Review
Blackpink, The Album, review: lab-made pop that gloriously basks in its own utter banality
The Korean girlband's second album sounds like it has been cooked up by pop scientists. It's unnerving and stupefying, finds Neil McCormick
I have seen and heard the future of pop, but I can’t decide whether I am bearing witness to a spectacular supernova or a supermassive black(pink) hole. Is it a big bang or a balloon going pop?
Blackpink, for the uninitiated or anyone over 14, are a South Korean girl group purpose built for global domination by YG, the entertainment company who brought you Gangnam Style by Psy and was inadvertently responsible for making Ed Balls a meme after he danced to the song on Strictly.
K Pop (as it is known) was once dismissed as a weak, derivative, parochial imitation of Anglo-American musical trends aimed purely at the Asian market. Yet over the last few years Korean pop scientists have quietly succeeded in deconstructing western pop styles, repackaging them, rebranding them, and selling them back to the world in a form so condensed it almost sounds like something new.
Since the demise of One Direction, the seven member BTS have become the biggest boyband in the world, offering the kind of hyper-drilled, intensely choreographed, shamelessly cliched pubescent pop that western music makers have perhaps become too self-conscious to concoct. Blackpink are effectively their female counterparts, the highest charting female K Pop act in the US, the most-followed girl group on Spotify, and the most-subscribed music group, female act and Asian group on YouTube.
The Album is their second album and the one that is going to make them inescapable. It is only eight songs and comes in under 25 minutes long, yet it packs more hooks than a whaling armada. It is short, punchy and sweet enough to cause tooth rot, every moment crammed with crafted earworms and swaggering beats. Every song sounds like five different songs tightly packed into one, with another song tacked onto the end for good measure.
Korean-American writer-producer Teddy Park switches up styles faster than the 15-second TikTok videos his beats will soon be soundtracking. If you think you’ve heard it before, then you probably have, but only because today’s hyper aware pop consumer has heard everything before, spilling out on the never ending stream of eternal Spotify playlists. The Swedes developed this brand of super compressed glossy RnB pop rock in the Nineties and sold it to America, where it was reexported to dominate global charts for much of the Noughties. But the Korean version has a secret weapon that makes it even more devastatingly effective: utter meaninglessness.
These are songs composed in two languages, Korean and English (with alternative versions recorded in Japanese for the local market). South Korea is a country that has been dominated by American culture since the end of the Second World War and has a proficiently bilingual population. So these songs may mean something entirely specific in their home market. But to non-native speakers, which represents most of their intended audience, they are effectively phonetic sounds interrupted by random English phrases.
And when I say random, how about this from smash hit single, How You Like That? “Karma come and get some / I’m right back / Cockback the trigger / Plain Jane get hijacked.” Or this intriguing verse from Ice Cream, their current collaboration with US pop star Selena Gomez: “Snow cone chilly, get it free like Willy / In the jeans like Billie, you be poppin’ like a Wheelie.” These are interspersed with possibly equally random phrases in Korean.
I put the first bilingual verse of How You Like That through Google translate and got “It collapsed like a look / Through the floor to the basement / I’ll grab the edge / Even if I reach out with both hands that high / In this dark place again, light up the sky / Looking into your eyes, I’ll kiss you goodbye / Laugh so hard because it’s bad / Now you one, two, three / Ha, how you like that?”
It is as if someone has fed Korean and English teen magazines into a William Burroughs cut up machine. Let it spew it out in any order, as long as it flows. Who cares what words mean, when they sound this good? When they are, indeed, just sounds to which listeners can attach whatever meaning they want? For the selfie generation, perhaps self-generating lyrics are the next step. How you like that, da, de, da, da, da, de, da, da?
The rise of Blackpink and K Pop in general suggests a kind of decadent moment for western pop, when the sounds, signs and symbols no longer represent anything but shorthand for themselves. Whilst our own digital pop nations are lost in a mumble rap blizzard of downbeat EDM and strummy acoustic singalongs, have our pop palettes become so jaded that we require a bit of eastern spice to reinvigorate them?
Blackpink offer a maximalist mashup of old ideas, reheated, retooled and regurgitated, with all the originality of a photocopy montage and all the emotion of a set of emojis. It is Britney Spearmint Bubblegum on steroids, a masterpiece of chewy pop banality, all sound bites and furry costumes, signifying nothing.
Blackpink: The Album (YG / Universal) is out now
