I feel like this might be a hot take.
And I have this hot take because of all the arguments I keep seeing in the comments under people reacting to this group, or talking about how they're copies, how their personalities are fake, how there's nothing original about them, etc. Because as much as I don't hate the music that CORTIS puts out, and I genuinely really like Lngshot, WAYF Boys come off as way more authentic to me.
And I think there are a couple reasons for that.
First of all, they remind me of NSB.
If you were around during the pandemic era on TikTok and social media in general, you probably remember the North Star Boys. They were basically a group of guys who came together, made content together, built friendships together, and eventually started making music together.
That's the energy I get from WAYF Boys.
They don't really give me "the company assembled five boys who fit a concept and told them to become best friends." They give me, "these guys actually met each other, got along, formed friendships, decided they wanted to make music together, and then somebody eventually put a company around it."
They also remind me a little bit of PRETTYMUCH in that sense. It's just a group of guys who seem like they actually enjoy being around each other and then happen to make music together.
And honestly, I think part of why they feel more believable to me is because I grew up as a mixed-race Black and Asian American person.
Because there are WAY too many K-pop companies, and frankly way too many Asian people, who love American and Black culture but aren't actually educated about it. They know the aesthetic. They know the music. They know a few words and references. But they don't necessarily understand where any of that shit came from.
And I'm not saying that's the case with CORTIS or Lngshot specifically. I'm saying that I don't automatically trust a company to understand the culture just because the group is making music influenced by it.
Especially when one of the people involved is Bang PD.
I don't trust Bang PD any further than I can throw him.
And if you've seen that man, you know damn well I cannot throw him. 😭
But seriously, when I look at the music recommendations these different members give, the artists they talk about listening to, and the things they've said they were actually influenced by, some of it lines up with the aesthetic their companies are pushing.
And that's one of the things that makes WAYF Boys more believable to me.
Four out of the five of them grew up overseas in America and Canada. They've shown a lot more of their actual personalities through livestreams and pre-debut content. They're all adults. They've already had experience as trainees and, in some cases, being on survival shows. They didn't just get randomly scouted, put into a training room, and told, "Congratulations, you're a group now."
From everything we've seen so far, their formation seems a lot more organic.
From what I've gathered, Andrew, who I believe is the oldest, already knew or had interacted with some of the other members, and eventually they all ended up at this company together. So it feels more like they already had experience in the industry, already knew what they wanted to do, and then found each other.
And they're actually involved in the creative process.
From the behind-the-scenes content we've gotten so far, it looks like they work with an in-house producer to some degree, but they're also doing a lot of their own choreography and creative work. I believe Anderson is the one who's particularly involved with choreography.
So yeah, obviously there are going to be things about them that aren't completely organic.
Nobody is 100% themselves all the time. Hell, we aren't even 100% ourselves all the time. You are not going to act exactly the same way on Instagram that you do when you're sitting in your friend's kitchen at 2 AM eating leftovers and talking shit.
But there's a difference between having a public persona and feeling like the person behind the persona actually exists.
WAYF Boys feel like actual people to me.
And I think that's part of why some of the criticism I've been seeing is so weird.
Because some, not all, and I'm emphasizing that because I know some of y'all are fans of these groups, but some CORTIS and Lngshot fans have been saying WAYF Boys have nothing original about them.
And I'm sorry, but that's hilarious to me.
You're comparing groups made up primarily of Korean people who grew up in Asia to a group where the majority of the members grew up overseas.
Even Martin, if I'm remembering correctly, only lived in Canada for part of his childhood before moving to Korea.
Meanwhile, WAYF Boys have members who spent basically their entire childhoods in diverse environments in America and Canada before eventually becoming trainees.
Those are fundamentally different experiences.
And then people get mad because WAYF Boys use American slang.
Shorty has been slang forever.
There is literally a Wayans character named Shorty. 😭
So when these boys say something along the lines of "they ain't got no shorties but the WAYF Boys do," and people immediately go, "OMG THEY'RE DISSING THE OTHER GROUP BECAUSE THAT'S THEIR FANDOM NAME!"
I'm going to be so real with you.
I was already side-eyeing Jay Park for making that the fandom name because I KNOW how many K-pop fans don't listen to anything outside of K-pop.
A lot of them genuinely don't know that "shorty" is just slang.
It can mean your girl, your girlfriend, a woman you're attracted to, somebody you're trying to holler at, etc. It's been part of American slang forever.
You cannot just take an incredibly common word, register it as a fandom name in Korea, and suddenly act like nobody else is allowed to use the word because your company gave it a capital letter.
That's not how language works. 😭
And then people were interpreting the line about "idol rappers trying to come for me" as some huge targeted diss and I'm like...
Have y'all listened to K-pop before?
BTS has literally had songs where they criticized idol rappers. Block B has done it. Groups with members who came from underground rap scenes have been doing this forever.
That's not some revolutionary new form of beef.
And honestly, this is where I'm probably going to piss some people off, but I don't care.
I hate that 90% of K-pop idols who are labeled rappers aren't actually rappers.
They're performers who have been given rap parts.
