K-pop groups usually maintain some level of conceptual clarity across releases, but it is much rarer to find a group with a consistent sound that one would say, at least within the realm of K-pop, is uniquely theirs. However, though NewJeans's greatest strength lies in the cohesion of its discography, Min Hee-jin's stroke of genius lay in NewJeans's initial promotional strategy. Unlike most K-pop debuts, which involve a sort of drip-feeding release schedule revealing members and the debut song title, the only information about NewJeans before the drop of their debut single, "Attention," was the single's date.
Put complimentarily, the NewJeans debut strategy was a risky gamble that circumvented the meta rules of K-pop debut. Though other groups may imitate the NewJeans style, they have not yet risked imitating the NewJeans release blueprint. TripleS ascribes to the idol trainee show formula of fan-built rosters; "Debut Song" is KiiiKiii's second pre-release single (their first, "I Do Me," is a much more traditional girl group release) a month before their debut date and they were promoting on music shows as a pre-debut group; Illit was borne out of a survival program ominously named R U Next?; and Hearts2Hearts debuted only after multiple member teasers, not to mention that SM trainees are already usually more visible than most.
But if you're still keeping score, NewJeans has been stalled at its peak by a legal imbroglio between Min and the group's company, HYBE. The issues started with an audit of ADOR due to breakaway suspicions, and has since progressed into a complicated morass of plagiarism and workplace harassment allegations, a viral press conference, Min leaving the company, and NewJeans—who threw their support behind Min—attempting to terminate their contracts and rebrand as NJZ. They have yet to release a new song since a Japanese release on June 2024, an eon for young artists in K-pop.
By that light, a more pessimistic reading of Min's promotional strategy arises: NewJeans provided a template for its own replicability. The entire infrastructure of K-pop has always hinged on the mining of parasocial relationships and investment in each member of a group (more so for boy groups than girl groups, but if boy groups primarily generate income through hyper-consumerist fan clubs, girl groups primarily generate it through individual and group brand deals), and the traditional marketing strategy of K-pop follows this traditional wisdom. Intentionally or not, when Min Hee-jin debuted NewJeans without revealing any of its members, she proved that a group could be successful irrespective of who is in it; that the conceptual and aesthetic grounding for a group can supersede and/or uplift its actual members to unbelievable fame. The post-NewJeans wave may not have imitated that behavior, but its groups have been borne out of a coherent ecosystem. What does it matter if NewJeans is gone? Here are four more groups that look the same.
One cannot declare that K-pop is dead or dying. It is a commercial enterprise whose life is measured by its commercial reach, and ever since BTS officially paved the way into the Western market (after Wonder Girls before them and BIGBANG before them), K-pop has never been bigger. In BTS's hiatus, the Western void has been filled by BLACKPINK, the third-generation icons of networking: Lisa is performing at the Oscars and collaborating with Doja Cat and Raye and garnering negative attention from Joshua Minsoo Kim at Pitchfork; Jennie's debut album is a laundry list of features, including Doechii, Dua Lipa, and Dominic Fike, and garnering more positive attention from Joshua Minsoo Kim at Pitchfork. NewJeans's "ETA" is suitable listening for members of an esports and entertainment org called FaZe Clan.
Then is K-pop worse now—musically, visually, and conceptually—than it was ten years ago? Is K-pop in a slump? It's tough to find a serious question that matters on the terms that K-pop and its broadest cross-section of fans engage with it: As people are quick to reassure you, it's just not that deep. It's supposed to be fun. Well, then: Is K-pop still fun?
Key, a member of second-generation boy group SHINee, has an open preoccupation with the industry that is unique, at least in its expression, among idols. In a 2023 appearance on a YouTube drinking show, he refers to himself as a contract worker and says, "It's a lie to say that the company is a family. We are just helping each other." He adds, "I love my company," before looking at the camera and saying, "I love you." (Amusingly, his comment was predated on the same show by noted SHINee fan and Seventeen member Hoshi, who got so drunk he started crying and saying, "I love my company.")
