Which song will be more enduring? 9
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SNSD - Into the New World (6) 67%
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IU - Through the Night (3) 33%
n the game of soccer, if the game was interrupted for whatever reason, like injury , red cards or whatnot, some time is added after regulation time has expired, and sometimes decisive goals are scored during that period.
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Arguably it can be said that the most enduring song in the 2nd Generation, and possibly all of KPop, came in 2017, long after KPop's 2nd Generation was blasted away beyond recovery by Psy.
The 3rd Generation already took over, and EXO, BTS and Seventeen, as well as Twice, BlackPink and Red Velvet (with GFriend barely holding on back then), roamed the KPop scene, with BTS about to break into the entire world.
That's when the most enduring song of the 2nd Generation came forth.
Lee Jieun, the last survivor of the 2nd Generation, released Through the Night, a ballad in the torrent of dance songs, the epitome of an anti-KPop song which represented everything KPop wanted to eradicate.
A song which used not single word of English, this ultimate anti-KPop song , which did NOT hit 100M views after 5 years had passed after its release, this song was #2 in 2017, #9 in 2018, #10 in 2021, #7 in 2022 in the Gallup Polls of the most popular song of the year.
The arrival of New Jeans might have put an end to TTN but the Hybe-Min Heejin conflict occurred, which prevented New Jeans from releasing more hit songs, and after everything is said and done TTN was #6 in the Gallup Polls, charting in the august list for five years, the most by any singer(excluding trot, whose songs don't get old fast) since the polls began on 2007.
It has outlived all the hits in 2017-2021, including even Dynamite, Life Goes On and Dynamite, and is likely to be the song from the heyday of KPop, which ended last year as APT., a NZ-Hawaiian song finished off KPop, to survive the longest.
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Into the New World by SNSD, its debut song, was not a major hit when it was released in 2007.
Although it did influence every girl group since then, including GFriend whose debut song, Glass Bead, sounds very similar to ITNW (but got away with it since GFriend's then owner was a former SM employee and at that time GF was called a quasi-SM act), it was not remembered as a major song until Ewha women's university adopted it as a protest song.
Long story short, this song became the theme song of the protest against SK President Yoon Seokyeol last month, and as he refuses to pack up and continues to fight, this song is revived by the protestors.
As it has become the staple for unhappy younger people, especially women, ITNW will be relevant for a long time.
The singer who had taken a picture with an SM idol had defeated SNSD in 2011 and 2014, the second time decisively, but she probably did not expect SNSD to rise up and bite her from behind, which might have led her to support the protestors, who were singing ITNW, APT. Fire by BTS, and other songs, but not a song from her since she was the ultimate conformist, not standing up to any social issues, causes or anything, just interested upon building her own wealth and real estate holdings including acting like a miser to her brother who said she lacked humanity.
It looks like thanks to the politics of South Korea, SNSD might snatch victory from the jaws of the singer who only thought and cared about herself and was called someone who lacked humanity by none other than her own brother.
