Episode 84: M.A.D.E.—A Road Not Taken (2008-2010)
This is the third part in a series of episodes on BigBang’s magnum opus: M.A.D.E. I’d had the idea of trying to cover the album the same way I did Winner’s EVERYD4Y and SHINee’s The Story of Light (two other K-Pop masterpieces) but the more I researched, the more I understood that the story of M.A.D.E. is really the story of BigBang and, more broadly, of K-Pop as a genre.
The first episode—The YG Famillenium (1988-2006)—covers the founding of YG Entertainment and the origins of both the early YG Family sound and the origins of some of the characteristics that would define the agency through this early era.
The second episode—Majah Flavah (2006-2008)—covers BigBang’s rookie era through their first big hit, “Lies,” and also includes a discussion on what plagiarism in music actually involves.
This episode covers their first mini-peak in Korea along with the first big push into Japan and the beginnings of their solo careers. Includes discussion of “Haru Haru,” “Sunset Glow,” “Gara Gara Go,” “Strong Baby,” and “Heartbreaker.”
I mention it briefly in the episode but this episode series will not be covering Seungri’s criminal charges and the Burning Sun scandal. If you’re here for the salacious gossip, you may as well close the browser window now. The media coverage of Seungri and Burning Sun has tended more towards sensationalism and less towards, you know, facts, which has not been all that helpful in understanding what actually happened. There is a timeline of events put together by Billboard that is as good a source as any for a look at how the scandal unfolded and Soompi has a fairly dry list of the charges that Seungri was convicted of. Maybe one day I’ll do an episode series on Burning Sun but this series is not it.
This episode discusses both Rain and Se7en, who were very prominent R&B soloists in the proto-K-Pop era. Taeyang’s early solo work was following in the wake of these two titans of Generation 1.5 K-Pop. Both men have been unfairly tagged as “flops” in the current era—if anyone remembers them at all—but the 2007-2008 financial crisis and its long tail are under-discussed as part of the reason why neither Se7en nor Rain managed to establish themselves in the American market, despite some promising interest. I covered Rain’s two big Hollywood films in Episode 76 with Kelly. Also, “Take Control” (feat. Se7en) is a banger.
Se7en would also like to remind us all that he did lightsticks first.
TOP planting a kiss right on Lee Hyori’s lips!
The TVXQ x BigBang rivalry was really a lot of fun; sadly it was cut short when TVXQ imploded (which you can learn about in my TVXQ series). Recently Daesung had ex-TVXQ member Junsu on his YouTube channel and the conversation was a delight. The Junsu x Taeyang piano battle always reminds me of Daffy vs. Donald from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
The afterlife of the Korean adaptation of Boys Over Flowers is nightmare fuel. I wrote a little bit about it here. Kim Hyun-Joong spent years embroiled in a legal battle with an ex-girlfriend who had accused him of assault and forced abortion; he countersued and eventually won.
Part of idol life is doing silly things like going on Young Stars of Trot:
“Sunset Glow” has become the kind of song where if you play it somewhere like a baseball stadium, everyone just sings along—whether it’s Lee Moon Sae’s version or BigBang’s.
Early contributor to BigBang’s electropop turn—Grammy award winning Congolese-Swedish songwriter Mohombi.
Read Tom Breihan’s Number Ones columns on “Just Dance” and “Right Round.”
“Heartbreaker” feat. Flo Rida as the ultimate revenge for the hell G-Dragon went through with the baseless plagiarism accusations. GD would also guest at Flo’s concert in Seoul.
It’s been great to see G-Dragon back in the mix with “Power” and more music to come! G-Dragon is an incredible talent and remains a trend setter to this day. Nobody else can do what he does. Almost 20 years since he officially debuted and young artists are still inspired by his stage persona to this day… they keep trying to knock him down and amazingly he gets back up and keeps going. He’s got the power! The Power Power!
Daesung and Taeyang have also been active and it makes me really happy to see them! As of last year Taeyang was still doing the music show rounds and he also recently held some solo concerts where he was joined on stage by Daesung and G-Dragon. The three also recently united on Daesung’s popular YouTube channel, which you should watch!
The songs played are:
“Gara Gara Go” by BigBang, live at Kyocera Dome, Osaka, December 29, 2016 (you know I gotta play it again right!)