Fast forward a couple of years, and on another show, Key is asked about the tradition of K-pop dance practice videos. A producer says, "When idols recorded their practice video, they used to sweat a lot and show their real selves. But these days, it's so neat." Key replies, "Do you know why? We've never released our training videos. They were all leaked. Do you think Taemin's absurd bar code T-shirt or my updo would've been shown to the public? ... Since those videos went viral, people thought, 'We should record this properly and upload it.' That's how it became one genre of content."
"Real selves" is a fascinating turn of phrase, and part of what NewJeans's "normal" concept is attempting to evoke. But what the producer in that video referred to—and what fans high on earlier generation nostalgia crave—was not a relatively pared-down aesthetic for an idol, but rather a human being who sweats. But even in the fabled year of 2010 this was a bug, not a feature; if an idol's "real self" was shown through a dance practice video, it was the result of an industry that, for all its unselfconscious manufactured nonsense, had not yet ironed out all its kinks. Variety shows with sprawling casts served as a mode of self-promotion where idols had to take big swings for screen time. Companies had ... ambitious concepts for their artists, and even more ambitious styling. Before NCT had to explain "neo-culture technology" to variety show hosts, BTS had to explain "bulletproof boy scouts." Prior to the rise of survival shows, "being an idol" wasn't yet a measurable skill; sometimes, being good at singing or dancing would be enough.
It is objectively for the better that some of this is gone. T-ara's Eunjung certainly wishes that her company's CEO hadn't spent so much money on giving them professional Cats make-up; those variety shows had grueling filming schedules. But in an era where everything is polished, it's easy to yearn for a time when the veneer would crack into something legitimately authentic, or for an embarrassing era to look back on and remember with affection. Polish is impressive. It is not always fun, or funny. Wanting that particular kind of fun back is a separate matter when the same machinery lies at the root of it all. There's no real way of unsolving an industry that has gotten a bit too good at what it does; you'd sooner wish for baseball to bring small ball back.
If self-awareness has gone too far in fiction, it has also rendered the magic of certain second-generation groups inimitable. Later-generation girl groups have done their best stabs at recapturing Orange Caramel's campy, deranged, react-fodder releases, but in playing it safer—cute colorful outfits are well enough, but they aren't dressing up as literally sushi—falls short of the mark. BIGBANG kicked off a trend of hip-hop–heavy boy group debuts that, if they eschewed the over-the-top, occasionally androgynous styling that defined BIGBANG's music video visuals, certainly caught onto the perks of gratuitous shirtlessness. No one's even tried to touch the children's-show cartoon zaniness of Crayon Pop.
Yeah, yeah. They don't make them like they used to! the nostalgia-brained fan cries. What happened to my beautiful K-pop? Game's gone! That's, like, just your opinion man.
Better or worse or just different, K-pop as an industry is unquestionably more optimized in its production. If part of that optimization comes at the cost of anything weird, or Too Much, or what used to make K-pop as an industry unique? Well, those aspects—involved concepts, saccharine cuteness, ostentatious and/or ugly styling, dramatic eye make-up on men—also happened to keep K-pop's barrier of entry much higher for global audiences. Now that that's gone, there's not so much to cringe at. There's also less there.
It should be embarrassing that SM, a company formerly at the vanguard of K-pop, would crib so blatantly from Min Hee-jin, one of its former employees. This was an organization that eschewed convention by producing F(x), one of the most musically experimental girl groups in K-pop, if to occasionally mixed reception; and NCT, also experimental, also to occasionally mixed effect. But even if NCT once spit out a, uh, song like "Sticker" ("I like it," a friend and NCT fan told me once. "I think it's camp."), the group, now reaching military service age, served as evidence that someone in the industry was interested in taking risks, instead of abiding by the lowest common denominator formula. Hearts2Hearts's debut song "The Chase" is less divisive than the debut of SM girl groups before them in "Happiness" and "Black Mamba." But being boring can be worse than being bad.
Or, if K-pop is like baseball, then everyone is now the Tampa Bay Rays.
