Is performance pop coming back? (the rise of Gnarly)

    I’m watching this video about Gnarly by Katseye and it enlightened me enough to shift my opinion on the song itself.


    I always viewed this as a song. Just a song. And when i view it as a song, something just for my ears, truthfully its lackluster. The beat is undeniable and addictive, don’t get me wrong, but Tesla Gnarly? Naur girl….


    But then i heard someone say “this song is bad, but its meant to be performed not just listened to” and was followed up by Manon saying herself that its her favorite song of theirs because she loves to PERFORM it. That made me look at it a little different.


    Is this song meant to be WATCHED and not just LISTENED to?


    Eastern?(asian?) Markets have had a sense of “performance” music for a long time with AKB groups, chant style music where you watch huge groups do extravagant performances and obviously Bar Bar Bar by Crayon Pop and its contemporaries weren’t created to be sonic magnum opuses. This made me think… i dont listen to musicals on my phone, but i will definitely watch a performance of Good Morning Baltimore, Tango Maureen, Cell Block Tango, Defying Gravity (alright well i actually will listen to that stand alone). There are so many things created for the performance that we kind of forget POP music used to be performance based. Remember TRL?


    Maybe Gnarly is…. Ahead of its time?

    I'm not sure if performance pop ever left?


    It's just that it is typically not mainstream. But, artists who specialize in performance almost always have songs on their albums specifically there for that reason. To be performed. Not necessarily to be their main single.

    There are definitely songs that work better as a performance and it's interesting to think about which ones those are. On the whole I would say K-pop leans much more to the performative side than other genres, because the flashy dance moves and groups with lots of members are such a big part of the overall package.


    For many years for me, I digested kpop solely through music bank/inkigayo lives on YouTube and never listened to the audio only. It's only been the last few years, with NewJeans and TripleS, where the b-sides have actually become good enough for me to want to sit down with an album or EP like I would with another genre.

    Are you referring to the US market finally warming up to performance pop again? Because all of Kpop is obviously performance pop and it's been around for 30 years at this point.


    If you look at the US specifically, when was the last truly performance based group that were mainstream chart toppers? To me, we have to go all the way to Spice Girls/Backstreet Boys/Destinys Child/NSync era, the Golden Era of boyband music in the US.


    I had lost almost all interest in pop music when One Direction and 5th Harmony made it big but my hazy memory of them is that they were mostly vocal based and barely danced.

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