Wonder Girls: REBOOT
The praise that rolled in for Wonder Girls’ comeback REBOOT are not without cliches: “late 80s nostalgia,” “synth-pop that is so utterly ’80s it defies logic,” “a vintage synth-pop dream on VHS,” etc. It’s simply impossible to talk about this album without using the words “retro,” “vintage,” “synth,” or “throwback,” so let’s skip them and get to the heart of why this album succeeds where so many have failed: this album is the perfect marriage of a razor sharp understanding of pop music and the skills of master producers who use just the right sound effects to achieve that scary-good level of authenticity. It’s the addition of a visually accurate mock up of all the best and worst things we loved about 80’s music videos. It’s the keytar. It’s the breathless vocals and cascading star bursts on “Candle,” the drawn out “eh eh eh”s on “Baby Don’t Play,” the alluring anonymity of “John Doe,” and the euphoric, chilly shadows of “One Black Night.” REBOOT isn’t just an attempt to revive the best of Madonna’s golden era, or cleverly appropriate a culturally significant touchstone as the title, it’s a thank you to the decade that taught us how modern pop music should be made: with an emphasis on the now, on how it should be listened to after the fact, and how we should see it when we get older. There’s nostalgia, yes, but all of our accumulated nows, too, everything we’ve heard and experienced to help us appreciate what a wonderful “then” it was, without having to sacrifice our own “now” to have it: we get K-pop AND Carly Rae Jepsen AND Donna Summer AND The Beach Boys (if that’s your thing), and what a wonderful world we live in that we can experience all of it in what was once the distant future.
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