Being a rapper isn't just being able to say words quickly over a beat. Writing matters. Flow matters. Rhythm matters. Freestyling matters. Being able to manipulate words and cadence to actually communicate something over a beat matters.
If somebody can't write or freestyle at all and they're just being handed eight lines in a song and told to perform them, I'm sorry, but I don't personally consider that person a rapper.
And that's not even an insult to them. They're singers and performers who happen to have rap parts.
There is nothing wrong with that.
But I think WAYF Boys making comments about idol rappers is funny because some of y'all are acting like they invented the concept of a rapper criticizing another rapper.
And then there's the double standard.
Because I really don't think people realize how obvious it is.
When something controversial happens with one of these other groups, suddenly it's:
"They're Korean, they don't know any better."
"They didn't mean it that way."
"They weren't trying to appropriate anything."
"But they grew up in Korea!"
"They weren't exposed to that culture!"
But then WAYF Boys, a group where the majority of the members actually grew up in America or Canada, comes out with a sound and aesthetic influenced by Black American culture and suddenly:
"They're cosplaying Black culture."
"They're trying to copy this group."
"They're trying to act American."
How does that make sense?
You're telling me a group of people who were born and raised in Korea and may have never lived overseas couldn't possibly be doing something problematic because they "don't know better," but a group of guys who actually grew up in America and Canada, who actually lived around these cultures, listened to this music, experienced racism themselves, and grew up with the slang are somehow the ones who are "cosplaying"?
Please make that make sense for me.
And then we have the whole CEO situation.
People got mad because their CEO responded to people accusing WAYF Boys of copying another group.
First of all, songs are not made in two fucking days.
From everything the members have said, this song has apparently been sitting around for a while. We're talking about something that was likely written and developed a year or more ago.
You cannot look at something that was already in production and go, "Well, this other group released something similar recently, therefore they copied it."
That's not how music production works.
And then there was the whole situation with Andrew and the mascot drawing.
People were accusing him of copying Woojin because of the drawing associated with WAYF Boys.
Except they've been using that character since before we even knew who the members were.
They were literally covering their faces with the drawing during their pre-debut period.
And their drawing styles are completely different.
Also, K-pop idols have been making their own mascots, logos, characters, and little cartoon representations of themselves for YEARS.
But apparently now Andrew personally invented the concept of drawing a little character and therefore somebody needs to send him death threats.
Which brings me back to something I keep noticing.
People can separate Jay Park from his group.
People can separate Bang PD from his groups.
But suddenly this CEO, who we barely know anything about, who doesn't seem particularly interested in making himself the face of his artists, stands up for his group one time, and suddenly:
"He's problematic, so I can't support WAYF Boys."
But you can support groups under companies involved in all kinds of scandals?
You can separate the artist from the CEO when it's a company you already like, but suddenly the CEO's behavior becomes a moral line when it's a group you don't like?
And before somebody tells me I don't understand the Jay Park situation, baby, I was a Jay Park fan.
When I say I used to love that man down, I mean I USED TO LOVE THAT MAN DOWN.
I listened to his music constantly. I watched interviews. I watched behind-the-scenes content. You could not have told me shit about Jay Park during certain parts of the 2010s without me immediately defending him.
I was genuinely a fangirl.
And then I got older and realized...
This man keeps making the same mistakes.
You cannot keep making the same culturally insensitive and racist decisions from your early twenties into your late twenties, apologize every single time, and then expect me to believe that you've genuinely learned from it.
At some point, you're just repeating the behavior.
You can't appropriate someone's culture, get called out, apologize, do it again, get called out, apologize again, and then act shocked when people eventually stop accepting the apology.
And especially when you've literally admitted that people who worked for you warned you not to do something because they knew exactly how it would be perceived, and you did it anyway.
That's where my issue comes in.
So when I see people saying, "I can separate Jay Park from his artists," but then suddenly they can't separate WAYF Boys from their CEO because he defended his group once...
And honestly, I think WAYF Boys are a really interesting example of something that K-pop desperately needs right now:
the ability for idols to actually be fucking people.
People are calling them performative because they have a line about "fuck ICE."
Four of these men grew up in America and Canada.
I think they probably know what racism is.
I think they probably have reasons to dislike ICE.
And then people called them performative because there was a video of them fighting each other.
Except they explained that they were originally trying to film something, an argument happened, two of them actually got into a physical fight, and afterward they basically went, "Well... we already have the footage, might as well post it."
And somehow people think that's fake.
Baby, GOT7 members have literally talked about physically fighting each other.
Other idols have talked about getting into arguments and not liking each other at certain points.
This is not some unbelievable thing.
It's just one of the few times we've actually seen it.
And then people are upset because Anderson apparently has or had a girlfriend.
And then people are calling the group fake because they thirst-trap.
The youngest member is 20.
They can be shirtless. They can flirt. They can make horny jokes. They can post thirst traps. They can do whatever the fuck they want.
And I actually think part of the reason some people are uncomfortable with it is because they're not used to seeing K-pop idols who are genuinely grown adults behave like grown adults.
