K-pop girl group NewJeans / Courtesy of Ador

The latest B-side from NewJeans is not mean to appeal to a wrinkled old raver like me. I'm not going to learn the names of the girls in the video, be sucked in by the girl crush concepts, and spend loads of money on their merchandise and CDs. However, "Right Now" is a great track.

Many decry K-pop because of the associations with inauthenticity. A few people who I asked about this song told me that K-pop was not their thing and so were reluctant to listen to it. Yet there are only two kinds of music to my ears: good music and bad music. There's good punk songs and rubbish ones. There's country music that will make you cry and country music that will bore you to tears. There are many different genres, styles, approaches and cultures, but ultimately, there's the music that I like and the music that I don't like. This should not be read as if my subjective music taste is better than someone else's. We are not here to yuck someone's yum.

Nevertheless, this is how I understand the latest NewJeans track in light of my own experiences. It's a way of communicating the past to the present while presenting a vision of the future. The track sounds fresh to a lot of young people in their 20s captured by the whole Y2K vibes and rewatching of "Friends" on streaming devices. To others it sounds like a nostalgic hit of the clubs and raves of a past that has almost been forgotten. Although people are often quick to say that culture merely goes round in cycles, we should remember that culture doesn't necessarily repeat, but it rhymes. NewJeans aren't repeating the past, but their producers are rhyming the sounds of yesterday with the vibes of today.

When the jeans were new

England in the 1990s was a place of pleasure, progress, and change. It was as if we were standing on the edge of tomorrow. A vast future of positivity and openness stretched out before us like an ocean without horizon. We projected our current state far into the future and imagined that our music, our clothes, our values, and our culture was unlike that which had come before. As humans, we had finally got things right. Gone were the days of colonialism and racism. Gay people were more accepted in society. The economy was growing. The summers were long and dreamy. The politicians young and guitar-wielding.

And the soundtrack? Of course there was the mainstream chart music. A host of bands dominating not only the small shores of the British Isles but also, to our mind at least, the whole world. Blur, Oasis, Radiohead, The Verve and the Stone Roses were the kings but they were joined by a wide-range of smaller groups providing anthemic hits like Reef's "Place Your Hands" and The Boo Radleys' "Wake Up Boo." Beyond the pubs and the beer, the beer and more beer, there was a world of dance music. All kinds of electronic forms that were the sound of the more narcotically inclined parties. People would take uppers, downers, and everything else in between: chemicals, pills, tabs, lines, dabs and bottles were the fuel for driving one all through the night in hazy underground raves or transcending reality with the mind-bending light shows of the big clubs in London and beyond.

It was in the former that jungle, drum and bass, and UK garage began to be heard. While the rave scene had previously been dominated by hardcore styles, pop-culture soundbites, and big smiley yellow faces, this soon matured into something a little different by the mid-1990s. Drawing on Jamaican influences, particularly the heavy bass as well as the dub versions of tracks, Jungle was created. From this then came the various types of Drum and Bass, a genre which largely removed the Jamaican influences and adopted a more polished approach. The breakbeats, such as that found in James Brown's "Funky Drummer," were complimented by atmospheric synths and landscapes and a relatively fast tempo of somewhere between 160-180 bpm. Rising out of the ganga filled haze of London clubs, it began to spread across the country, gaining wider acceptance with acts such as Goldie, Roni Size and LTJ Bukem. There was also The Prodigy and The Streets doing their own version of British dance and garage.

From that moment, it began pushing itself further into the mainstream. Computer games such as Playstation's futuristic anti-gravity racing series "Wipeout" and the Nintendo 64's "Bomberman Hero" had drum and bass featured on their soundtracks, exposing young children in their bedrooms to the genre. Hit movies such as "The Matrix" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" featured drum and bass tracks on their soundtracks. And then there was the "Powerpuff Girls." Their theme song and a reoccurring motif throughout the show was a drum and bass track utilizing the funky drummer break. It was this show that got Netsky into drum and bass when he was a kid: He liked the intro so much he recorded it and became obsessed by the sound.

Once famous for its curated pop starlets, the UK stopped doing girl groups and boy groups around this time. While there have been a few scattered examples since, the idea of a manufactured group of adult performers dancing to songs for puberty-stricken teens and horny housewives has gone out of favor in the west. Growing up it was Take That, Spice Girls, Westlife, Destiny's Child, NSYNC, Backstreet Boys and so many others. Imagine a group of eight 29-year old British men with dyed hair throwing up love heart signs, single their whole life, and rarely pictured with cigarettes or alcohol? You'd think there was something wrong with them and fail to take them seriously, I think. But that wasn't always the case.

