Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
For all the damage that TikTok and Instagram have done to modern music, one of the good things that’s come from the short-form vertical platforms is the resurgence of popularity of old hits — or should’ve been hits — that can arise suddenly if it’s sufficiently catchy, the right challenge can be made out of it, and the algorithm blasts it out. Fortunately for BESTie all of those things happened for their 2013 track “Love Options“, which has long been a favorite of deranged K-pop stans (me), and the song has surged to trending popularity eight years after their 2018 disbandment.
According to reports, the song slowly started to return around May, and indeed since around then I’ve been seeing videos (surprisingly) set to “Love Options” on both TikTok and Reels, and I know at least in Korea one viral video is Hearts2Hearts‘ “Lemon Tang” choreography being set to the song about a month ago that seemed to kick it into overdrive.
That seemed to at least be the catalyst there and everybody started picking it up.
@choiyena.official #연애의조건🤍 #최예나 #예나 #YENA ♬ Love Options – BESTie
While it’s not yet back within the Melon Top 100 (Top 150, I think), it has reached the Top 100 of both Apple Music and YouTube already.
The members themselves have acknowledged the rise and Hyeyeon and Haeryung have done the challenge themselves.
In an era where every group can have a reunion, I don’t see why BESTie shouldn’t give a shot as well. All the members are still active in some public capacity — especially Uji (musicals) and Hyeyeon (trot soloist) — and I’d love to see them try to kick this into overdrive to hopefully get spillover to their other quality music. If it happens it would also make a great narrative considering they (except Dahye) had originally left EXID, perhaps the most famous viral chart-reversal group, and formed BESTie.
Note: I’ve seen erroneous reports/translations from English accounts that they’ve already agreed to comeback, but there’s nothing of the sort in Korean news yet. YET.
Anyway, you know something is trending when the comments on YouTube videos for the songs used to be English hags like me complaining that the song is underrated or forgotten and now it’s full of Korean comments talking about how they recently saw it.
