NewJeans: Year of the Bunny
Hype? Boy
NewJeans slipped into the world as quietly as they could, which wasn’t very. Ever since BTS’s label Hybe Corporation spun off the ADOR imprint as a blank canvas for Min Hee-jin, their Chief Brand Officer, talk had spread within the K-pop fandom about “Min Hee-jin’s girl group.” Min, not a musician at all, was one of the key figures of the Second Korean Wave, building “brand identities” for most of the major acts of SM Entertainment, the 800-pound gorilla of K-pop until Hybe’s predecessor Big Hit Entertainment cracked the Western market. From Girls’ Generation to f(x), Min came up with a decade of visual concepts for mini-album after mini-album, before claiming burnout and quitting SM, only for Hybe to offer her an allegedly absurd number of zeroes to put a band together.
On July 22nd, 2022 the music video for NewJeans’ “Attention” was uploaded, without the pre-release hype that usually accompanies major Korean media investments. The song is your typical hook-heavy R&B-influenced K-pop song, very much in the vein of former Min protegees Red Velvet with some simplification of the harmonies. The following day came no less than four videos for “Hype Boy”: one shared by Danielle and Hyerin (the Australian and the workhorse singer), one each for Hanni (the Vietnamese-Australian), Minji (the one who most obviously could’ve been a model), and Hyein (the maknae or baby of the group.) This second single showed they could work at the progressive end of K-pop, then typified by groups like Aespa. But despite the future bass sonics (provided by 250, a name DJ who’s become their main producer), there was something a little retro about their delivery—maybe it was just the assurance with which Minji spoke the “I just want you/Call my phone right now” prechorus that made them feel older than their years.
The NewJeans EP, dropping on August 1st, contained two more good songs, “Cookie” and “Hurt”, the former resulting in their first real controversy, with “looking at my cookie” accused of referring to genitalia by perverts on the Internet (which to be fair is most people when they’re on the Internet.) It’s unlikely that anyone involved with the song was thinking about anything but cookies, except, barely plausibly, co-writer and grammar checker Ylva Dimberg, and even she’s Swedish and born after the Beastie’s first single. While most complaints about NewJeans’ supposed sexualization may appear quaint to jaded Westerners—teenagers wearing crop tops—in Spain, no less—the group’s youth is enough to raise genuine concerns in an industry that sometimes seems to take The Jacksons: An American Dream as a how-to manual. Hyein in particular was fourteen at the time of their debut, and there’s no way she could have full knowledge of what she was getting herself into, though allegedly it was her brainchild to release “Attention” before introducing the group. It’s their youth that makes them sound like what they are—teenagers describing their experience of being teenagers (who happen to be pop stars) in pseudo-real time. While their handlers have admirably gotten most of the group involved in the writers’ room, the five remain very much under the thumb of Min, and even if she were the most benign of impresarios, there’d be reason to worry about them for a few years yet.
Min, who popularized elaborate CD packaging in Korean (get a photocard with a random band member! Not your fave? Buy another one!) scheduled an end-of-year “single album”. The two-part video for the flip side, “Ditto”, dropped on December 19th. It was a hit beyond all expectations, breaking the U.S. Hot 100 and outdoing a BTS record with a 655-hour Perfect All-Kill—basically staying at number one on every K-chart. If ranking the clips, by Shin Woo-seok (who’s become their regular director), among the best of all time might appear hyperbolic, I hope I can at least get away with placing them among the most effective works at visually defining the image of a rising artist: up with Madonna’s “Borderline” or the explicitly referenced “A Hard Day’s Night” or, hell, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. In my initial Video & Audio comment, I was going to compare the feel to the 2001 Japanese movie All About Lily Chou-Chou before chickening out and deciding it was too obscure a reference, only to later find that multiple critics had referenced the work of its director Shunji Iwai, apparently big in Korea. The video reinforces the considerable strengths of the song. 250 borrows a gentle clapping beat from East Coast club music (regionalists inform me it’s the Baltimore variant) imbued with a double-time feel that gives it an urgency beyond its BPM. But that, along with the general wispiness, also gives it a fragility, a sense that the duration this mood can be sustained, whether three minutes or 655 hours, is finite. While NewJeans do bestie dances around the school, a sixth girl films them with a camcorder; by the end of the first clip, she’s filming absences and by the coda of the second, she’s watching the footage on VHS. Shin has said she represents the Bunnies, the officially sanctioned name for the group’s fans, and she’s necessarily at a distance—from celebrity and, if you’re old enough to have seen Iwai’s successes when they came out, from one’s own youth.
Initially overshadowed, the single’s A-side, “OMG”, eventually became as big a hit on streaming and international charts. Both song and video are a lot more light-hearted. Shin’s minor-metafiction concept has them in a psych ward, with Hanni thinking she’s an iPhone and Danielle thinking they’re the popular group NewJeans filming a music video. The song returns to their pop-R&B side, with trap hi-hats so divorced from their origins they might as well be insects, while the lyrics, by Hanni, Dimberg, and the ungooglable Gigi, cover their usual topic—young love as a physiological disturbance, a complement to Olivia Rodrigo’s psychological approach. Though they’re clearly trained to display similar vocal tics, Hanni is starting to show personality, and Minji is up-to-date on developments in the fast-evolving art of talk-rapping.
In spring came a cola ad, certainly core to ADOR’s ROI calculations, and an appearance on a Jon Batiste single also featuring JID and Colombian singer Camilo, which I’m not sure even Grammy voters would think was a good idea. A second EP, Get Up, arrived on July 21, 2023, in time for their first anniversary, and topped the Billboard U.S. album chart. The big news for a certain kind of pop trainspotter was the addition of Portuguese-Cape Verdean-Belgian-Danish cult figure Erika de Casier to the songwriting pool. de Casier was a precursor to PinkPantheress in resizing the club (sonically and emotionally) to fit in the bedroom, and “Super Shy” very much resembles PinkPantheress, albeit with an optimism: shyness won’t stop them getting what they want. The melodies on Get Up are a lot more contemporary-sounding than their previous tunes: the descending title of “Cool with You” is very 2020s, as is the video, which stars the woman from Squid Game and hints at interracial romance until Tony Leung of all people drops in to prevent it. The clip for “ETA” is less textually rich—the boy’s a liar and did we mention you should buy an iPhone?—while the song, a Dimberg rather than a de Casier, is more interesting in the way it blends the club beat of “Ditto” with a more aggressive airhorned approach, the members agreeing that boys, while bad, are useful accessories.
Thus ends the most consequential rookie year in K-pop history. (There’s subsequently been a soundtrack spot and the “anthem for the Legend of Legends World Championship”, which need not concern us here.) Even established groups like Aespa have reacted to their moment, releasing at least some less maximalist tracks that let song and beat do the talking. As for NewJeans themselves, while there’s current security in the collective, one hopes they’ll be allowed to grow musically distinct from each other. And that, pace JID, they’ll find collaborators more attuned to their aesthetic. In particular, a team-up with PinkPantheress is so obvious it’d be malpractice for ADOR not to make it happen. Hopefully Tony Leung doesn’t snuff that one out.