“This is My Year” by Se7en feat. Fabolous (confirmed as real but treated as a leak and never officially released; you can find it floating around on streaming sites.)
“I’m Singing in Korean” by Stephen Colbert, a loving parody of the then-stereotype of Korean pop music.
“Tell Me” by Wonder Girls (watch the super cute MV!)
“Lies” by BigBang (the official MV is a delight!)
“D.I.S.C.O.” by Uhm Jung Hwa, feat. TOP (and you need to watch the MV, directed by Seo Hyun-Seung but the live performances were also incredible)
“Look at me, Gwisun” by Daesung (he would eventually release a Japanese version of the song with an MV; the inspiration for the song is allegedly a woman from a blind date show who picked Seungri over G-Dragon.)
“Only Look At Me” by Taeyang (and the official MV)
“Haru Haru” by BigBang (and the official MV but also check out the (many) live performances, as well as Daesung’s recent karaoke version!)
“Mirotic” by TVXQ (and the official MV but also check out the (many) live performances, as well as Junsu and Jaejoong’s recent version!)
“Heaven” by BigBang
Medley by No Brain and BigBang live on Kim Jung-Eun’s Chocolate
“Kiseki” by GReeeeN (the Official MV)
“One Love” by Arashi (and the Official MV was just posted to YouTube!)
“Just Dance” by Lady Gaga (spin that record babe!)
“Number 1” by BigBang (Official MV)
“Always” by BigBang (live in Osaka, October 29, 2008)
“Wonderful” by BigBang
“Twinkle Twinkle” by BigBang
“Sunset Glow” by Lee Moon Sae (who is a rock star! Check out his live version!)
“Sunset Glow” by BigBang (and the MV but also check out the (many) live performances!)
“Sunset Glow” by BigBang (singalong by a baseball crowd)
“Jinjja” by Dynamic Duo and G-Dragon and TOP (this special stage at the SBS Gayo Daejun, December 29, 2008 is one of my favorite videos; the original “Jinjja” MV by CB Mass; Dynamic Duo are still active and are an offshoot of CB Mass)
“Rainism” by Rain (the official MV and live performances! Just don’t mention the “magic stick!”)
“Strong Baby” by Seungri (the official MV and hover hands live performances! “Strong Baby” became Seungri’s signature song and the vibe becomes so much sleazier as he gets older.)
“Girls” by Se7en feat. Lil Kim (Official MV)
“Lollipop” by BigBang and 2NE1 (Official MV)
“Gee” by Girls Generation (Official MV)
“Emotion” by BigBang
“Gara Gara Go” by BigBang (Official MV—upload this in higher quality already!!! @YGE)
“Heartbreaker” by G-Dragon (Official MV and live performances with the look that launched a thousand K-Pop It Boys)
“A Boy” by G-Dragon (Official MV; this is one of my favorites from GD. I love this song.)
“The Leaders” by G-Dragon, feat. Teddy and CL
“Right Round” by Flo Rida (and it’s still WILD to me that this song was held up as some kind of sacred totem that must not be besmirched)
“Gossip Man” by G-Dragon feat. Kim Gun-Mo
[Flo Rida comments on G-Dragon]
“Wedding Dress” by Taeyang (Official MV and live performances!)
“Cotton Candy” by Daesung
Our opening song today is BigBang’s “Gara Gara Go” performed live with their backing band Band Six, on December 29, 2016, at Kyocera Dome in Osaka as part of the 0 to 10 10th Anniversary Tour. The last BigBang concert date in Japan before T.O.P. would enlist in the military to perform his mandatory military service.
This episode is part three of a series looking at BigBang’s magnum opus, the pinnacle of K-Pop artistry, MADE, and I recommend you listen to the first two episodes before this one but for those of you just joining me, when we left off in the last episode, in was early 2008 and BigBang had just wrapped up promotions for the song “Lies,” their most successful single to date. The triumph was only slightly marred by the accusation in the media that BigBang member G-Dragon had plagiarized the song from Japanese artist FreeTempo. Charges that YG Entertainment (BigBang’s agency) and FreeTempo dismissed as false.
But a lot had changed in the fast moving world of K-Pop since BigBang debuted in August 2006 so let’s pause to take a quick look at the lay of the land here in 2008 before we get into this next installment.