Because let's be honest, some of y'all are grown too.
I've seen people in their twenties talking about members of other groups who are literal teenagers in ways that make me want to put my phone down and stare at the wall.
Martin and Louis are young.
You can think they're handsome or cute, sure.
But if you're a grown-ass adult talking about a teenager like he's your celebrity crush and you're describing him in ways that you would describe a grown man...
WAYF Boys being adults and acting like adults is not the problem.
If anything, I wish more K-pop groups were allowed to do this.
And then people started saying all three groups sound the same.
Which is also funny because...
Because they're pulling from similar musical influences.
CORTIS has songs that sound extremely reminiscent of music from Black artists. Lngshot has songs that pull from older R&B and hip-hop sounds too.
I really like "FaceTime," but there is absolutely a 2000s or even '90s R&B song somewhere in there that my aunt immediately recognized.
She literally stopped and went, "This sounds like that one song."
And then I listened to it again and was like...
That's because all three of these groups are pulling from similar eras of music.
We're talking contemporary R&B, 2010s R&B, 2020s hip-hop, '90s R&B, '90s hip-hop.
Of course they're going to overlap.
Hell, K-pop does this CONSTANTLY.
My aunt, who I've talked about before because she's a huge Stray Kids fan and also follows aespa, pointed out that this and that sounds like whole another animal she heard it and thought the bass and cadence were so similar.
If you played certain songs back-to-back, you could probably make some insane DJ transitions because they're using similar BPMs, bass patterns, cadences, and production techniques.
A lot of K-pop songs sound alike.
There are entire genres of K-pop songs that are basically the same three production formulas wearing different outfits.
And that's why this whole thing frustrates me so much.
Because for once, we're getting a group that feels slightly more authentic.
They're R&B and hip-hop adjacent.
They're not insanely sanitized.
Their livestreams feel less scripted.
They're allowed to talk a little more naturally.
They're allowed to show behind-the-scenes chaos.
They're allowed to apparently fight each other and then upload the footage.
They're producing and choreographing some of their own material.
They're allowed to be messy.
They're allowed to be horny.
They're allowed to be fucking people.
And instead of letting that marinate for five seconds, everyone is already trying to convince themselves that it's fake.
And I genuinely think that's a shame because this is exactly the direction I thought K-pop was heading in during third gen.
We were getting more self-producing idols.
More self-choreographing idols.
More idols who were allowed to talk like actual human beings.
They'd talk about arguments.
They'd admit when they weren't close with someone.
They'd say, "Yeah, we're coworkers," instead of pretending every member was their soulmate.
They'd talk about dating.
They'd talk about friendships.
They'd share embarrassing stories.
They'd actually let us see different sides of their personalities.
And then K-pop became increasingly global, companies realized how profitable the fantasy was, and suddenly everyone became terrified again.
So we went right back toward first-gen levels of sanitization.
Male and female idols can't interact because someone might start a dating rumor.
Idols from the same company can't be seen together too often.
Dating becomes a scandal.
Everything has to be carefully curated.
The idol is your boyfriend.
The idol is your girlfriend.
The idol is accessible to you.
The idol would choose you.
And that shit gets dangerous because eventually people stop remembering that there is an actual human being underneath the branding.
And honestly, I think that's part of why situations like the current BTS controversy are so messy.
Because when you've spent years selling people the image of these perfect, morally flawless human beings who "love yourself" and "be kind" and "be a good person," people eventually forget that they're still just men.
They're going to have questionable opinions.
They're going to like problematic artists.
They're going to make dumb decisions.
They're going to do things you don't agree with.
And that's not necessarily evidence that everything they've ever said was a lie.
Sometimes it just means...
And I actually think fandoms would handle these situations better if idols were allowed to be human from the beginning.
Because then you can look at something and go, "Yeah, that's a shitty decision. I'm disappointed."
Instead of acting like you've just discovered that your favorite idol is secretly Satan because he took a picture with an artist you don't like. Because as much as people want to complain y'all have to understand that a lot of Korean people and a lot of K-pop idols don't find people like Chris Brown or Kanye West problematic. Even if they are.
There's an opportunity here for K-pop to normalize adults being adults again.
Letting idols have chaotic livestreams.
Letting them have real friendships.
Letting them show us parts of themselves without handing over their entire personality for public consumption.
And I think WAYF Boys are interesting because they seem to be sitting right in the middle of that.
They're not completely unfiltered because no celebrity is.
But they're also not giving me that ultra-polished, perfectly sanitized, "I have never experienced an emotion outside of happiness" idol persona.
They're giving me actual twenty-something men who happen to be celebrities.
And maybe that's why people are so uncomfortable with them.
Because we've gotten so used to K-pop idols being presented as characters that when somebody actually feels like a person, people immediately start asking:
"Okay, but what's the gimmick?"
Maybe the gimmick is that there isn't one.
Maybe they're just some chronically online dudes who like R&B and hip-hop, make music together, fight sometimes, thirst-trap, say dumb shit, make jokes, and happen to be in a K-pop group.
I kind of want to see where that goes.