I guess I’ve become hardly sick of it in record time. This opinion crystallised for me not with the A2o groups debut although I didnt care for it as much as others but with JUST B’s upcoming songs. I had been looking forward to what they might do since their banger 2025 and while I was not as enthused by the teasers photos I did like how wild and weird their outfits were and thought it might translate to the music. Unfortunately while the songs themselves are not bad I distinctly don’t care about any of them. Like okay you’ve done a pitch perfect imitation of what exactly the mid tier boy group songs sounded like. Anything else?
Kpop has always been an iterative genre and I’ve liked some of the nostalgia fueled genres before. I got into kpop during the synthpop retro phase and I still stick by it to this day the banger to dud ratio is insanely high. The thing about that is that it wasn’t as insanely adhered to the genre conventions of synthpop and thus picked out what it liked and threw out what it didn’t. Noone was going to be mad that it didn’t have a Phil Collins esque gated drum machine under the beat. It was just as beholden to 2020 song trends as it was the 80s and that’s what made it unique to me. You couldn’t mistake a 2020 synthpop kpop number for one made in the us in 1987. I remember not really liking the related citypop trend and chalked it up to me thinking a lot of those songs were dull as tar and im not saying they werent but in retrospect a lot of my disinterest is because they did seem interested in recreating the 80s Japan focused rnb balladry sound to the point where they had the gated drums and that did not move me.
In many ways 2nd gen was itself built on a mix of nostalgia and trend hopping. The dna of 80s new wave and 90s hip hop/pop is one that’s embedded into the biggest and smallest songs of the day but with modern concessions such as hard autotune, modern flows and drops and dance breaks associated with the club boom going on. Even at its most deriative and bad you can see that is a mix.
So now I’m looking at a2o lite‘s neon sounding like Lucifer if Lucifer was sung by middle schoolers and JUST B recreating 2nd gen so hard that they managed to bring back the mid rap ballad that everyone stopped listening after 2014 and Yena making a pitch perfect T-ara clone and im like okay you recreated that but also what‘s stopping me from just listening to those songs right now? What are you doing differently? More over a lot of these songs are making the same mistakes their inspirations did. Hard autotune is nice and all but everyone got sick of it back in the day and the songs that were celebrated were the ones that had great melodies under that hard autotune. A lot of these new rap focused ‘second gen throwbacks’ just think that hard autotune and obnoxiously blasting synth faders every five seconds will make me go ‘oh my I remember the thing’.
I think most popular music is going through a little bit of nostalgia fatigue right now honestly. Theres the ‘student of pop’ discussion in which new popstars are molded into sounding like their influences and everything’s a throwback or reference and nothing is original. The biggest hits in electronic music are just reiterating on indie electronic and club boom stuff from 15 years ago. Even the dreaded country boom already a genre that makes looking back part of its dna are built on songs that sound like either 90s pop country or the neo traditional scene from that period also. All our trends are from the 2000s. Theres nothing new to look forward to so we all stay in a past that at least our brains can retrofit into looking nicer.
The songs I tend to like or at least respect are the more obvious mixes of this. I’ve said before that while I’m not particularly a fan of the putting a 5th gen jersey beat under a 2nd gen song cover spree I respect those failed attempts to mix old with new more than straight covers. I ruffle some feathers by saying I do mostly like the ’edm’ (most kpop songs are edm I hate this name) hyperpopish fast rave music thing this year has pushed out it’s fast mostly stupid and does a lot more to put me in the feeling of listening to the 2nd gen songs I do like than a lot of the so called active revival make me. The feeling part is what’s gets me. You can hit all the nostalgia buttons in the world but if it’s a cheap high the song just ends up hollow. I suppose we’re in the early stages of a trend and we’re going to get more weirder attempts as it goes on before crashing and getting replaced by I don’t know xylophone punk rnb or something. Can we reach this point soon?
In short it’s not enough for me to merely hear something second gen ish to soyface and put that on my playlist. We are in 2026.
submitted by /u/Miserable-Elephant-3
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