That Side of K-pop (Flipped) #3: Too Bad
We're a K-pop newsletter now, and covering music of old generations from Taemin's solo debut, 4 songs from before 2018, and G-DRAGON's latest number-one, plus the hip-hop throwbacks of Young Posse
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If this is your first time with Young Posse, I wouldn’t blame you if you thought the girl group’s performance of “XXL” above on their parody program Korean Soul Train was an actual broadcast from its timestamped date of 19940421. Sunhye, Yeonjung, Jiana, Doeun and Jieun don’t pay homage to the scene’s first wave as much as they directly beam themselves back to 1994 with perhaps the same ACME technology from their music videos. They put on the puffy, neon snow gear also worn by the rap-dance idol acts of the time. Seen through the TV grain, they most resemble Seo Taiji and Boys on MBC Top Music in 1995.
Young Posse are known for their often literally cartoon antics. For one, the heavily CGI-ed MV of “XXL” sees Jieun turn the rest of the group into kaiju size with a magical flashlight. But the group puts such sharp attention to detail to their Korean Soul Train performance that respect outweighs any irony. Their care toward their aesthetic references extend to the music too that’s accurate as it is inspired. Even without dressing it up in snow gear, the production of “XXL” recalls Seo Taiji’s 1995 classic “Come Back Home” as well as the whole cast of the boom bap made around that same decade. G-funk’s favorite squeal immediately transports it back to the days of Cypress Hill’s debut while Sunhye swipes a Das EFX-like wiggity-wiggity flow like it’s really a New York rap record cut in ‘94. It tips its cap to first-gen K-pop as much as the import of hip-hop records that inspired that generation.
The group’s love for hip hop doesn’t stop at the ‘90s, an adoration already evident through the cover art of “XXL,” literally a spoof of an issue of XXL magazine. (I implore you to search up the physical edition to see how it really looks in person.) If “XXL” resides in post-Chronic haze, their next single “ATE THAT” lives in the aughts after 2001. The booming low-rider funk recalls G-Unit’s Beg for Mercy in its blockbuster slickness while the idols lyrically interpolate “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang.” They recreate snap music to the T in “Bananas,” the track that follows the title track in the ATE THAT EP, as if they downloaded Soulja Boy’s exact copy of FL Studios. The latter song explores a rather niche genre relative to K-pop idol scene at large, suggesting it’s driven by personal vision as much as overarching pop trends. Though nostalgia for ‘00s pop is in vogue as heard in today’s swipes of The Neptunes and UK garage, only a few are willing to champion D4L as their musical lodestar.
Not only do they borrow the sounds signature to snap—the gummy bass lines on “Laffy Taffy” or the exclamation-point synth hits that open “Crank That (Soulja Boy)”—Young Posse stay committed to the silly, colorful attitude inherent in the music and its pioneers. Their meticulous curation behind the music and visuals appears too ambitious for me to write off as mere cosplay, especially when they invite rappers from their local scene for their remixes. They expanded the bumper-music intro, “Loading…,” of the ATE THAT EP into a full-on G-funk posse cut, some of which explore L.A. gangsta rap and Atlanta swag rap on their own solo works. As they have a blast building their hip-hop world through reference-heavy videos and niche genre dives, Young Posse exhibit a deep, playful reverence to their influences.
April Fools! With now a third edition, That Side of K-pop is becoming less a prank and more an annual tradition (excuse?) to invite our friends to crash the party and discuss K-pop. And this time, we bring a Flipped issue, meaning we twist the regular TSoJ format to feature older music, dated no recent than 2018, for our Album of the Week and Singles Club while I highlight the newest number-one from the Melon charts. We got some real time capsules as well as some great writers on board to share some old favorites.
Enjoy, and happy listening!
Album of the Week
The review for this section is written by returning guest writer Kayla. You can also find her writing on The Singles Jukebox as well as her blog Pop Excellence, where I’ve previously contributed blurbs about K-pop. Enjoy!
Ace by Taemin [SM, 2014]
*Recommended track: “Experience” | Listen to it on Spotify
I’ve been a ride-or-die Taemin fan since 2020, but until the end of last year, I had never listened to his debut mini album. SM often takes a release or two to find their artists’ sound, and a lot of K-pop from the first half of the 2010s has not aged well on a technical level, so I’d always put it off with lowered expectations—but I should have known better than to doubt Taemin. Ace, despite being undeniably tied to the trends of its time, still holds up a decade later as both a first exploration of Taemin’s solo identity and a great musical project in its own right.
