This Is (Not) About RIIZE

On SM Entertainment, K-Pop, its American expansion, and that good old capitalism.

The fifth generation of K-Pop — indeed, a lot of charting music in the year 2023 — is one that is largely based on nostalgia. In the US, that means easy-to-spot samples and interpolations that aren’t tweaked too much so the largest possible target audience is reached (also right-wing sajaegi). In Korea, older groups have all made hyped returns, from KARA to U-Kiss to Teen Top; more to the point, though, easy listening is favored now. This is music that is meant to fit a Today’s Top Hits playlist and also your local grocery store and also your local clothing store and also your background listening while you do something else: devoid of location markers, context, and artistic identity. In the realm of K-Pop boygroup music, that means the abrasive, “you won’t get it the first time” music of NCT 127 has run its course, relegated to the rap verses if that or reserved for what seems increasingly like a niche¹; the musical palette is notably brighter, reminiscent of DAY6, Winner’s rock days and The Boyz (more on them in a bit). Most importantly, though, it was BTS’s easier, more palatable fare that broke the barrier of the Billboard Hot 100 #1, and “Butter” hangs over all boygroup music now, finally and fully replacing the tedious reign that Big Bang’s “Bang Bang Bang” enjoyed prior this point.

Boynextdoor showed the way forward, “naturally snatched”, with “ONE AND ONLY”; Zerobaseone, Mnet’s survival show boygroup, covered a synthpop angle of it; and here is RIIZE, SM’s new boygroup since 2016’s NCT, doing much the same. “Get A Guitar,” they say, but there’s more electric guitars in the music video than in the song, more charm in the choreography and vocals than in the actual melodies. If this sounds like a reject to you, not only are chances high that it might be, but it is largely irrelevant if it was: It’s the SM songwriting template that now tackles “Butter”. “Memories”, the other track, wins over with a sugar rush of a chorus that is reminiscent of TXT’s earlier fare, using both synths and guitars and singtalking in the verses that gave so much of NCT’s fare their notoriety. Most of its runtime, I wish it went back to that chorus. For a debut by the SM Entertainment label, a company that prides on its songwriting quality, constant developments (2016: “Neo Culture”; 2023: “SM 3.0”) and overall package found little elsewhere, it’s a beginning so toothless it is overall baffling.

It’s worth noting that SM has been playing catch up with the spearhead of K-Pop since at least 2011. An entertainment label that originally started out as the forefront of all Korean Pop music, being chiefly responsible for the Hallyu brand — be it with performance machines like BoA, TVXQ, Super Junior or Girls’ Generation — the initial expansion of K-Pop across Asia can be safely attributed to SM, with JYP (2PM, Wonder Girls) behind with a distance. And then 2011 happened: 2NE1’s “I Am The Best” was released, a song so braggadocious and noisy that it proved a canny, charming answer of Korea to the EDM expansion over in the United States. More followed, all courtesy of YG: “Gangnam Style” and “Fantastic Baby” dropped the same year. Big Bang saw no signs of stopping: 2012’s Alive alone had three bangers, one for the domestic market (”Blue”), one that could appeal to both (”Bad Boy”), and one for the international market (”Fantastic Baby”), and the repackage Monster won critics’ and listeners’ attention for good. Leader G-Dragon made strides: be it with his collaborations with Missy Elliott or his high-profile fashion show attendances or relationships or — most important — his solo music that proved him a canny musician with voracious taste that caught the popular ear.

And what did SM do in the meantime? Keep to the Asian market. EXO’s debut courted Korea and China. It was a safe play, but it belies the risks they had taken years prior: BoA’s American debut hadn’t gotten anywhere; “The Boys” might have been produced by legendary Teddy Riley and even feature Snoop Dogg on a remix, but never charted on the Billboard Hot 100. After this, SM hopped enthusiastically onto the EDM trend, calling it “SMP” (SM Performance) to success and failure equally grandiose, but any step forward they had made with the experimental trap of f(x)’s “Red Light” or SNSD’s multi-part epic “I Got A Boy” or even the orchestral-metallic EXO’s “Mama” was tossed aside as soon as Big Bang debuted “Bang Bang Bang”. A year later, NCT 127 would hew closely to this sound and, well, “get it lifted” with “Fire Truck”. NCT 127’s success, which initially started out overseas with SM seemingly at odds with how to tackle it, came domestically almost four years after their debut, with the metal-adjacent “Kick It”. Such noisy boygroup music typically got a better reception from K-Pop listeners overseas, from Monsta X to Stray Kids. The rest of the K-Pop industry took notice, as did SM, though it’s hard not to see SuperM as a poor response to both NCT 127’s potential and BTS’s success in the United States. We were jumping and popping, but jopping does not a juggernaut make.

To say that NCT 127 (as well as BTS’s incredibly noisy moment with “Fire” and the tropical house pop of “Blood, Sweat & Tears”) ended up leading the boygroup sphere would possibly border on hyperbole, although not as much as one would think. However, as a result of oversaturation within the noisy music, slowly, another group started to emerge as an inspiration point: The Boyz, debuting late 2017, featured summery, boyish aesthetics that — at the time — might have seen more as a rite of passage sort of thing only to be discarded later. But throughout their career The Boyz kept returning to this concept, not courting international audiences (for the most part) but the increasingly shrinking domestic one. That they were taken notice of for this, I wouldn’t have assumed back in 2020, a year in which they caught international and domestic attention during their Road to Kingdom run, which operated on dramatic storytelling levels typically more associated with theatre and opera than a pop show performance.² But lo and behold, in 2023, Zerobaseone not only boasts a fraction of fandom that derived from former The Boyz fans, there was also a moment in their Mnet reality show in which they were told to pose like The Boyz did for their 2017 promo video. The signs, therefore, are clear: the pendulum has swung back, and swagger is now secondary to boyishness. (The female counterpart of this, of course, NewJeans is well in the lead of for over a year now.)

