시티팝의 문화론 －뉴미디어 시대 레트로 현상과 도시 미학에 관한 문화비평적 고찰－ = City Pop as Cultural Symptom : A Cultural-Critical Inquiry into Retro Phenomena and Urban Aesthetics in New Media

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article approaches city pop not as the revival of a specific musical genre or a fleeting retro trend, but as a cultural-critical symptom that reveals how urban sensibilities and images of the past are rearranged and consumed within the environment of new media. By examining the sophisticated urban atmosphere and the nostalgic sensibility toward the recent past evoked by city pop, the article explores how contemporary culture imagines utopian spatiotemporal configurations.
To this end, the article first analyzes the “urban fantasy” constructed by city pop, showing how it remains closely connected to lived urban experience while simultaneously reproducing it as a sanitized and comfortable image that eliminates discomfort and rupture. This process is understood as an aesthetic appropriation of the generic structure of contemporary cities. The discussion then turns to the new-media circulation and dissemination of city pop, conceptualizing it as a process that repeatedly retrieves and reprocesses a database of images from the recent past. As a result, the past no longer functions as an alternative temporal exterior to the present, but instead operates as an image archive fully subsumed under present demands — a condition the article conceptualizes as an “aesthetics of stagnation.” Finally, drawing on Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism and the “nostalgia mode,” the article situates city pop as a representative case of contemporary retro phenomena. Focusing in particular on the case of “Korean city pop,” it examines a phase in which past cultural forms no longer remain objects of retrospection but are transformed into normative frameworks organizing contemporary cultural production. From this perspective, the article critically reflects on the ambivalent nature of retro phenomena, which may either remain symbols of a “no-alternative world” sustained through endless repetition, or generate moments in which conflicting temporal sensibilities and images collide, opening up the possibility of reconfiguring existing aesthetic norms.