2014 was the year of “Overdose,” “Mr. Mr.,” “Come Back Home,” “Good Boy,” “Up & Down”—the era of plasticky, blown-out EDM synths—and the sometimes-shiny, sometimes-honking instrumental of Taemin’s first-ever solo single “Danger” is just as dated as its peers. Aesthetically, the music video feels like an entirely different artist than the one that released “Want” or “Guilty”: Taemin slid so easily into a more subtle, androgynous style from “Move” onward that it’s funny to see the brief attempts at making him seem macho here. (Nose ring, motorcycle, fake gun, male backup dancers; I’ve literally never seen this man in my life.)
Despite the mismatch with what would become Taemin’s signature sound, “Danger” is still enjoyable thanks to its classic topline. Like a lot of second- to early-third-gen K-pop, it goes big and loud and fast enough that you never stop to consider what’s happening; it just keeps barreling forward through a pile of iconic hooks. “I’m like a maze when you look at me / I’m like sand when you try to catch me / Scattered like the fog / Mysterious like a puzzle,” he taunts in the second pre-chorus, fitting himself into the long tradition of debut tracks that self-describe the artist, and then exclaims “It’s my showtime!” in the chorus, in case it wasn’t clear enough.
Taemin addresses the audience even more directly on “Ace,” the album’s opening track. “I want to be your only ace,” he sings to us over a sultry, shimmering R&B beat. “I’m a little different… what you wanted, what you dreamed of.” It’s ostensibly directed to a love interest, but the going-solo subtext is basically just text when the song is also the title of the album. This yearning R&B track holds up impressively well in 2025, and it allows Taemin to flex his vocals in a more subtle way that’s perfect for a B-side. (For more R&B, see tender closing track “Play Me.”)
The rest of Ace is an exploration of the over-the-top styles that defined K-pop’s second gen. “Wicked” leans on aggressive brass tempered with R&B shimmers; out of all the songs, the almost-annoying electro mish-mash of “Pretty Boy” sounds the most like it was released in 2014, but the chorus goes hard enough to be fun anyway. My personal favorite is “Experience,” which mixes guitar strums, castanets and rippling piano riffs with a dubstep breakdown at a breakneck pace—it sounds full and fearless and nothing like any K-pop being released today. Comparing these tracks to Taemin’s (equally good!) most recent album Eternal shows the total shift in K-pop’s musical preferences in the last decade: whereas Ace goes hard in almost every chorus, 2024’s Eternal mixes traditional high-energy choruses with anti-drops, spoken hooks and languid melodies. Both approaches produced great projects—they just need to be understood in the very different musical contexts of their times.
For me, listening to it a decade and two full K-pop generations after its release, Ace was a delightful time capsule of where Taemin’s singularly impressive and influential solo career began. Some of the sounds on it continue to hold up, while some are better left in the past, and there are moments that make me long to hear more of its second-gen-style boldness in the K-pop of today. But across all these changes over the years, Taemin is still here, thriving as an artist and performer, and better than ever. After all, he did promise us at the very beginning: “Forever, I’m your only ace.” —Kayla
Singles Club
“Moon Madness” by Nodance [King, 1996]
Golden Hits Vol. 1, the solitary album by Nodance (the brief collaboration by the late rock singer Shin Hae-chul and pop-producer maestro Yoonsang) is a weird record to reconcile with in the greater saga of K-Pop as the dance/R&B-dominated genre as we know it. In fact, it’s kind of inconceivable to imagine such a “rock-y” album coming from the genre ever again. A hilarious notion given this record is overflowing with numerous ‘90s trends in dance music that are to this day being revisited and revived by the genre at present, not to mention deviations into downtempo, ambient and even industrial. Yet the compositions ride a see-saw of razor-sha(r)pe sleekness while often abandoning the idea of the compact song to meander into strange whims and directions, to a degree that even when I’m ultimately bored or turned off by the efforts by the duo, I’m still bothered by its incongruity.
Take a look at a song like “Moon Madness” for example. The pairing of Hae-chul’s “devil-ish” slurred whispers and yowls with the post-rave Balearic exotica tinges takes the works of Enigma, Soul II Soul and Beauty-era Ryuichi Sakamoto and grants the song a menace that places it alongside Spread Beaver’s industrial-tinged ‘90s output or the sultrier efforts of a visual-kei band like BUCK-TICK—not to mention somehow forbearing Mike Patton’s post-Faith No More psycho-crooner trip-hop hellscapes. Yet it’s the sheer lushness of Yoonsang’s melancholy production (in many ways not far removed from a modern work like, say, DAYBREAK’s “Doesn’t make sense”) that yanks the listener away from the horror show and keeps them in familiar territory. Nodance’s lone record is tragic not because it failed in its attempts to broaden the landscape of a K-pop yet entrenched in the international mind. It’s more that it’s impossible to imagine what a modern record attempting to capture its spirit could even sound like. —Micha
…from Golden Hits Vol. 1 (1996). Listen to it on Spotify.