Lain out like this, I suppose I should not have been surprised, or shocked, to hear SM still hew closely to previous sounds — put another way, the former leaders still playing catch up to diminishing returns. But SM this year has found something of a lane with their releases: while aespa is marketed for the American market with Pussycat Dolls sounds and breezy Raye demos, NCT 127 and SHINee both went for 90s hip hop. More important, the latter released “The Feeling” prior their eighth album HARD, a sound that is well about to return into the popular music sphere: drum’n’bass, or more broadly spoken, dance music (note the success of “Padam Padam” and “(It Goes Like) Nanana” in the United Kingdom this summer, as well as the viral success of “Planet of the Bass”). One could have capitalized upon this and remained on top of the conversation, the same way NewJeans had done a year prior. No, instead it’s “Get A Guitar” in a year where now more than ever K-Pop is moving to the United States, because their pop stars are no longer “popping like they used to” (Billboard said this, not me). And I suppose it’s unfair to be judging a SM group from debut alone — could any person have predicted that NCT 127 would release a song like “Touch” from “Fire Truck”? — but in the hyper-accelerated attention economy that is the K-Pop idol market, it’s a privilege of SM groups to be even given a second and third chance like this, a grace not afforded to everyone. In any case, “Get A Guitar” and “SuperShy” show us the current state of K-Pop: a world of overly pleasant pop music written by Scandinavic songwriting teams to pop music so precision-engineered you can practically smell the plasticky new smell off of all of it. It’s pop music that happens to be Korean, stuck in the year of sometime 2014.

That this used to not be the case, SM could gladly tell you themselves. Super Junior’s biggest hit, and the one that made such a big wave in Asia, is the robotic, electronic “Sorry, Sorry”. There was “Gee”. There was “Lucifer”. I still consider this kind of K-pop the definitive version of it: audiovisual assaults that seemed to go for the most sound possibly ever. Kraftwerk as performed by nine pretty girls. Britney and Justin (Timberlake) dupes that doubled down on their inherent raunchiness. Electroclash with some of that 00’s lesbianism. MTV-era synth pop dialed up to 11 to the point where the vocals turn to a screech. Sophie as performed by a bunch of boys in strange clothing and ridiculous hair. “Teen Top we gon rock it drop it hey don’t stop it pop it”. And who could forget the opposite: mid-tempo ballads with key changes; sampling Vivaldi; Boyz II AM. Really, this is the MTV era done right, and that glorious time from 2007 to 2015 produced some of the brightest gems of K-Pop; I would go so far as to say that this era codified it wholly not just for me, but to K-Pop itself. (Is it any wonder that “One and Only” takes liberally from “Her” coming out in 2013?) That stuff like “Tried to Walk” and all does not fit exactly with the music of 2023 that favors passive listening, “beats to study to”, and Instagram reel/Tiktok video background music, I am well aware of (hence why Fifty Fifty’s “Cupid”, described as a “lucky hit” by the Korean industry, took off so much.) That there is still electronics abound, that Everglow returned this year with “Slay”, that at least choruses are coming back, is all true. But these stories feel increasingly sidelined in favor of United States chart approval, with the obvious end goal winning a Grammy.

But like… what is a Grammy if not a couple articles about how great a group is? Does the whole genre need to bend over for an institution that perennially misses the mark? A genre — an entire industry — that makes its money off touring can surely allow to be loud and colorful, no? A genre that made its name on it, rather than “I Like It” clones that the United States don’t need to hear a second time from foreigners³? The money/fan reception is irrelevant here. After all, us fans are the ones that are told to stream the song as much as possible everywhere — from Youtube to Spotify to digital downloads to Twitter trends and what have you. But risks are boring in this form of capitalism, and sticking safe and bland is the modus operandi for various tech companies that will call anything “content” that needs “engagement”. This third expansion to the United States⁴ with the blandest music imaginable may likely bear fruit, but only so because it fills a gap that both the British and American charts left behind: for the former, it’s girlgroups; for the latter charts, it’s capital P-pop music itself. K-Pop as a codified genre will never die, but it seems clear that the goal is to phase that out, to mature it, and thus integrate it to the pop mainstream altogether whilst losing all the markers it previously possessed. As such, “Get A Guitar” is pop. This is fine. It’s just no longer K-Pop.

1. The “niche” in question still manages five million pre-orders, mind you, but it’s a bubble rather than any real indicator. As a J-Pop writer tends to say, everything is AKB48.

2. The Boyz themselves still remain releasing songs both on alluring, dark spectrum and the peppy, summer one: “Roar” and “Lip Gloss” could not be further apart in ideas and aesthetics, but were both released this year.

3. Now, lest I sound xenophobic myself: this is a dig at the American charts and radios. You practically can’t enter the charts without an American featuring (see “Despacito”). In 2023 Spanish songs are still not given radio support. And note that while BTS originally tried (and succeeded) to enter the charts through features with Desiigner (“Mic Drop”) and Nicki Minaj (“IDOL”), SM gave NCT 127 a song that… was well-known already? In the same year as “I Like It” no less!

4. The logic here is that if you make it there you’ll make it anywhere, disregarding the genre’s original history of expanding.