This is something I've been thinking about for quite some time. I've been a kpop fan for a decade now, and it was very different 10 years ago. It went from being vibrant, varied, and larger than life to...music for tiktok. I made a whole video talking about this and directly comparing "old" kpop to modern, but I won't like unless anyone wants me to; just saying I can back this up with actual examples. But out of everything that's been lost since 2018 (BTS's rise in popularity is, for better or worse, what actually triggered the degradation; the TLDR is mainstream attention is very lucrative) I think what disappoints me is that kpop doesn't feel very "grand" anymore. There used to be quite a few MVs that went big. Everything from the music itself to the costumes to the sets/locations felt larger than life. And now, they just...don't. I'm talking primarily MVs like Xia/Junsu's Flower and BTS's Blood Sweat And Tears and Spring Day, but there's also, off the top of my head and no particular order: Seventeen's Don't Wanna Cry Taeyeon's INVU and Why Chungha's Play Mamamoo's Décalcomanie Akmu's Dinosaur (G)-Idle's Hann and Oh My God Taemin's Sayonara Planetarium Records' Blind Vixx LR's Beautiful Liar Even Kpop Demon Hunter's This is What it Feels Like kind of fits, too. Out of all of these, the most recent one-discounting KDH-is INVU from 3 years ago. The rest are pushing a decade or so. KDH may not entirely count, as I've been told production started back in 2016 or thereabouts, which explains why so many of the songs sound like "old"/gen 3 kpop. I just can't help but mourn the loss of this grandiosity. The MVs themselves I get- everything I've listed has probably been extremely expensive; lots of CGI, shooting on location can be expensive, detailed costumes also get expensive to buy or rent, lots extremely detailed sets that are expensive to dress (again, buying or renting from a prop house; building them is actually pretty cheap- flats are literally just 2x4s and plywood). All this means that shooting in a simple "white box" is significantly cheaper, and kpop is all about maximizing profit. But the music? 90% of title tracks now are just "let's flaunt how rich/famous/attractive we are" while keeping the chorus as simple as possible to make a tiktok sound bite, and often eliminating the bridge to make songs shorter. Nothing is very "wide" or "open" anymore, very few layers to be found in the instrumentals, most title tracks don't build much anymore, and plenty of people have already complained about idols not being very good singers anymore (diehard fans will eat up anything, so the industry gets away with debuting idols with only a year or less of training, and it shows). I miss when kpop was actually interesting and didn't try so hard to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Jonghyun's Inspiration is still one of my favorite instrumentals, but a lot of kpop was still very engaging until about 5 years ago, when the degradation really picked up speed. While there are still occasional MVs that go big (Slay comes to mind, as much as I hate it; that MVs got a lot of shooting on location and detailed sets IIRC), kpop as a whole has mostly lost just about everything that made it interesting pre-gen 4 (no we're not on gen 5; stop fucking saying this). And I miss that variety. submitted by /u/PeachyPlnk [link] [comments]
The biggest downgrade in kpop has been the loss of grandiosity
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- 2025-09-19 00:07 event
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