Make Believe Mailer #131: An Assortment Of Thoughts On NewJeans In Japan
Featuring Summer Sonic, The Powerpuff Girls, And "Plastic Love"
NewJeans At Tokyo Dome, Earlier This Year. Photo Via Official NewJeans Instagram Page
1. Few concerts become full-blown milestones that people will tell you about attending months after they happened. I have been very fortunate to see a lot of big artists perform special shows, the type of concerts that get people buzzing and create memories that last for decades. Yet rarely do they also feel like an epoch shift, or mutate into the kind of happening people brag about more than a year later.
Yet one performance in recent memory certainly fits that description — NewJeans’ Japan debut at Summer Sonic 2023.
I woke up around 7:30 a.m. on August 19, 2023, an extra 30 minutes of luxury sleep thrown in since there was no need to head out to daycare this morning. I was out the door in a huff about an hour later, becuase a glance at Twitter revealed that people had lined up for NewJeans’ noon set since 4:30 in the morning. This was going to be the show of the weekend…and people were already waiting to get into ZOZO Marine Stadium before the sun had even come up.
My worries were warranted — I stood under the blazing-hot sun for an hour waiting to shuffle into the main festival area, a first in the 10-plus years I had covered Summer Sonic. I barely got into the baseball-stadium-turned-festival-grounds for the opening sighs of “Ditto,” and missed all of NewJeans’ actual first song as I trekked my way up to the top rung of ZOZO Marine. Even once I got up there — and as the group and the live band accompanying them pivoted into “OMG” — I had to find a space to stand, as nearly every inch of available walkway was taken by someone. This didn’t look like a festival-opening set…this was packed as tightly as it had been for former headliners like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead and more.
I found a nook on the visitor’s dugout side, and watched the rest of a show I’d hear about for months. “You know, I was at NewJeans Summer Sonic set,” multiple Japanese music industry types would tell me over the next few months, breaking it out in a braggy way I rarely encounter in this space. But that’s all good…because I was there too, watching a new generation of K-pop assert itself in Japan.
2. Music stories rarely warrant a breaking-news alert from LINE News. The death of a prominent artist or some huge industry shakeup — say, the dissolution of SMAP or Kohaku Uta Gassen announcements — might get the folks at the messaging app to send something out. But it has to be.
The news that NewJeans would be terminating its contract with HYBE subsidiary label ADOR1 after months of drama prompted a breaking-news alert, sent to nearly everyone in Japan using the popular messaging service.
There’s dozens upon dozens of angles2 to approach this story, from the immediate saga of NewJeans at HYBE to the bigger picture of what this means for the greater K-pop industry down to intricate looks at how this whole narrative has been covered by the press. It’s one of the biggest pop news stories of the year, after all, starting from producer Min Hee-jin’s press conference back in the spring.
Yet in the hours after this news…which, it should be noted, does not offer any kind of end point…I’ve mostly thought about NewJeans in Japan. While the quintet attracted tons of attention in the West, particularly behind “Super Shy” in 2023, the key market for them was always nearby Japan.
3. A quick overview of evidence in support of my argument that Japan was the key to NewJeans’ career: frequent appearances on Japanese TV to indebt themselves to the market; collaborations with national broadcaster NHK; all sorts of live shows as part of various events and festivals in the country; a two-day, sold-out run at Tokyo Dome, more on that later; commercial tie-ups; merch collabs with Takashi Murakami and Hiroshi Fujiwari; and of course, Japanese singles, with no English-only releases thus far in its catalog3.
4. Perhaps most tellingly, NewJeans generated new vocab in the Japanese lexicon. A “NewJeans Ojisan” is an older man who really loves NewJeans. It’s a bit more layered than that — the “NewJeans Ojisan4” generally doesn’t like K-pop, more in tune with Japanese and Western rock. But something about the music of NewJeans…it’s just better! The 50-year-old dude once only going to Summer Sonic for Radiohead and Red Hot Chili Peppers now braves brutal heat to see a bunch of young adults dance around stage. He’s not like those silly teens, who will consume just any ol’ K-pop…NewJeans are just different.
5. There’s a lot of potential NewJeans Ojisan in the Japanese electronic scene, because the amount of sick remixes that came out since they debuted has been staggering. That’s not a Japan-only phenomenon, but there’s just so many to cover. Credit to the glossy ItoShin rework of “Ditto.”
6. What exactly makes NewJeans such a draw in Japan? I think part of the charm lies in something also potentially uncomfortable. They are idols, and they really lean into that world.
To go back to Summer Sonic 2023, NewJeans delivered the most packed performance of the weekend, attracting a crowd on par (if not exceeding) any headliner. Hundreds of people got heatstroke because they were so focused on seeing it.
Yet as the mini concert wrapped up, my immediate thought was “huh, they remind me a lot of AKB48.”
