- Golden ages are usually identified in retrospect. Golden ages end for a variety of reasons. One is a genre can be so successful so as to just be the default. This happened with prestige TV I think. TV is either reality, sitcom, or heavily using prestige tropes.
- During a golden age there’s usually a strong consensus of what the best one or few things are. Again, “Breaking Bad” in prestige TV. There may (dunno) be better TV today but there’s never going to be just one great show like when Breaking Bad was a hit.
- I think people view gen 2/3 as a vocal golden age in kpop. Like I can just bring up Taeyeon or Wendy as an example of a great vocalist and I’m not really gonna get into a fanwar. It’s like the “Breaking Bad” effect. You can’t really do that with your gen4 vocal bias and just expect agreement by default.
On the “golden age” topic you can sometimes ask the question, what are we in the golden age of, that we might be missing?
In kpop it’s probably choreo.
- It did probably replace vocal somewhat, just in that you can only specialize in so many things at once.
- It’s of-the-moment. The thing is choreo+visual is distribution, whereas music as a product can’t really self-distribute. Pandemic, kpop choreo+visual and tiktok were a good combo for the industry.
- It’s not really a historical constant. Royal families don’t dance (can you imagine?). America’s celebrity class doesn’t really dance. Singers sometimes do, sometimes don’t. Actors and actresses usually don’t. In American culture, line dances come in and out of fashion, kpop dance being line dance adjacent. There’s not any great reason you’d think the choreo part of kpop will last forever.
- If any one moment inspired me to write this it’s how exhausted ILLIT besides Iroha looks after performing “Jellyous.” That just drives the point home to me, yes we are in a very choreo intensive era right now.
So if it’s peaking now and it doesn’t last in 5 years (which it may or may not), I’d call it a golden age.
And one reason I like bringing this up now is I always feel a little uncertain about put-downs of gens 4 and 5 compared to 2 and 3’s vocal dominance. Like, I got into kpop during gen 4 and 5. I had chances earlier — when I got into kpop last year I still had these moments like, oh I’ve seen Sana before, wasn’t Perfect Velvet playing at the gym all the time, hey the BOOM BOOM group is coming back. Turns out the choreos and visuals mean a lot to me. Like take “Icarus” for example, that’s my SOTY but I didn’t “get” it on the album. I “got” it in one of the music shows where I saw the dance was unusually sync intensive, then I basically fell in love with the performance video in particular.
basically I’m saying give choreo era more credit… it might actually be an era and it might not last
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