The Beginning of K-Pop’s Nostalgia Generation: BOYNEXTDOOR’s WHO

As the fifth generation is revving up, Zico's first boygroup BOYNEXTDOOR banks on the already available. A review

One of the more befuddling aspects of following K-Pop is the question of when one generation ends and when the other begins. The lines are soft, but definable: between the first and second, second and third, etc are sonic differences as well as new strategies in marketing, packaging, and visuals. As such, it’s not inherently useless. But try to define a hard line and you run into problems. Of course, questions as these are typically not answered with anything but biased fervor: the K-Pop’s fan chosen group started the generation, paved the way, upended the sound, instantly catapulting everyone that dared debut before them to the dark ages and everyone after hapless followers. Labels are far too happy to play this “generational leader” angle up in various media pieces too, so surely this cannot be the way to go.

For me personally, it’s helped to measure this by groups debuting under SM Entertainment; TVXQ in the first generation, SHINee and f(x) in the second, NCT in the third, aespa in the fourth. (Other K-Pop bloggers disagree that there’s a fourth generation, arguing that there’s no major changes between the third and forth; sound logic, though perhaps too lenient to my taste. You see how porous the lines can get.) So, unlike what some K-Pop stans on Twitter will say, the fifth generation hasn’t started, in my view, but following my logic will later this year when SM debuts its first boygroup since the NCT project… consisting of some former trainees originally meant to debut to NCT… but in either case, the past two years (and, in particular, this year) do show an ever so slight shift in sounds if not presentation, and the debut single WHO? of KOZ Entertainment’s new boygroup BOYNEXTDOOR makes for a good case of the fifth generation: the first that is overtly nostalgic.

BOYNEXTDOOR’s label bears talking about first. KOZ is the abbreviation of KING OF THE ZUNGLE and is a Hybe imprint headed by none other than Zico, producer, rapper, as well as leader and main rapper of Block B. He first uttered the phrase “king of the jungle” on the 2012 song Very Good, the main conceit of which was a metal riff. King of the Zungle was also the name of his first solo tour in 2018 — clearly Zico is interested in a bit of mythmaking, considering the way the name stuck and keeps sticking. Block B, it must be said, was a group that didn’t do anything too different from what Seo Taiji and Boys started in 1992: hip hop music that was aggressive and confident and fashioned around a main songwriter. Four years after their forgettable 2011 debut, Block B had found their derivatives too — Monsta X. Like with Monsta X, who would court international fandom for quite the time, Block B wasn’t initially successful in Korea (controversial, even, for laughing at a flood happening in Thailand in 2011) but had their breakthrough in 2013’s Her.

A stylistic departure that nevertheless slyly expanded on their sonic foundations, Her uses bass and electric guitars to great effect, as the title itself makes a play on both her (the object of Block B’s affection) and the Korean exclamative heol, both of which are written the same in Hangul. The music video, far from the pirates and gangsters of previous Block B ventures, has the seven members be cute and approachable whilst also showcasing a wacky side. Her works because the chorus works, because there is an energy that starts the song and never ends, especially in the vocals. Block B released three forgettable and/or bad singles after that, and there is also a subunit BASTARZ, featuring the most distinctive vocalists U-Kwon and P.O, as well as B-Bomb), the most notable song of which is the metal-esque debut Zero for Conduct produced by Zico. The group / subunit isn’t officially disbanded, but with Zico leaving sometime 2019, it’s clear the project is over.

No fear, though, because Zico decided to pick up Her where he’s last left off. That’s the thought I had when I listened to the debut single “One and Only”, co-written and produced by him. But just Her wouldn’t be enough, so there’s also copious amounts of NCT here, a sound that all boygroups have adopted the past four years to some degree of success. The first ten seconds are all Block B, and on the thirteenth second, the member rapping does both Mark and Park Kyung (another rapper of Block B) convincingly. And the chorus? A vacuum of one riff and some non-sequiturs (”I’m the one and only”, ”naturally snatched”, “wherever I go, lady” “oo-ah, oo-ah,”) is all you’ll get here. If this sounds familiar, that’s because every boygroup has done this the past four years.