In the last episode, I mentioned that the boy group market had been rebooted with the debut of TVXQ in 2003. You can listen to my series on TVXQ for the down and dirty details but the short version is that essentially after conquering teen girls’ hearts in Korea, their company, SM Entertainment, had shipped the young group over to Japan where they’d been camped out for essentially the entirety of BigBang’s short career so far.
As we get into 2008, YG Entertainment company head, former member of foundational K-Pop group Seo Taiji and Boys, Yang Hyun-Suk aka Yang Goon or YG had been dangling the promise of an American debut for Se7en since at least 2006 with very little to show for it. Se7en had been featured on a remix of singer Amerie’s wonderful 2007 single, “Take Control” aimed at the Asian market but otherwise there’d been essentially radio silence from Se7en for what felt like an eternity in K-Pop time. When Se7en left Korea he’d been one of the top K-Pop acts and then… nothing. He had been taken off the board completely. A planned debut single feat. rapper Fabolous was posted to MySpace by an account called Se7enInAmerica on March 24, 2007, but 24 hours later the account was deleted. While the song, “This is My Year,” was confirmed as real, we can only speculate as to who posted it and why. “This Is My Year” was treated by YG Entertainment as a leak and was never officially released, although it was spread among fans. Again, that was March 2007. Months and months passed. One year, then two. Into 2009 just nothing. Se7en—and again let me emphasize that Se7en at this time was a popular and sexy R&B soloist at the top of his game—was aimlessly spinning his heelys in America.
The other artist I need to mention right here is Rain, who was Se7en’s primary competition in the sexy, multi-talented R&B singer category. Rain had also been sent off to America by his company, JYP Entertainment. But Rain was having a much better go of it than poor Se7en. In 2006, Rain had held a packed out concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The New York Times described it like this, in an article titled, “A strong forecast for Korean pop’s Rain,” dated January 29, 2006:
“Immigrants or children of immigrants, they live in an era when technology makes it easy to connect with their homeland. Small-time entrepreneurs have long catered to the immigrant appetite for culture from back home. But what used to happen on a neighborhood level - a Colombian dance troupe at a Queens community center - is now taking place on a much larger scale. Like Rain, foreign artists are filling mainstream venues, their fans primed by the songs, videos, television shows and films that are ever more accessible through the Web, satellite television and new media outlets targeting hyphenated Americans.”
In other words, to the mainstream American media, in 2006, Rain’s appeal was still limited to the quote hyphenated Americans. He was the biggest star you’d never heard of. But that would quickly change. In a series of events I remember quite vividly as someone both tapped into Asian media via “the Web” and as a devoted viewer of The Colbert Report, Rain caught the attention of Stephen Colbert in 2007 when Rain fans accomplished what I believe is the first successful K-Pop mass voting campaign targeting the Western media and they pushed Rain to the top of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People poll… beating comedian Stephen Colbert who was extremely popular in America at the time for his television show, The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert, in character as a blowhard TV pundit, declared Rain to be his mortal nemesis and even recorded a K-Pop song parody. The following year it would lead to one of the most fondly remembered moments of the Colbert Report, at least in my opinion, where Rain—who was promoting the American film Speed Racer, which he starred in—popped in for a dance off to determine once and for all who was truly the best man in the world.
There are a couple of significant things about this moment in K-Pop History. 1) This was the first really mainstream exposure of the contemporary phenomenon of “Korean Pop Music” in America. Colbert, at the time, was extremely popular with a certain segment of the American market that consumed a lot of media. People like me. He even touted something called the “Colbert bump,” meaning that guests on the show would get a “bump” in views or book sales or what have you. So while The Report was just a small Comedy Central show, the audience punched well above its weight as heavy consumers of media and Colbert’s parody song absolutely put Korean pop music on the radar of this cohort of savvy consumers. The kinds of people who read and contributed to gossip sites like OhNoTheyDidn’t or PerezHilton.com, sites that would then feed into broader mainstream entertainment journalism. Colbert’s video is also interesting as a time capsule of the image of Korean music at the time. Rather than the current K-Pop stereotype of bright neon colors, bubblegum sounds, and coordinated dancing, in 2007, Korean pop meant… the sexy, soulful R&B sounds of guys like Rain and Se7en.
