Yes, I’m a 65-year-old Boomer who loves K-pop. People roll their eyes when I say that. They assume I’m just attracted to the performers and too embarrassed to admit it, as if holding two ideas in my head at once were impossible. But the truth is both simpler and more complicated: I love the music, and I also see the problems baked into the system.
K-pop is obsessed with rigid aesthetic standards—the look, the image, the perfection. That part bores me, and frankly, it worries me. Idols give up their social lives while carrying the public burden of the group, all while projecting the illusion of endless leisure: the parties, the designer fittings, the curated joy. How can anyone live like that? It must be exhausting.
The beauty standard is real, but it touches only the surface of what K-pop is. Beneath it lies a whole army of musicians, choreographers, stylists, and technicians who make every song, video, and live performance possible. I’m as much a fan of them as I am of the singers out front.
That’s why I see K-pop less as a successful evolution of a South Korean garage band aesthetic and more as the polished product of imported Broadway production techniques. It’s a polyglot spectacle built from layers of talent, coordination, and vision.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour? To me, it looks a lot like K-pop formulas perfected over the last decade by Girls’ Generation, BTS, and Blackpink.
So when I’m jamming out to a Blackpink track, sure, Jennie Kim might be on the screen—impossibly gorgeous, magnetic as always—but I’m listening for the musicians you never see. They’re making music as thrilling to me now as the album rock of the 1970s was then. Album drops still feel like events. Tours still support the music, not the other way around.
K-pop moves in generations, like Rock and Roll did when I was growing up. Groups form and go on hiatus as solo projects are explored. Sometimes the solo project sticks, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes bands that go on hiatus get back together, sometimes they don’t.
Taeyeon (Kim Tae-yeon), now in her mid-30s, has a voice that is every bit as powerful and disciplined as Judy Garland’s. She used to lead Girls Generation, who is kind of the Led Zeppelin (i.e., second generation) of K-pop girls’ groups. They set the course (in 2007) for much of what exists today, particularly leading K-pop’s invasion of Japan.
Girls Generation was beset by members leaving for solo projects and then re-forming, sometimes with the entire group, sometimes now, but Taeyeon’s exceptionally clean and technically precise voice has sustained her solo career. Below is my current earworm of hers, though far from her best work, I just can’t get enough of what they do with this arrangement.
Blackpink, whom I discussed above, is considered a third generation phenomenon. I came into all this as a Blackpink fan (called a “Blink”) because the third generation of groups, which included TWICE, Red Velvet and GFRIEND, along with Blackpink, were the pioneers in globalization of the sound.
The second generation had already invaded Japan, Blackpink as a third gen phenom conquered it quickly, even re-recording hits in Japanese, but they rolled on through the regional space and did social media outreach to find fans like me around the world via socials with songs and videos like this one below.
You don’t have to watch the whole thing to get the idea that characterizes third generation K-pop. This is a collection of personalities, they fashioned themselves deliberately after the Spice Girls and Salt-n-Pepa, wanting to be a collection of distinct performance entities rather than a homogeneous group singing together. That was a departure for K-pop and it defined the third generation of groups:
For Blackpink, as well as TWICE, this public relations strategy made their social media presence four times more powerful. One doesn’t follow Blackpink on Insta, one follows Jennie, Lisa, Jisoo and Rose’. That’s four times the engagement. That transformed the global reach. They found me.
The fourth generation of K-pop girl group includes AESPA, New Jeans, IVE, and (G)I-DLE. One might argue that (G)I-DLE is a late-blooming third generation group, but as they evolved they have taken on more of the heavy concept work and fan engagement that characterizes the fourth generation.
AESPA does what characterizes the fourth generation most aggressively, and one should note the use of hands in the dance routines, that isn’t accidental, that’s a nod to Asian dance traditions. Note the heavy use of CGI, the performers are really providing digital samples for the entire build of the look of this video. It is composed digitally, this is the frontier that the fourth generation explored:
The musically-inclined among you may note the tempo changes in this tune. One could argue it is a composition of several song ideas, The whole idea here, bigger than what the performers are doing on screen, is the next level that the concept of this group and the four generation of K-pop introduced.
The fifth generation is happening now, some of these groups, particularly the one that most interests me, BABYMONSTER, aren’t even really fully formed as bands. They are still working out what they are.
What fascinates me about BABYMONSTER is the concentration of talent in the seven members of this group. They can all sing as individual performers but they sing even better as a seven-voice choir. This is best demonstrated by this silly early song of theirs, it shows you where the fifth generation of K-pop is going. They mix both individual segments with choral, using each where it most fits the arrangement. This ain’t easy:
That’s why I’m here.
It’s about joy.