[K-pop Kritic] Korea Wires Back: Retro, Newtro and Y2K Pt. 2 (2024)

Historical periods are often tied to particular technologies (e.g. “radio era” versus “TV era”), and our individual memories of the past are also powerfully shaped by technology. In exploration of this larger theme through Korea’s recent Y2K craze, the first part of this series focused on the evolution of consumer electronics in Korea and its intersections with K-pop. But in today’s episode, we want to delve a bit deeper into our emotional responses to contemporary representations of earlier technology and digital cultural artefacts. More specifically, we will look at the complex interplay of nostalgia and novelty that “newtro” offers to K-pop fans and the larger Korean public.

Imagined Pasts: NewJeans and Newtro

An important distinction between “retro” and “newtro” is that the latter is a reinterpretation of bygone cultural products, designs, and styles with modern sensibilities as opposed to a simple recreation or transportation of past objects to the present. Recently in K-pop, NewJeans—a five-member girl group that debuted under ADOR (an independent label under HYBE) in 2022 has added fuel to the “newtro boom,” while also becoming its most quintessential example. NewJeans’ clean aesthetics and breezy easy listening tracks offer a reinterpretation of 90s girlhood that carved out a space for NewJeans both within K-pop and beyond. What’s most interesting about NewJeans is that the group succeeded in appealing to not just existing K-pop fans who were growing tired of the genre’s saturation with “girl crush,” but also to a much larger segment of the Korean public that were previously not interested in K-pop.

Below is an image from “Phoning", a mobile communication application that NewJeans and the group’s fans (also known as “Bunnies”) use to communicate.

What do you see? How does this image make you feel?

For us (all born in the late 1990s), even a quick glance at Phoning’s interface suggests its similarity to the interface design of “feature phones.” At large, we would expect it to evoke a sense of nostalgia to those who grew up experiencing a transition from feature phones to smart phones and a sense of novelty to those who grew up with mostly smart phones. In our view, NewJeans’ entire brand—their music, music video, album cover, concept photos, marketing materials, and more—reflects this acute balance of nostalgia and novelty within a carefully crafted narrative of youth denied to most Koreans. That is, the success of this formula, when considering the rigid and repressive educational environments that most young Koreans grew up in, is somewhat ironic. K-pop creates fantasies about our past, present, and future, but these fantasies often times tell us more about our realities.

K-pop Then and Now

If NewJeans chose “newtro” as its core aesthetic, other K-pop groups have selectively tapped into the newtro trend by releasing remakes of “classic” K-pop songs. SM entertainment has been at the forefront of this trend, with aespa’s “Dreams Come True” (2022) and NCT Dream’s “Candy” (2022) harkening us back to the late 1990s. Both songs are remakes of earlier SM artists’ hit tracks, namely S.E.S.’ “Dreams Come True” (1998) and H.O.T.’s “Candy” (1996).

We should also not forget that Oh My Girl had a whole special album in 2016 dedicated to “classic” Korean songs, drawing from a range of genres and musicians. Of the four songs in the album, the song “Listen to me (A-ing),” featuring Skull and Haha, is a remake of “Listen to me” by Papaya, a five-member K-pop girl group that was active between 2000 and 2001.

These types of genealogies between girl groups or boy groups from different generations are interesting in that it creates a kind “micro-history” that holds K-pop as a genre together but also its fan base together through common knowledge. But while it’s easier to make sense of why groups would remake older songs released by groups of the same gender, it’s more interesting to unpack cross-gender remakes, as in the case of Fin.K.L.’s “Now.”

Less than two weeks ago, ONEUS—a five-member boy group that debuted under RBW entertainment in 2019—released “Now,” a remake of Fin.K.L’s 2000 mega hit track “Now.”

“Now” has been covered by several groups in different occasions, but it’s quite interesting that a boy group decided to remake this song in 2024. ONEUS’ take on this classic hit differs substantially from Wonder Girls’ remake of the song and its music video in 2009 to advertise the “Ever X Slim,” a feature phone model released by the mobile phone manufacturing company KT Tech (formerly KTFT). As you look at these three videos, try paying attention to what has changed and what hasn’t—everyone will notice different things, but this will be a fun exercise nonetheless to understand how “remakes” work across generations.

We hope this series helped you think about your own connections to technology and the electronic devices that you’ve owned and own currently. What do they mean for you? How do they make you feel? If you are a fan of K-pop, how has technology mediated your connection with it so far? We’d love to hear your stories in the comments below!