In some benighted corners of the internet, the big news a couple of weeks ago was the latest battle in the ongoing war between fans of South Korean boyband BTS and fans of fellow K-pop stars Blackpink. Ever-vigilant for perceived slurs against their idols, the BTS Army took exception to an innocuous remark made by Blackpink’s Jennie Kim about paving the way for other K-pop acts: apparently she should have mentioned that BTS were successful overseas prior to Blackpink. Cue much mutual abuse being slung and pleas for calm from more level heads, fruitlessly invoking feminist solidarity and the grim spectre of online bullying.
You can see where the rivalry has come from. Barely four years on from their debut release, Blackpink seem to be repeating BTS’s boundary-breaking success, racking up commercial achievements that would once have been unthinkable for a non-Anglophone artist. They are currently the most-followed girl group on Spotify and the most-subscribed band on YouTube. Just as BTS’s success drew artists from Ed Sheeran to Nicki Minaj into their orbit, so The Album features guest appearances by David Guetta, Selena Gomez and Cardi B, the co-author of WAP finding herself in more prim company than usual. The metaphors of Ice Cream aside – “you’re the cherry piece, so stay on top of me” – the closest The Album comes to the mention of sex is Bet You Wanna’s reference to a gentleman keen to give the song’s narrator something mysteriously called “an all-night hug”.
And yet, a comparison of The Album with BTS’s last album reveals them to be very different propositions. Map of the Soul: 7 was a blockbuster, 75 minutes of music apparently inspired by Dr Murray Stein’s book Jung’s Map of the Soul. Its release was heralded by a “global public art project” involving both Antony Gormley and “environmental artist” Tomás Saraceno, the latter building a solar-powered hot air balloon that flew a human a record-breaking 577 feet over Argentina’s Salinas Grande. By contrast, The Album lasts a fraction over 24 minutes. No one has cited Jungian psychoanalysis among its influences, nor has anyone commissioned a hot air balloon, solar-powered or otherwise. Instead, the only truly massive thing about it – apart from its anticipated sales – is its packaging. Parents of Blinks (ie Blackpink’s superfans) beware: the top bundle of album swag costs £134, featuring three luxury CD box sets, a regular CD, four signed art cards and – for the insatiable Blackpink stan trapped in the early 1990s – four different cassette versions.
This highly efficient extraction of pocket money runs the risk of making music seem like a secondary consideration, but that doesn’t tally with The Album’s contents. It deals in precision-tooled rap-influenced pop that makes most western artists’ efforts in that area seem wan. Its songs are unrelenting three-minute bombardments of hooks: barely a second passes where you’re not in the presence of a melody you struggle to erase from your brain, a snappy throwaway aside anyone else would build an entire chorus around – How You Like That’s cry of “look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane” is a prime example – or an equally snappy production touch: the Popcorn-esque melody that ping-pongs behind Lovesick Girls’ chorus, the woozy-sounding staccato synths that open Ice Cream. This production approach reaches a deranged height on Crazy Over You, its backing track constructed from a patchwork of eclectic sounds – bursts of Bollywood-ish strings, flute, rave-y synth stabs, a Brazilian cuica, what sounds like a Japanese gottan – interspersed with bursts of sub-bass.
You’re struck by the sense that the quality control has been set very high, and that the writers and producers – old hands at K-pop and big western names including Ryan Tedder and the team behind much of Ariana Grande’s Sweetener alike – have felt impelled to bring their A-game. The possible exception is the lyricists. Devoid of an overarching concept and eschewing the need to show a human heart at the centre of the K-pop machine – the raison d’etre behind much of BTS’s recent output – it sticks to the topics of how great Blackpink are and how that perennial bugbear The Haters aren’t getting to them. In fairness, given the vociferousness of said Haters, perhaps the latter subject has more heft in the world of K-pop.
Much as anyone who shells out £134 for it might quail at its running time – you’ve just paid nearly £5.60 for every minute of music it contains – as a listening experience, its brevity works in The Album’s favour. There’s no time for longueurs, no padding, no ponderous ballads. Instead it’s the musical equivalent of the moment in the video for their 2018 hit Ddu-Du-Ddu-Du, where Jennie Kim suddenly appears, clad in a pair of 18-hole Doc Martens and eating a giant bucket of popcorn while sitting on top of a tank that’s covered in squares of mirrored glass like a disco ball: striking, glittery, depthless and rather impressive.
What Alexis listened to this week
Romy: Lifetime
The XX singer’s solo debut involves an unexpected diversion into peak-time electronic club banger territory – her vocal undercuts the anthemic chorus with just enough yearning melancholy.
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