I was revisiting a few 90s KPOP --
the KPOP as I remember when I was actually living in SK -- and I felt like sharing a few.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72BqCAmhnxkgod - 어머님께(Dear Mother) (1999)
The band's name is "officially" pronounced as gee-oh-dee and is for some goddamn reason always spelled in lowercase only, though the video I link doesn't. Hmmm. Just a generic South Korean boy band, nothing remarkable about this song, other than the song supposedly based on the real story of one member. For me, god is the twilight of an era that transitioned to something else by 2000s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exPzyNBO5cs이정현(Lee Junghyun) -00001, GX 339-4, 와(Wa) (1999) This is her debut performance. The TV subtitles of the song titles are, actually, wrong.
She was then dubbed the "techno goddess"; pretty fitting, as she was the one who popularized it. My taste is heavily electronica, to an extent I'd prefer synthesized electronic music than actual pipes and strings... and ultimately, she's the causa prima. Looking back now, she was Lady Gaga before there was Lady Gaga.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvpU-7BO0JE자우림(Jaurim) - Magic Carpet Ride (2000)
I think they've set the direction that KPOP music videos would set from then. Flashy, colorful and vibrant. Although I haven't been to one for years now, I would still probably sing this in a karaoke. And unless the company is too young to even know them and if the company is sufficiently drunk, they'll probably join.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAsMh0zyH3o박지윤(Park Ji-yoon) - 성인식(Adulthood Ceremony) (2000)
She is the product of Park Jin-Young, who was a singer himself and found the JYP Entertainment. Still a young music agency, JYP made a statement. The camerawork, choreography, bold and suggestive lyrics and the music itself, and the cinematic cutscenes. It set another trend of KPOP which built upon the formula set here.
While I consider this to be something like the KPOP Manifesto, the artist herself was later said to be quite unhappy about oversexualizing her performances. She had an existing music career, where she was a teenager star who played more on innocence than sex appeal. While this was a hard hit to her person, I don't think anyone else could have delivered the seismic wave on the same scale, had JYP chosen someone else for this.