The bolero revival playing in karaoke rooms from Saigon to San Jose

For most of the 2000s and 2010s, bolero — the slow, string-heavy romantic ballads that dominated South Vietnamese pop music before 1975 — was treated by a lot of younger listeners as strictly their grandparents' music: something played at family gatherings, rarely sought out on purpose. That's shifted noticeably over the last few years, driven largely by karaoke apps and livestream singing competitions that have made the genre newly visible to a much younger audience.

"I learned three bolero songs because my dad kept requesting them at karaoke, and then I just kept singing them because they're actually really good songs," said 24-year-old singer and part-time livestreamer Hùng Vo, who now performs bolero sets to a small but devoted online following. "The chord progressions are simple but the phrasing is really hard to do well. It's a technical challenge, honestly."

Karaoke lounges in both Vietnam and diaspora communities abroad report bolero standards remaining among their most-requested songs across age groups, and livestream competitions dedicated specifically to the genre regularly pull in young contestants alongside veteran singers decades into their careers. Music historians note this kind of generational crossover isn't unprecedented for bolero, which has cycled in and out of mainstream favor several times since its peak.

Whether this counts as a full revival or a longer plateau is up for debate among the genre's longtime fans. But for singers like Vo, the practical effect is the same either way: a catalog of decades-old songs that suddenly has an audience that wasn't there five years ago.