A YouTube video called This Dead Genre is Taking Over K-Pop came up in my feed the other day. It’s a nice and concise little plug for a throwback sound kit, that claims that the New Jack Swing genre is making a resurgence in Korea, and gives a short explanation as to why. In short, the video claims that while New Jack Swing can be traced back to groups like S.E.S. in the 90’s, it’s current resurgence is largely due to the success of the more recent girl group, tripleS.

Defining New Jack Swing

The creator of the video does a brief breakdown of what swing is, and some of the elements of New Jack Swing, but I don’t think it quite does the genre justice. New Jack Swing kicks ass. So here’s a short playlist for anyone who might need a refresher on one of my favorite pop genres, in chronological order.

Looking at the Genre in South Korea

I can’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the K-Pop scene, but even I could tell there was a bit more to the story than one group showing up in 2023 and driving a genre, and so I did a modest amount of digging and put together a somewhat more detailed narrative. As the New Jack Swing genre was defined by great producers like Teddy Riley, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, and Bernard Belle, I would trace the origins of the K-Pop swing resurgence to a handful of producers, rather than any particular artist.

The O.G. – Yoo Young-jin

The video mentions S.E.S., and we find their music in the mid 90’s was produced by this gentleman. We’ll get back to him in a bit.

The Tycoon – Park Jin-young

Park Jin-young, aka J.Y.P. is a looming figure in the K-Pop world. He’s like the Rome of K-Pop – all roads lead back to him. Among the many, many, successful groups he’s managed and produced, one of the standouts are the Wonder Girls. While I’m not totally familiar with the East Asian pop conventions of “breakthroughs” and “graduations” and “comebacks”, their Reboot comeback album did heavily feature some fun throwbacks. Among those was the distinctly New Jack-influenced Rewind. (As a topical aside, JYP allegedly referred to himself as the P. Diddy of Korea. Hopefully he won’t be catching any charges this year.)

The Baegin – The Stereotypes

The producers that may have played the biggest part in all of this are actually The Stereotypes, a Western production trio formed in 2003. In collaboration with Yoo Young-Jin mentioned earlier, The Stereotypes were among the producers of SHINee – ‘1 of 1’ back in 2016. This song came out just a little over a month before another song by The Stereotypes that you may be more familiar with: Bruno Mars’ ‘Finesse’ feat. Card B.

Once Bruno Mars brought New Jack Swing fully into the focus of the global music scene, the door was wide open for producers to follow suit and cash in on that sweet, sweet, nostalgia-ridden, synth-driven, money wave.

The ‘Finesse’ Aftermath

By 2019 we have groups like Cube Entertainment revisiting New Jack Swing throwbacks like their 2012 production of BTOB – ‘WOW’ with PENTAGON -「HAPPINESS」in 2019, and K-Pop veteran producer’s like Shinsadong Tiger cashing in with EXID – LADY. Come 2020, JYP doubled down on New Jack Swing, doing a duet in RAIN(비) – “나로 바꾸자 Switch to me and having the girls group TWICE feature SWEET SUMMER DAY on their ‘MORE & MORE’ album.

The artist tripleS that was referenced in the video that sent me down this whole rabbit-hole didn’t feature their New Jack Swing-influenced sound until 2023. And by 2024 we even have Pharrell catching wind of it and producing New Jeans – Supernatural.

# In Short

As far as responsibility can be assigned to individuals, we can thank a resurgence of New Jack Swing in the K-Pop scene to old guard producer Yoo Young-jin, K-Pop giant JYP, The Stereotypes, and Bruno Mars.

More generally though, genres always get revisited, and New-New Jack Swing was particularly inevitable. It has a well-defined and easily reproducible aesthetic, a fun production process, and as Josh Bae mentions in his video, it’s highly danceable.

Thanks for meandering down music history lane with me for a bit. I’m sure even my small window of investigation doesn’t even present the whole picture of how a fun genre from the late 80’s has popped up in South Korea nearly forty years later, but I think it does a decent job. For anyone curious, here’s a playlist of Hangeul-Jack Swing in chronological order as well.

If any K-Pop heads want to enlighten me with more info, I’d be glad to hear it. Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed reading and listening.

Until next time,

-WellTree