One of the last big groups from the west to attempt something like that route was Girls Aloud. Like many K-pop groups, they were created through a television show, thrusting them into mainstream media and the charts. Despite the artificial nature of their creation however, their soundtrack was not puppy love but rather an innovative approach to pop music, featuring a lot of electronica and dance. They used the sounds of the clubs and the theme tunes of ravers and pillheads but in a more polished manner to get across on the radio.

And then came K-pop

Sat at my desk, last week I had a stream of different music playing while I worked. Chappell Roan's "The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess" has been getting some heavy play; it's still more exciting and fresh sounding than Charli XCX's "Brat" to my ears. Sophie's "BIPP" remains the highwater mark. It's interesting to see how Hyperpop is getting bigger all the time and fun to note how the west is borrowing from soundscapes and approaches that are often associated with Japan's approach to pop. And while I go through a variety of tunes, there's always some intelligent drum and bass for when I need to concentrate; the snare and hi-hat gripping my attention and pushing my ADHD tendencies away while I sit for hours writing and grading papers.

It was in this situation that I heard NewJeans' new single "Right Now." I've written before about how being a 90s raver listening to Super Shy is a hell of a trip. The memories, the smells, the dank, all coming back from an age in which there were few photos to capture the reality. It's also no surprise that the producer of a lot of their tracks, 250 (real name Lee Ho-hyeong), is also a man in his early 40s. His work and revival of other genres is fantastic, particularly his breathing of life into Korean oldies with his 2022 album "Ppong" and subsequent documentary. If this article gets you to search anything up online, make sure it's that album. It's incredibly well produced and just a beautiful mix of old trot, Casios, synths, samples and lots of lots of space. The man clearly has an ear for creating amazing soundscapes and it's no wonder that NewJeans have earned plaudits for sounding fresh. They have this chap creating their soundtracks.

"Right Now" by NewJeans is 2 minutes and 30 seconds of modern drum and bass. The video features the aforementioned Powerpuff Girl and I'm sure many will analyze that and all the capitalist permutations. But I don't really watch many music videos. I'm not interested in what K-pop idols look like for two reasons: I grew up when we had tapes, CDs and minidiscs and listened to music rather than watching it. Music goes in my ears and not my eyes, as weird as that might seem to some. Second, with K-pop, I know that the people on the screen are not the artists. They are the packaging, the design to the musical product created by people like 250 and Kenzie.

And so what of the latest b-side? It's not classic jungle or drum and bass because it's more polished and eschews the grittier samples. This is catchy: a sleek earworm. Rather than being from the LTJ Bukem wheelhouse of London, the track is closer to something from DJ Marky or the Sambass subgenre. This adds to the summer vibes and brings us out of the dark clubs. Using just a resolution chord followed by a tension chord, it's restless. Constantly shimmering. The main vocal hook features a poppy octave jump and then runs down and then back up the minor pentatonic scale, making it easy for people to recognize and understand instinctively. While the main hook (right now) is in English, the discerning ear will hear Korean and Japanese in there as well, adding to the global TikTok nature of a world connected and decolonized. Further symbolizing our modern world, the song contains no chorus, bridge, or middle 8. Gone are the schizophrenic approaches of groups like aespa and Le Sserafim who seem determined to fit 4 or 5 different songs and genres into 3 minutes of non-stop audio attack. In contrast, "Right Now" is essentially one loop with the vocal melodies on top changing: perfect for social media.

Embrace the ick

K-pop is not a genre. It's a process. Never is this clearer than when one sees how the entertainment companies and producers will constantly shift between styles and concepts over the years: from aggressive hip-hop, 90s R&B, rock, ballads, Latin flavors and anything else that seems cool at the time.

It's weird to hear the soundtrack of messy weekends and lost summers of which I have no memories nor remaining brain cells become the hip sound of youth in 2024. It's being experienced in a whole new manner, reinterpreted and reimagined by the current generation. Rather than be protective or apprehensive about what subsequent people are doing to something that was part of my own life and childhood, I'm excited to see these cultural mutations and manifestations. We are meant to pass things on. Meant to share. The future illuminates the past and the past creates the future. Meanwhile, we're here stuck in the present, blissed out to 180bpm breakbeats and vocal samples once more. The past isn't repeating; it's rhyming with the now.

David A. Tizzard has a doctorate in Korean Studies and lectures at Seoul Women's University and Hanyang University. He is a social-cultural commentator and musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He is also the host of the "Korea Deconstructed" podcast, which can be found online. He can be reached at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.