Micha is on Twitter. You can find her writing wherever it happens, whenever such tragedy befalls us.
“Limitless” by NCT 127 [SM, 2017]
There’s something off-kilter about NCT 127’s “Limitless.” The chorus lacks stickiness, missing those earworm-ready hooks that many K-pop songs thrive on, especially in the era of TikTok. It instead offers up intense, drum ‘n’ bass-style whining synths and pulsating, tinny percussion. There are very few moments featuring straightforward, rhyming repetition typical of K-pop choruses. And yet, it’s one of the group’s most beloved early singles with many, many iconic verses that come to mind.
“Limitless” consistently pushes forward while working in a different formula than what came a section before, building depth and elevating the sonic soundscape with each turn. NCT 127 utilizes rhythmic chanting and deadpan, almost moaning one-liners to rally around. Then, the chorus is bolstered by aural, dramatically layered verses that evoke a sense of depth and intensity fueled by the instrumental. Each verse, rap, and repetition of the chorus in “Limitless” arrives in a new mood and mode, landing on something that proved to be what NCT 127 can be at its very best. —Tamar
..from NCT#127 LIMITLESS - The 2nd Mini Album (2017). Listen to it on Spotify.
Tamar Herman is a writer and author specializing in music and entertainment. She’s written for Billboard, NME, Rolling Stone, and many other outlets. She currently runs the Notes on K-pop newsletter.
“Dreams Come True” by WJSN [Starship, 2018]
You would think a group with the name “Cosmic Girls” would have done a song that sounded like an anime opening from the get go. You know, taking advantage of their concept (13 girls representing 13 zodiac signs) and bombarding us with pop anthems that’s musically matched to their lore. But the group spent two years swimming in the well-traveled waters of bubblegum K-pop before releasing “Dreams Come True,” which used their celestial origins to move them in a new direction and led them to become the WJSN we now know and love. It’s a song about a destined meeting, a fated encounter, a fulfilled wish. Hopeful and determined, it drives away the dark simply by being convinced of its own power as a connecting force.
“Dreams Come True” is stubborn, defiant hope bottled up in a pop song. I have already written one sappy blurb about WJSN’s “disbandment”, so I won’t write another one, but I can’t help but be reminded of the departure of the Chinese members right after this comeback due to regional political tensions, and then now, the group’s indefinite hiatus. But listening back to “Dreams Come True” after all these years have passed, I’m also reminded that the future is yet to be written, and that hopes and dreams can still become reality, as long as you trust in yourself and keep moving forward. Can you still believe in the impossible after loss and heartbreak? As the song repeats, like a magic spell: “it will all come true, just as we dreamed.” —Anjy
…from Dream your dream (2018). Listen to it on Spotify.
Anjy Ou has been writing about music on the internet for about 15 years but is currently a nomad with no website to call home. She is grateful to her friends for allowing her to crash on their couches occasionally.
“Baramui Norae” by Uhm Jung Hwa [Sony BMG, 2006]
Despite her best efforts to cover up the pain from recalling bittersweet memories, Uhm Jung Hwa can’t hide her heartbreak in “Baramui Norae.” The solo star’s best singles from the ’90s also found her caught up in post-relationship woes, her frustrated cries from being wronged often set to glamorous disco to rewrite the ugly situation into the flashiest drama — like 1998’s “Poison,” a Eurobeat-driven cheater’s-tale classic. But almost a decade later since the debut of her music career, Uhm navigates a more complicated story of love and loss in the grooves of a delicate house production.
A deep cut in 2006’s Prestige, “Baramui Norae” runs counter to the sound and tone of the LP’s lead single, “Come 2 Me,” a jittery, Neptunes-ian synth-funk oozing with irrepressible desire. It instead echoes another of her deep cuts, 2001’s “Glass Castle,” through a similar influence from Eurohouse in the production; personally, it recalls the more low-key and subtly anxious ends of Kylie Minogue’s Fever. But also there’s the lyrics that read forlorn in spite of the vibrant beats. Though, the melancholy hits more obvious in “Baramui Norae” from the Rhodes chords on.
