🔗 NYT – Popcast: Doechii! NewJeans! Ye! Answering Your Pop Music Questions
🔗 (250407) NYT – Popcast: Doechii! NewJeans! Ye! Answering Your Pop Music Questions(EN/KR Script)

(Previous content omitted)

Joe Coscarelli:
Our next question is from Jemma Flynn, and Jemma says:
“Jon, Following your recent coverage of NewJeans, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the specific pressures facing artists who work under HYBE, especially given the company’s central role in spreading Korean music influence in the US. With B** returning from military service soon and a massive world tour ahead, could the anticipated financial and soft power gains be enough for HYBE to fully weather the current NewJeans controversy? Do you think NewJeans’ lack of compliance pose a particular threat to HYBE’s broader project of combining profit with global soft power?”

Joe Coscarelli:
Very well-put, intelligent question. Thank you for sending it.

Jon Caramanica:
That’s, umm… If we ever had an alt podcast, I think we’d call it Soft Power.

Joe Coscarelli:
Yeah.

Jon Caramanica:
Yeap. So I, For those who don’t know, I got to go to Hong Kong recently to watch what I was maybe anticipating would be the first performance by NewJeans under a new name, NJZ. NewJeans has announced last year that they were terminating their contract with HYBE. And then HYBE said, “Actually, you’re not,” and they have been embroiled in this kind of legal back and forth for the past few months. that also has extended to the former creative director and executive producer of NewJeans, Min Hee-jin, who is engaged in some separate legal troubles with HYBE.

Joe Coscarelli:
Can you touch briefly on what it is they’re alleging to try to get out of the contract with HYBE?

Jon Caramanica:
Yes, so they are alleging, the allegations are of, I would say, abuse termed broadly. I can only assume that training to be an idol everyday from the beginning to the end of the day constitutes a particular kind of workplace abuse.

Joe Coscarelli:
Basically, pop music boot camp.

Jon Caramanica:
Yes, like if you read the piece that I wrote last year about the NewJeans YouTube live session where they first went public with their frustrations with the label combined with the Netflix show that HYBE put out in which they formed a global pop group primarily without Korean performers, a group called K******, what you see is that becoming a pop star at that level is incredibly hard work, and HYBE’s perspective, appears to be that hard work is absolutely justified, and it’s what it takes to perform at that level for an extended period of time. It seems that part of what NewJeans is saying is maybe that was too much. It’s also alleging that HYBE separated them from the person who was their creative director, who inspired them to be different. One of the reasons NewJeans is my favorite K-pop group in the last few years, innovative sonically…

Joe Coscarelli:
But there seemed to be a power struggle within the label.

Jon Caramanica:
Of who was in charge, or more to the point, who could be in charge. And I think the striking thing about the NewJeans debut in 2022 and 2023 is that it was sort of alongside some other HYBE girl group debuts that seemed to be getting more proper attention, but the NewJeans explosion kind of couldn’t be stopped, and I think helped to set a template moving forward for what some other K-pop girl groups have been trying, and maybe even moving the genre more broadly away from kind of like overproduction, as it were. There was also suggestions, so in addition to HYBE getting in the middle of their relationship with their creative director, there were also suggestions that internally at HYBE, other artists and other groups were told to ignore NewJeans and, you know, in a…

Joe Coscarelli:
They were being soft blacklisted in some way.

Jon Caramanica:
Yes, like in a culture in which honor and respect are sort of paramount, things like that that are slights can actually take on quite outsized importance. There was a court injunction recently that basically said NewJeans has to… cannot do work as NJZ. They have to consult…

Joe Coscarelli:
Until the suit works its way through the system.

Jon Caramanica:
Yes, there’s two legal tracks happening, and in the coming… I mean, depending when this episode comes out, sometime this week or next week, there are two separate court dates, I believe. One is the beginning of the actual litigation over the terms of the contract, and them trying to break the contract. The second is an appeal to the injunction that was handed down a week and a half ago. The injunction was handed down quite literally when I was on the plane to Hong Kong, so I did not know exactly what I was getting into until I landed and learned what was going on. The show… was… sad. They did not perform any NewJeans songs. Each member performed one solo song.

Joe Coscarelli:
And they played a new song?