What strikes me, though, is that Zico has clearly learned one lesson of his tenure in / writing for Block B: that you need one vocal that stands out… Park Kyung’s. In his group, there were two more: himself and P.O’s deep bass. It’s an old school kind of thinking to go for this type of vocal strategy: a group like Teen Top, consisting of six members, the untrained ear only picks up one rapper (former member L.Joe) and one vocalist (Niel) and a serviceable soup of male vocals inbetween. But BOYNEXTDOOR’s big problem is that everyone sounds like Park Kyung, all the time; nasal boys singing with copious amounts of pitch correction, turning vocals to a nasal mush that seem perennially underqualified to sing their own songs. Not having recognizable vocals is not a new idea, but what Hybe made popular in 2020 and sees no reason to stop inside its umbrella hasn’t been en vogue for many years now. The pitch-correction in particular makes for a disconcerting listen, and that vocal problem is all over One and Only. The other two songs — the WINNER-esque pop rock track Serenade and the unnecessarily short surf rock piece But I Like You, both co-written by members Jaehyun, Taesan, and Woonhak — are charming, but rendered anonymous for the same reason. Had nobody told me that this was a new group and Serenade or But I Like You happened to hit my timeline, I would have readily assumed it was the nth comeback of a group at most popular with a certain section of international fans that call themselves “multis” and like any debuting boygroups that have a variety program on their Youtube channels. For better or for worse, One and Only — that nostalgia circuit of a track — is the (one and) only track that makes any memorable impact.

And that’s where we’re roughly at now: with K-Pop no longer having a new recognizable trend in the United States to cannibalize off of, it now cannibalizes its own history. To some degree, this has been a thing since K-Pop’s birth — Block B itself isn’t exactly an act that reinvented the wheel at the time. But never before has it been as stark as it is now. IVE, the best of the new batch of artists, makes big, glossy 00s-reminiscent Eurodance music; NewJeans combines S.E.S-esque R&B with 00s 2-step; ENHYPEN’s last comeback utilized Latin pop for their latest comeback that was last popular around the late 90s. There is nothing new to copy from, and, as if having resigned to this fate, a lot of labels do not try. Part of that has to do with the atomization of American pop music: the charts have become a battleground of stans and streams, with the lowest common denominator being radio (which explains why Morgan Wallen has the #1 song in the States right now for the umpteenth week).

This is fertile ground for boygroups to do what they’ve always done and create a bubble of popularity and relevance (with a not insignificant amount of environmental pollution). But BOYNEXTDOOR, crucially, isn’t going for the noisy boygroup variety that Block B started out with. They’re, well, boys next door. They fall in love and hang out in record stores and play beer pong at parties. They play guitar and sing and try to confess and fail at it. (And they also, in a move that struck me as quite blatant, do things that make it easy to put shipping lenses on, especially in the intro video.) This is the kind of presentation and pop music that’s been missing from mainstream K-Pop for a couple years now, but always hovers around in fanservice-y B-side music videos. It should be enough reason to excite, but BOYNEXTDOOR’s first effort is so diluted that it only recalls previous heights by older groups.

To be fair, this is still only a start for more; more famous groups have found stronger footing in their first comebacks (as did, ironically enough, Block B). But Who does not strike me hopeful about K-Pop’s future. All I feel when I listen to it is that it’s been ten years since Her, almost ten since Winner debuted, and seven years removed since we first heard Mark Lee on a song, saying that it’s a long-ass ride. This nostalgic K-Pop will be, and to a degree already is, uninterested in innovation because innovation means risks, and nobody needs that when you can make more money regurgitating old music. (This, hilariously, is not original to K-Pop either; American pop music increasingly turns towards big, noticeable interpolations.) Now Her and Winner and even Mark have become part of a giant slush of music that’s safe, bankable nostalgia, songs that can be endlessly replicated from this never-ending vault of what already exists. There’ll be a new wave of teenagers that haven’t heard the originals before and will be far too infatuated to realize that they’re being sold worse products, and I fear WHO is just a first taste to come with this fifth generation. If that's the case, I wish groups at least sang on the choruses again. Now that would be one hell of a throwback.