Let's go back to something that, at the very least, is not boring. There is a cleverness to "Debut Song," which is celebratory not just of KiiiKiii's members but also of the staff behind them. The final 14 seconds of the two-minute-24-second music video are a rolling list of credits for everyone involved in the production: the creative director, the producer, the stylists and make-up artists, and so on, until finally getting to KiiiKiii themselves, consisting of members Leesol, Sui, Jiyu, Haum, and Kya. It is not a cheap music video—it was filmed in London—but it's made to look like a bedroom production. A montage of shots in the middle imitates the culture of music-show performances still prevalent on Korean television. A scene prior shows member Kya in front of a Starship Entertainment logo, grabbing a mic and singing. It mimics both self-introductions on idol survival shows and old idol audition footage. On the screen is text that gives her real name, birthday, and age: Park Ji-woo; born December 12, 2010; age 14.
Satire is all well and good, but it doesn't work when there's a 14-year-old on screen—how fully can a 14-year-old be in on a joke whose aesthetic reference points predate her birth?—and the singers have no creative say. The glittery typography and retro filter are more effective in Seulgi's "Baby Not Baby", a Britney throwback released a couple of weeks after "Debut Song." "Baby Not Baby" works because Seulgi—now an established 11-year veteran of the industry—has the age, longevity, and presence to render it believable. When that production is given to a pre-debut song for a group consisting of teenagers, containing a credits scene that includes the mass of production staff behind the group, it becomes the corporate arm of the industry insisting upon its own self-awareness. And that, even more than any "Happy Birthday" samples, is where the sense of maliciousness comes from.
It's hard to argue that the sort of longevity Seulgi has is now more difficult to achieve than it was a generation or two prior. The "beating a dead horse" part of identifying modern K-pop developments is acknowledging that these are not new systems, but an evolution of pre-existing ones. For all of the rose-tinted nostalgia that exists around the mess and music of the second-generation era, the treatment of idols then was worse. Hyuna was 14 when she debuted in 2007 as a member of Wonder Girls; Taemin was 14 when he debuted in 2008 as a member of SHINee. The term slave contract has been around since three members of TVXQ split from SM in 2009 and argued that their 13-year contracts were unfair and too restrictive. The maximum term for contracts was subsequently limited to seven years, which is, coincidentally, how long most groups last.
In recent years, high-profile lawsuits between successful girl groups and their management have rendered the dynamics between company, producer, and performer more transparent. In 2022, members of LOONA petitioned to break their exclusive contracts with their company, Blockberry Entertainment. In 2023, Fifty-Fifty members, almost immediately after they achieved TikTok virality with "Cupid," filed a lawsuit against their company, ATTRAKT. And at the peak of their popularity, NewJeans/NJZ became entangled in a messy dispute between their company and their creative director. A member, Hanni, filed a workplace harassment petition that was dismissed on grounds that idols are not "workers" but rather "exceptional entities." (In all three cases, members of the groups returned to working with the creative directors who oversaw their initial success.) The hardest part is not making it; it's making it and somehow making it last.
This ticking time-bomb of obsolescence hardly matters for a big enough company. Any group is lucky to make it to the end of its original seven-year rookie deal as popular as it started; in very few exceptions have groups come out of it more popular. But unless the group is the company's main breadwinner, the company sees diminishing returns investing in even successful older artists after they have renegotiated for better pay. Here is an endpoint of optimization: Why put in effort for a smaller profit margin, when you can debut a younger, shinier artist whom you won't have to pay as much, if at all? It's no wonder idols are increasingly eschewing re-signing with their original, bigger company in favor of founding their own company or joining a smaller one where they will be its primary, if not sole, focus.
The post-NewJeans slough is a labor issue materialized as an aesthetic one: a visual and sonic representation of a solved industry planning for obsolescence. Individual distinction isn't necessary for individual success so long as the group is very popular—the NewJeans/NJZ members were household names and raking in brand deals—but that individual success relies on the group remaining popular. In an environment that moves so quickly onto the next best thing, group members often need to capitalize on their individual brands to ensure some level of longevity, whether that's as a variety star, an actor, or a solo artist. But the top-down roster construction style of NewJeans, paired with an increasingly homogenized visual and musical presentation, makes it difficult to imagine which of the members will or could have individual success. If there is a future, it is only for those who last long enough.