The dance music resembles more of a shell where a lively dance-floor used to be as Uhm opens up more about her days far after the dissolution: “Yeah, I forgot, you’re not here anymore,” she begins. At least in her past songs set post-break-up, her words seemed to get across to the very person she made them out to. “Poison” posited her in the heat of the moment as if she’s getting in one last word before she broke it off with this cheater for good; “Glass Castle” found her pleading another to not let go as sunrise signaled an imminent goodbye. In “Baramui Norae,” Uhm sounds as though she’s talking about a ghost, recollecting a presence as if she’s unsure herself that was even once there. The production, too, is too cool and desolate in atmosphere to recapture heat.
“Baramui Norae” tries its best to convince that it isn’t an elegy to a love lost but an anthem to move on forward. Uhm attempts to muster the strength in the chorus to shake the memories loose and go on about her days: “I tell myself, it’s gonna be OK when it’s over, it happens to everyone,” she sings. “There’s nothing more important than myself, so I can swallow it like that.” She’s not fooling anyone neither through the defeated dance-pop nor her weathered tone in which she assures herself about her current dilemma. The same singer from 10 years before might have turned those words into lyrics of triumph as she rises out of the ashes, like the disco diva in 1995’s “Sad Expectations.” Here, the music betrays her words as her true emotions spills out into the fore. Uhm sounds small, vulnerable, human. —Ryo
…from Prestige (2006). Listen to it on Spotify.
Around this time in 2025…
“TOO BAD” by G-DRAGON ft. Anderson .Paak [Galaxy Corporation / EMPIRE, 2025]
No. 1 during March 2025 on Melon Hot 100 | Listen to it on YouTube/Spotify
As current K-pop dips into early-aughts pop for inspiration, G-DRAGON re-enters the scene to join the throwback fun. For “TOO BAD,” he collages the sounds of The Neptunes from various eras into jingling kitchen-sink funk. The dial-tone synth riff echoes “Like I Love You,” but its naked referencing also makes conversation with today’s favorites also nostalgic for the 2000s like KISS OF LIFE, who particularly eyes a different part of the same Justin Timberlake record for “Get Loud” — you can take the Spanish guitars, I’ll take the synths, he seems to say. “TOO BAD” slides right in as it works in the same milieu of today’s K-pop. Though, given his rise in the very era referenced in the production, the song doesn’t come across so much as a catch-up for G-DRAGON than the solo star revisiting a familiar pop period to do what he couldn’t do the first time around.
G-DRAGON must be feeling deja vu after returning in 2023 to the scene from his military service. Pop music at large, K-pop and beyond, is finding inspiration in the shiny hip-hop and R&B that was around when he was finding his artistic voice before debuting as a member of BIGBANG in 2006: the squeaky ringtone synths, acoustic-guitar backdrops, melodramatic string stabs, all pieced together to flow in the anxious rhythms of its drum patterns. G-DRAGON didn’t need to look further than the singles put out by seniors in his then-company YG, like 1TYM or Se7en1, for the style back in the early aughts. And today, he can either observe acts like ZICO, TWICE’s Nayeon and, yes, KISS OF LIFE update the sound popular during his early rise through their respective tastes or see new idols climb the ranks by using it wholesale.
While the song bears sonic resemblance to Justified, G-DRAGON leans into the bling-rap origins of the Neptunes for his take on the production duo’s patented sound. After all, his cocky on-record persona has historically suited jiggy braggadocio set to gruff beats than serenades at the disco: it’s the kind that brushes off a silly pick-up line like “MBTI is SEXY TYPE, so become my sweetheart” as a natural piece of dialogue coming out of his mouth. It’s also a brash personality that makes for a great hang with fellow R&B sleaze Anderson .Paak, who provides the song’s titular chorus that’s playful as it is boastful in its dance-floor demands.
Through its production calling back to the aughts, “TOO BAD” presents an appealing idea: how would the G-DRAGON of today, with 20-years-plus of experience under his belt, fare going back to the pop landscape from just before his debut? He teases this pop-history hypothetical without fully indulging in it. Despite delivering a slick, if brief verse full of his humor, he seems rather non-committal to participating in this revival. His collaborator occupies more space in the song than the main artist himself, resigned to a rap verse and a series of ad-libbed bars before ceding the floor to his guest. “All I want is within arm’s reach,” .Paak sings the refrain, and G-DRAGON yawns past a scene seemingly his for the taking, dipping out as soon as he’s done making his point.
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G-DRAGON is literally featured on the intro track of Se7en’s 2003 album, Just Listen…, interpolating Missy Elliott’s “Work It” over a G-funk-meets-crunk beat that is so 2003.