Make Believe Mailer 15: IZ*ONE Layer
Yeah, the votes were manipulated, but the songs!
Via IZ*ONE Official Website
Observers and fans alike often treat the relationship between Korean and Japanese entertainment as sports. Intricacies and context get pushed aside in favor of shouting “scoreboard, scoreboard!” From any number-centric perspective, K-pop trounces J-pop on the global stage, at a Georgia Tech vs. Cumberland-level gap. Many transform into music industry Skip Bayless, dismissing deeper looks and comparisons with an ear-rattling “are you serious???”
There’s a far deeper intersection worth exploring, though, and few moments in recent memory highlight this better than time K-pop spent several years obsessing over AKB48. To tell the story of either J-pop or K-pop involves a lot of criss-crossing between the two sides. No group captured this as well as the recently disbanded IZ*ONE.
Here was three-decades worth of exchange between Japan and Korea’s pop industries manifest into a 12-person group put together via a rigged reality competition, itself a compact metaphor for the music business. IZ*ONE, officially done as of the end of last month, provided a physical form to this bilateral relationship while simultaneously offering top-notch insight into J-pop and K-pop’s crossover. Imagine a concise Wikipedia piece with banging audio on top of it.
The story starts with teasers for Korean music channel MNET’s first season of Produce 101. They looked — very similar to a bunch of aesthetic choices and general foundational concepts central to AKB48. Here’s a prominent distortion between the two sides as disseminated through media1 — AKB’s kingdom of sailor-suit-clad members became the representative point of comparison for many to K-pop’s more “mature”2 performers. Forget K-pop’s own love of this look — this was the go-to example of why J-pop was “bad” and “failing on the global level” while Hallyu blossomed. Then suddenly…the successful side was pretty clearly biting from the Akimoto Yasushi playbook.
Whether a genuine interest from the Korean side simply emerged or some kind of litigation forced MNET to suddenly shine a light on the Akihabara-born project, AKB48 became a presence in K-pop. Most if it was through MNET themselves — they had already been throwing “Best Asian Artist Awards” at the group as part of their own award show spectacular for a few years — but it also bubbled up via AKB producer Yasushi being commissioned to write a song for BTS, a truly bananas combination that instantly ignited a geopoplitical firestorm.
That’s nothing compared to Produce 48, though. MNET aired the talent competition — wherein members of the AKB48 family competed alongside/against K-pop trainees for a spot in a group aimed at promoting in both countries — in 2018 and, despite a legacy of voter manipulation, it remains the finest incarnation of this sort of show ever (plus, still best original Produce song, above). I won’t transform this into my dissertation — THOUGH if you want a giant YouTube documentary / podcast series about all of the international and music-biz drama contained within these 12 episodes, hit me up, I’ll devote myself to you — but I’ll say this stands as the most mind-boggling creation between J-pop and K-pop, and also the most entertaining.
Out of it came IZ*ONE, a K-J-pop hybrid. Korean groups featuring Japanese members wasn’t new — TWICE had found massive success across Asia using this approach several years earlier — but they built from the ground up. IZ*ONE was more like creative IP usage, combining fresh-faced Korean performers with existing AKB-verse names to create an ambitious experiment in pop merger.
It would be fascinating even if they flopped…but, better still, IZ*ONE hit. Debut single “La Vien en Rose” topped three of the major Korean charts upon its release, while the video (above) amassed the most views for a K-pop group’s debut single on the platform in 24 hours at the time — a staggeringly goofy accomplishment but the sort of data-centric triumph modern pop fandom feasts on (scoreboard, scoreboard). Nothing after managed quite the same impact, but they always performed well, while their Japanese singles routinely topped the Oricon singles chart.
Let’s drop the big picture theorizing for a sec — part of what makes IZ*ONE’s disbandment sting is how fantastic their music was, one of the strongest runs in recent K-pop history. IZ*ONE avoided the sonic flattening-out that seemingly every outfit in the country has to indulge in at least once. IZ*ONE’s twinkle and fizz, a song like “Panorama” cramming ideas borrowed from “future bass” alongside classical touches to create busy but dynamic sound. Their songs abound with texture, but always retain the heart-racing excitement K-pop does so well. Then you get something like “Merry-go-round,” above, a 2020 album cut standing as the best interpretation of “modern city pop” outside of Japan (and better than, like, 90 percent of what comes out domestically) via its string stabs and post-chorus guitar smoothness begging for a lobby to drift over, but turned urgent thanks to the electronic dizziness consuming everything, leading to emotional fireworks (“dreams come true!!!”). 3
That body of work will persevere, as will the complicated — in every sense of the word — relationship between the Korean and Japanese music industries IZ*ONE embodied. Since Produce 48, this exchange has become more prominent, with JYP’s NiziU representing K-pop’s effort of bringing its formula directly to the Japanese market,4 while Japanese performers such as Yukika Teramoto and Miyu Takeuchi made inroads into Korea and beyond (shout out IZ*ONE member Sakura Miyawaki at least being rumored to sign Big Hit, even though I think nothing has happened since these reports). They aren’t new developments, but continued chapters in a relationship stretching back decades and often ignored over for a basic “a vs. b” confrontation that is present, but only one part. From their reality show roots to their music, IZ*ONE placed these ties into something you could hear, support and ultimately root for.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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maybe even by me, I don’t remember. Uhhhh don’t tell me if I did.
“fun” thing to reflect on — pretty crazy to think back on English-language coverage of this from like before 2013 and realize how much of it was dudes being like “Awoooga! Look at these K-pop ladies!”
For every glowing word I can think up for their Korean songbook, I can think of an equally grossed-out description for their Japanese work. Saying there’s a quality gulf between the two fails to really capture how bad it got — singles sound like they were mixed by someone plucked randomly off the street.
And, as of this week, K-pop is trying to do something similar in Latin America and the United States…via Produce-style reality competition! IZ*ONE paved the way (errrr, maybe I O I)