Nostalgia and Y2k Asian Baddie Music

Recently, I went down a rabbit hole of finding songs that I used to listen to in the late 2000's to the early 2010's. And while compiling a playlist on spotify, I suddenly remembered that when I was younger, my mom would always play music made by Jolin Tsai (蔡依林), a Taiwanese singer/songwriter/actress/dancer born in 1980. 

I remembered that my favourite song from her was 布拉格廣場 (eng: Prague Square), how the music video was downloaded into my iPad, and the amount of times I had hit the replay button throughout my childhood. The music video featured an alice-in-wonderland-esque setting and honestly... almost nothing to do with prague.

During my rabbit hole plunge, I discovered that she remade the song and posted the video on YouTube 6 days ago! I was thinking to myself about how funny of a coincidence that was. To be honest with you all, even though the new vesion of the song was objectively better than the old one, I still preferred the one released 16 years ago when I was 6 years old. 

I started wondering why that was, because objectively speaking, the newer version is cleaner. The visuals are sharper, the vocals feel more controlled, the production is obviously more modern. But even while watching it, I kept thinking that something was missing. It didn’t hit the same way. 

I realized that it had nothing to do with quality and everything to do with timing. When I first heard 布拉格廣場, I was six years old. I wasn’t thinking about mixing, choreography, or artistic direction. I just liked how it felt. The song lived somewhere between my childhood memories and whatever was playing in the background of my home at the time. 

My mom loved Jolin Tsai, and because of that, her music became part of my normal. The replay button on my iPad was basically a ritual. Looking back now, I think nostalgia tricks us a little. We think we’re comparing two versions of a song, but we’re actually comparing two versions of ourselves. 

The new music video is something I watch as an adult with opinions and preferences. The old one is something I experienced without any filters, before I knew what “good production” even meant. That early Y2K era of Asian pop also had a very specific energy. Everything felt dramatic and slightly chaotic in the best way. 

The fashion was bold, the sets were theatrical, and sometimes the visuals barely matched the song title, but that unpredictability was part of the charm. It wasn’t trying to be minimalist or curated. It just existed loudly. Looking back, it almost feels like the early blueprint of what people now call the “Asian baddie” aesthetic, before the label even existed. 

And maybe that's why old songs keep popping back up online, It reminded people of a past version of themselves. One that was more free-spirited, more careless, and ultimately, more youthful. It was a time when music wasn't performative, and people were not deterred from listening to popular songs because it made them seem basic or beause they feared being dubbed a trend-hopper. 

Do you remember a version of yourself that did not curate a taste profile, or limit yourself to a certain aesthetic? You just listened to what you liked, the songs you burned into your CDs didn't have any rhyme or reason aside from the fact that you like them and would play them on repeat a hundred times. 

I think that's why even though the remake was better in every technical prespective, I still preferred the old 布拉格廣場. Not because it sounded better, but because that versio of the song belonged to a different me, one that I miss everyday without realizing.