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One of the things we discussed in the episode I recorded over the weekend is the impermanence of K-pop and how quickly songs, groups, and even entire genres are forgotten as fans chase the new and shiny comebacks over the horizon.
As the metrics for “legend” status are sliced thinner and thinner (“first 4th gen boy group to have six albums chart in the Billboard Top 200!11!1”) and K-pop grows ever more distant from what the normies and locals are listening to, the faster the slide into the murky black hole of Forgotten Pop Culture.
Universal Music’s first K-Pop boy group Boys Republic was a mid-2010s favorite of mine. They debuted in 2013 (the same year as another rookie group from a non-Big 3 Company called Bangtan Sonyeondan). Boys Republic had quality songs and were engaging performers. They appealed to tastemakers outside of the K-Pop sphere with outlets like Vice Magazine ranking them in on lists like The 20 Best Kpop Songs of 2014 alongside acts like 2NE1, Orange Caramel, and Taemin.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with Boys Republic. They had fans. They toured. They performed on Music Bank.
But for whatever reason they’ve been written out of the narrative and now it’s like they may as well have never existed--quite literally actually as some of their MVs have been pulled from YouTube.
The new crop of fans coming in don’t even know Wanna One (whose rabid fans made international news in 2018 for their insane shenanigans) let alone groups like Infinite (who won Best Boy Group at MAMA a decade ago over heavy hitters like EXO and SHINee) or domestically popular first generation groups like N.R.G. How can fans properly judge the lineage of current trendy K-Pop group concepts like Astro’s “Candy Sugar Pop” when they’ve never seen the 2015 pastel wonderland of “Ah Ah” from Teen Top.
Not that everybody needs to know everything but there’s something particular about the amnesia in English-language K-Pop circles where the only things to be known are what happened 30 seconds ago and we’ve already forgotten it because we’re already speculating about the next comeback.
Fans can stream and stream but everybody’s K-Pop fave is destined for the recycle bin in the end. What does it matter that a video got millions of views when the video no longer exists and nobody remembers it?