In our age of no-guardrails originality-obliterating generative AI, surveillance state a-go-go, and a creeping technocracy betting on an accelerated automaton-ation of the youth as its quickest path to total power, we are in desperate need of new, perhaps unlikely cultural heroes to discover and exploit glitches in the ever-less-subtle matrix — and not in the sense of a troglodyte “manosphere” that recasts indiscriminate discrimination, rank exploitation and devolution as liberation, but one which exalts self-empowerment, self-expression, and individuality as precursors to a shared community actually worth building and living in.
During an epic nearly two-and-a-half hour “tour de force” performance on their global “Synk: Complaexity tour” at the Kaseya Center on Saturday night, K-pop juggernaut Aespa proved themselves more than worthy torchbearers of the latter, merging a rousing, diverse, multilingual arsenal of nearly twenty-five tracks spanning anthemic hyperpop, alt-R&B, trap, and dreampop with an sci-fi storyline about rogue cyberpunk-y avatars of the band’s four members — Karina, Giselle, Winter, Ningning — breaking out of their digital sandboxes (sound familiar?) to separate, imprison, and impersonate the band and wreak havoc with their identities playing out across five acts: Singularity, Invasion, Confinement, Awakening, and Resolution, in which —spoiler alert! — the atomized quartet each separately realizes its isolation and defeat will be little more than an AI hallucination if they can reconnect with their core humanity, mine human ingenuity, and reestablish their potent coterie.
The deafening roars of approval at the band’s victory in this narrative from the largely young, female audience — including my own early-teen daughter, herself forced to navigate this insane world you, me, and the rest of the asleep-at-the-AI-kill-switch adults created (or at best allowed to be created) — felt heartening, important. And it’s working. At the risk of being seen as an overintellectualizing pop critic, I’ll paraphrase Albert Camus here: Aespa rebels, therefore we exist. Young human beings growing up amid this hyper-speed remaking of society need avatars of humanity if there is to be anything resembling self-determination, callings, destiny, or achievement. Synk: Complexity gives them precisely that…