I got at this in my review of the festival at the time, but NewJeans felt unpolished, with a lack of live energy and at times sloppy choreography. Then again…they were literally less than a year out since debuting, so of course they wouldn’t be pros. It takes time to achieve the skills needed to be a stadium-filling group, even if you get the stadium-filling part down right away.
I was watching the start of a journey that we, the fans, were embarking on, a very familiar story for anyone who has followed J-pop idols over the last 20 years. I think that was intentionally. I don’t think it was on purpose that now NewJeans story has only gotten more intense and interesting to follow…that’s just a happy accident.
7. I also fully applaud them for taking part in YOASOBI’s “Idol” fever dream at Kohaku Uta Gassen 2023…and not the last time their paths would intersect!
8. It’s impossible to talk about NewJeans without touching on the project’s Y2K savvy. That’s a large part of why they connected with Gen Z listeners in Japan too — the chunky aesthetic of “Hype Boy” most certainly existed here at the turn of the century too — but I’ve personally always loved the way they indirectly nodded to a pioneering J-pop duo in their promotions. At some point in 2023, NewJeans struck up some kind of deal with…I guess Cartoon Network, to allow them to basically take the Powerpuff Girls and transform them into their own avatars.
Brilliant on a lot of levels…but for me, accidentally hitting on a 2020s version of Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, another Cartoon Network property from the early 2000s that found J-pop group Puffy becoming cartoon characters aimed at Western viewers5. NewJeans doesn’t need a short-form animated series to make connections…but the team behind them seemed aware of a very in-demand multi-media approach, and embraced it in a way that echoed the past.
9. What NewJeans really represent to me from a business perspective is the re-centering of Japan as the most vital market for K-pop. Sure, America and the rest of the Western world represent a shiny trophy to be grabbed for prestige, but really is making all that effort for a pat on the back really worth it? The Japanese market, meanwhile, will adore you if you put some effort into it, as K-pop has learned over the course of the 20th century. BTS’ massive success might have lured in a lot of acts to think towards the West…but NewJeans knew its base should stay in its home region6.
10. I have no idea what happens next with NewJeans’ saga, and I doubt anyone really does. Stay tuned! Yet I do believe that Japan will remain central to whatever NewJeans 2.0 does. Nobody would have knocked the group for cancelling its appearance on Music Station this Friday after announcing its ending of the ADOR contract…yet they went on anyway. They’ll probably show up at Countdown Japan 2024. NewJeans deserve a break and time to strategize about what comes next…but Japan has to be part of that, so continuing to come to the country will be vital.
11. But also…NewJeans have a defining moment that few groups could dream of. Earlier this year, they sold out two shows at Tokyo Dome for something that was, technically, not even a show. “Bunnies Camp 2024” was just a “fan meeting,” which is definitely kind of stretching the definition of a live event, but the fact it sold out easily despite being billed as a “fan meeting” is telling.
12. What sticks with me about that Tokyo Dome set of shows…which I only experienced via X and YouTube posts…was how much they wanted to connect with Japanese fans, and forge a deeper connection. They brought out Lilas Ikuta of YOASOBI for a song and a sorta-kinda cover (above). The individual members covered a variety of J-pop songs to showcase their own color and build a deeper connection. You got a Vaundy cover, a Seiko Matsuda cover and, most knowingly, a Mariya Takeuchi cover.
Here was a group going to a great length to connect with an audience, by singing songs both contemporary and “nostalgic” to reach a modern Japanese crowd. Ultimately, the NewJeans saga of 2024 will illustrate the problems facing K-pop in the 2020s — of greed, of the need for eternal growth, of “K-pop without the K,” of the disposable nature of talent despite being the whole reason people give a damn in the first place7 — but the group’s Tokyo Dome shows highlight the potential to actually bring together pop cultural landscapes in a meaningful way.
Wherever they go next, I’ll remember this version of NewJeans as the one being able to fill huge baseball-ready venues — ZOZO Marine, Tokyo Dome — and use these spaces as a way to connect and create intersection. Now that’s a story worth following.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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Which says the contracts are still valid which…sure, go for it.
I attempted to tackle a few on Bluesky…which you should follow!
Which really is an important detail, given how the bulk of K-pop in the 2020s has been chasing the English-language market…but the one project to actually have some zeitgeist-grabbing luck with it didn’t.
Favorite instance of this term being brought up doubling as one of my favorite music moments of the year: rap trio Dos Monos’ latest album features a song where they declare “I’m not a NewJeans Ojiasn / Vision Creation Newsun” which shows how deep this went — you really can set yourself apart by refusing to be like the middle-aged men vibing to “OMG” and instead embrace peak Boredoms.
~ominous foreshadowing~ expect more on this soon….
That NewJeans did score U.S. hits stems entirely from the fact the actual music ranged from amazing to fine…which put it well ahead of a lot of other K-pop from the 2020s.
I mean except for the freaks who love corporations instead of people…of which there is, unfortunately, plenty.