Punctuating 2021 of Aespa’s historical chart-breaking career was an homage to their entertainment company’s history, a sample of first generation girl group wunderkind S.E.S.’s 1998 hit, Dreams Come True, which was, in itself, an adaption of Finnish pop duo Nylon Beat’s, 1996, Like a Fool. In the Nylon Beat version, love provided clarity by way of insanity. “A perfect night for keeping you so near and we’ll let all the world drift far apart... funny how I feel for you, like a fool I’m into you.” They let the audience know that the space where dream meets reality was through vulnerability. It was a 90s sentiment in which songs like The Cure’s Friday I’m In Love and K-Ci & Jojo’s All My Life shared. One had to give oneself up to enter this dream space, to depart from crushingly banal reality. In contrast, in the S.E.S. version, the trio sang “Dreams come true... 너의 곁에 그려질 꿈결 같은 나의 미래도,” the Korean lyric loosely translating to ‘to be drawn by your side, my future is dreamy.’ Dream, in their version, maintained its separated reality in a space of anticipation, a sentiment seen in torch songs of unrequited love. In their version, denial bred intensity. What is interesting to note in diasporic’s relationship to pop is the projective space it opens for indefinable extreme feeling. What’s at stake here is one’s relationship to the lyric and the imagining it affords. The Korean lyric, in S.E.S.’s version, gives access to an intimate space of reconciliation, a divide that gets at the heart of Kpop’s piercing power and the materiality of pop.

The pop sample and English lyric, can initially be read as a performance of globality, yet this reading falls short as the gesture isn’t just about inclusion in a global and local divide, it is more importantly about access towards interiority. It allows the psyche to amplify emotion as various vantage points make their case. It is a clash towards actualization, a process that revels in one of pop’s most seductive appeals – the ability to break free of one’s image towards the sacred. Such an image erases the path it takes to get there. Even though S.E.S. and Nylon Beat’s versions share the same D-minor melody, its homage and origin are virtually erased in Kpop and larger pop memory. The duty of eulogizing the graveyard of pop is in the ones that have the mic. Thus, one of pop’s most generative qualities is its amnesia. Memory, like history, is conditional on fiction and in operating in an amnesic landscape, appeals towards purity and authenticity lose their weight. A wealth of music knowledge is just one component of pop as contemporary experience requires bending of source material, it requires shaping that history to fit one’s lived experience. This is a process of necessary contamination.

By the time Aespa contaminated S.E.S.’s version, pop had gone through two decades of innovations that pushed music to its limits. One interesting moment to note is Aespa’s and S.E.S’s Dreams Come True, both share the lyrics:

Naw ae love epp few love mee wern ae taki wakka mekezon

Nart weeny beeney weeny beeney ganer gan

Pam murr wassur doo wee gecha love mee wassur doo yee thang

Dui giree wesso wella gella doo wee gella

The protagonist tells you about the antagonists in their lives and they tell you how nevertheless they prevailed and if they prevail and they are clean in their memories. They are clear in their memories of only the harm others have done to them and how they have been harmed. They must be avoided.

In S.E.S’s version, the lines are spoken by an alien that hula hoops its hips and dazzles with its hands. In 1998, when these lines were delivered, they were virtually unintelligible. They resembled sound patterns coming out of a machine that smashed English and Korean together. What listeners heard were rare hieroglyphic proclamations from another realm, an alien promising the luxury of escape for those without the tools to convincingly exist in the ways they aspired to be. South Korea in the 90s, was going through the growing pain of transitioning to a non-dictatorial government. Technical innovation was met by setback, rapid economic growth by corruption, excitement over immigrating abroad tempered by the 1992 Los Angeles, and during the year when S.E.S’s Dreams Come True came out, South Korea was going through a crippling financial crisis in large part due to its entrance into international markets. Newspapers that year were flooded with images of families called upon to voluntarily donate gold in order to repay national foreign debt.

20 years later in Aespa’s Dreams Come True, the alien’s lyrics are passed around between the four members like a spell. They deliver the lines faster than S.E.S’s alien, and most surprisingly, bring coherence to the sound patterns. “Naw ae love” begins to sound like Now I love, signaling to the world that they are convincingly capable of love, that they no longer require the summoning of an extraterrestrial to exist in love, that the projective space of escape found a foot in reality, entering that space Nylon Beat sang of without the diasporic divide. Audiences were given the toolkit to reinterpret history, make sense of fragmented imaginings, and most importantly, self-mythologize.

Choreographically, Aespa took S.E.S’s footwork and replaced movements that required bouncy shifts of weight to ones that were more grounded, a stronger bassline which allowed for greater access to the core versus the hips. This extra support is almost required as they were balancing more divergent contexts than their predecessors. A quicker access to the core allowed the lines of the dancers to be more legible to the camera. Even in the use of hands, the wrist rolls are replaced by geometric lines, movements that spared microseconds and allowed the choreography to cram in another sub-sequence. Within these moments, three of the members continuously framed a point of attention in which a single member’s fingers bridged the layered sonic and temporal landscape.

The bassline broke the need to be confined to the original and with that fissure came a push of linguistic meaning to its border. “Do you wanna upside down? And “Don’t you wanna up and down?” pushed English to meet the standards of Korean grammar in a way that broke both languages. It is within this chaotic realm that Aespa materialized form once again in their performance of this clash. As they operated in this noise, one that often numbs sentiment, they birthed language in a space of awe.

In those two decades between Aespa and S.E.S, pop saw a myriad of developments that allowed for this communication to be possible. Verbal dexterity met the limits of physical stamina in artists like Playboi Carti in which diary memos became transformative choir, chants broke down linguistic strongholds and resulted in gutteral prelingual utterances that captured the intensity of multiple sensory registers being stimulated at once. In M3tamorphosis, Kid Cudi’s groan became a transformative ambient hum in which Playboi Carti proclaimed that he “feels like God... metamorphosis.”

This unflinching candidness concentrated emotion to an intimate scale. It came from a place that realized the listener could no longer provide absolution, for in the 2000’s the listener inhabited a saint-like space because they were tasked with the duty of forgiveness. Just look at Usher’s Confessions Pt 2 and Rhianna’s Unfaithful in which both singers struggle with the guilt of infidelity. The listener was responsible for reconciling this strange relationship they had with an individual confessing to them, their attention blurred the line between being a listener and being the arbiter of morality. But fandoms quickly revealed their mortality, it was blatantly obvious that they were not passive Gods. Fandoms showed that they too were not the easiest ones to deliver forgiveness, that attention could and would actually attack back and destroy. Pop, then, in its adaptive ways, re-appropriated this process of deification. They no longer relied on mirroring the freedom contradiction could bring to a listener, but instead, harnessed it in themselves.

By the time Blackpink released Pink Venom, they knew how to expertly mash the self-deification process of pop with the mediated emotions of their fandom. Each iconic sample brought real-time self-historicization in the history of pop. If Aespa smashed Korean and English together, Blackpink smashed self-aware sample with Kpop flexing.

Kick in the door, waving the coco'

팝콘이나 챙겨 껴들 생각 말고

One by one, then two by two

내 손끝 툭 하나에 다 무너지는 중

자, 오늘 밤이야, 난 독을 품은 꽃

네 혼을 빼앗은 다음, look what you made us do

천천히 널 잠재울 fire

잔인할 만큼 아름다워 (I bring the pain like)

Prior to the chorus, Jisoo casually reminds that they are the stars, proximity will torch the skin.