Jon Caramanica:
They played a new song that has not been released, which, if I’m guessing, was maybe intended to be like the NJZ rollout song, but I guess lives in some nebulous netherworld, you know, in the ether. They read statements from the stage talking about resilience. There were a lot of tears. It was tough to watch. It was about as sad as almost any concert that I’ve seen that wasn’t by like an 85-year-old performer, kind of like on their last legs. Very uncomfortable. I think the crowd was like very excited to see them and also like not quite sure what was going on because you were never sort of like, is the show about to start? Like, is this the prelude? Is this the meat of the thing or is this the end of the thing? It was tough. Now, to the question more specifically about HYBE and Soft Power, obviously, I assume part of the reason that HYBE is pushing back so aggressively is because if one group can do this, then ten groups can do this. HYBE is a publicly traded company. They have a stock price to protect. They have a valuation to protect. I assume that…

Joe Coscarelli:
Yeah, they’re not in the business of letting artists do whatever they want.

Jon Caramanica:
No, and they’re certainly not in the business of letting the vanguard group under their overall umbrella extend a middle finger to them.

Joe Coscarelli:
And do you feel like they’re suffering from the reaction to this? And how does that affect the return of B**?

Jon Caramanica:
So one thing that I was struck by when I was spending time overseas is if you look at the online conversation, I was trying to liken it to if this was happening in America, if someone was mad at Interscope or Def Jam.

Joe Coscarelli:
Free Kesha or free Skye Ferreira or free Fiona.

Jon Caramanica:
Right, or free The Lox. Would people be on the internet being like, “We’re team Interscope.”

Joe Coscarelli:
(Laughs)

Jon Caramanica:
“We’re team Atlantic.” Would that happen?

Joe Coscarelli:
Even if they loved the other artists on Atlantic or Interscope…

Jon Caramanica:
Yeah, but would there be like stans for the label? I don’t think so.

Joe Coscarelli:
No, of course not. Yeap.

Jon Caramanica:
However, in Korean media, both real media and Korean social media, there’s actually quite a strong pushback saying that essentially NewJeans is overstepping their bounds, that they should be respectful, that they should honor the terms of the contract. The balance doesn’t fall to the artists as I would expect through if this were to happen in America.

Joe Coscarelli:
It’s interesting. I think like maybe the more accurate comp would because the brand itself has built a following is like if A24 was fighting with a filmmaker over a final cut, like you might have someone say, you know, A24, which is mostly a distributor, but sometimes produces, someone might say, “Well, A24 knows what they’re doing. This person might be, you know, full of crap.” Maybe.

Jon Caramanica:
Maybe…

Joe Coscarelli:
But even still.

Jon Caramanica:
And there’s an A24 aesthetic. I don’t think you can argue that there’s a HYBE aesthetic. And certainly if there was, NewJeans was an outlier that threatened-

Joe Coscarelli:
And that’s why it worked.

Jon Caramanica:
Right. And actually, what’s actually striking about it is it’s the outlier that undermined the other stuff that HYBE was doing. So as far as what this means for B**, I think there’s a whole other set of issues around B**. Obviously, they’re going to be printing money hand over fist on a reunion tour and almost all the members have had some degree of solo success. I think that those people are staying at HYBE and I think the people who are going to show up for that are not going to, they’re not going to let what’s happening with NewJeans complicate their relationship with B** or any of the members. But I do think the next 10 years of what HYBE looks like, that is where the NewJeans thing, it’s not so much what Big Hit, which turned into HYBE, it’s not what Big Hit did before. It’s very much like, can a group that wishes to have some say in how they sound, is there room for a group like that at a place like HYBE? If so, that upends the HYBE business model. If not, that potentially tanks the idea of HYBE as a creative hub.

Joe Coscarelli:
It feels very much like a developing story on multiple levels.

Jon Caramanica:
We’ll be back.

Joe Coscarelli:
I trust that you’re going to touch on it again.

Jon Caramanica:
Maybe to put a little bit of a smile here, maybe let’s listen to, I’m sure we can find a rip, a YouTube rip of Hanni from NewJeans/NJZ at the Complex Con Hong Kong, which is where this performance was, singing and I assume, and also dancing to <My Boo> by Ghost Town DJs, one of the greatest pop songs of all time.

Hanni’s cover of <My Boo> played

Jon Caramanica:
We’re going to take a quick break we’ll be back but in this break here’s our palette cleanse…

(The rest omitted)