And 2) the other reason I think this Colbert-Rain feud is significant because I think it’s the first time we see the impact of the #online Korean wave fans cross over into mainstream American entertainment. Again, this is something I witnessed in real time. It was wild seeing Rain, who was a popular figure among my online circle of Asian pop culture fans on LiveJournal, on regular television in America and being covered by mainstream entertainment outlets.
Rain is a fascinating figure and deserves his own episode so I won’t go into his story too deeply but I do think it’s telling that the Rain vs Colbert feud has been neatly written out of the current K-Pop narrative in English and Rain unfairly tagged as a “flop.” The Colbert Bump would not extend to the box office returns of Speed Racer, alas, but Rain absolutely “paved the way,” so to speak, in getting Korean pop music on the radar of behind-the-scenes entertainment industry and media professionals both in Los Angeles and New York. By 2009, Rain’s audience expanded from the New York Time’s “hyphenated Americans” to the normie readers of magazines like Entertainment Weekly.
But while Korea seemed determined to export all of their sexy R&B hunks to America, back home on the domestic market, in 2007, the teen pop scene had completely exploded in girl groups. JYP Entertainment—soon to be former home of Rain—had debuted a new group called simply, the Wonder Girls in February 2007 and in September of that same year they released a song called, “Tell Me.” It’s considered the first of the “hook songs,” a style of pop song that would become synonymous with what would be called the “Second Generation” of K-Pop. “Tell Me,” written by JYP with a big nod to Stacy Q’s 1980s electro-pop banger, “Two of Hearts,” is a relentless earworm. The noodling synthesizer line, the ticky tock drum machine, the “hook,” with its stuttering English chorus “Tell me tell me t-t-t-t-tell me”, all combined with a signature point and sway choreography turned the song into a national craze.
“Tell Me” followed directly in the wake of BigBang’s Shibuya-kei influenced mega hit “Lies,” which I discussed in the last episode, and the two songs together were a ferocious one-two teen pop punch that completely reset the K-Pop Trend Generator heading into 2008.
One last thing to keep in mind as we head into this next part of the story: beginning in 2007 and entering into 2008 a financial crisis is brewing in the United States and while at first it seemed like it might be contained to the American housing sector, the poison spread. In September 2008, the US stock market crashed. The ripple effects of this American crisis hit Korea, in particular, very hard. The old adage that you have to spend money to make money is as true in the entertainment world as in other businesses and, unfortunately, as the 2008 financial crisis dragged into 2009 and on into 2010 the lack of easily available cash made it a lot harder for a company like YG Entertainment to lay out the initial funds necessary to do things like… debut a singer or group in the massive United States market.
So, as we pick our story back up, Se7en was still off spinning his Heelys in the United States; a bunch of the former YG Family acts had either left the agency or moved behind the scenes into production, like Teddy from 1TYM and Kush from Stony Skunk; and BigBang had just ground through a grueling but successful 18 months or so as rookies. And in response to the growing cohort of Korean girl groups there were also strong rumors of a “female BigBang” set to debut from YG Entertainment…
Okay, so just in case you haven’t listened to the previous two parts, here’s the quick run down on our main players—G-Dragon, 19, BigBang’s leader, wunderkid rapper/composer, hyped as the next Seo Taiji; T.O.P., 20, BigBang’s eldest, ex-underground rapper, very handsome. The two of them form the core of BigBang’s sound. G-Dragon’s sing-songy tenor mixed with T.O.P.’s deep, rhythmic rapping turned out to work extremely well together. Then there’s the vocal line: Taeyang, 19 but just about to turn 20, rapper turned R&B vocalist in the mold of Se7en; Daesung, 18 but just about to turn 19, the big voiced OG K-Pop Sunshine Boy who joined YG Entertainment despite not really being into rap or hip hop or R&B; and last of all, maknae, Seungri who had just turned 17 years old, and was responsible for a lot of their comic relief in variety shows.
And like I said in the last episode, this series is focusing on BigBang’s journey to the album that I consider the artistic high water mark of K-Pop: M.A.D.E., which means I will not be getting into Seungri’s criminal charges. Again, for new listeners, Seungri officially left BigBang in 2019. He was convicted and served his prison time. If you’d like to learn more, I can link to sources in the show notes. That said, I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to project his current opera buffa villain image back in time so keep in mind that for this episode, Seungri is still just a weedy teenager, hanging around TV station hallways trying to get girls’ phone numbers.
Okay, so, with promotions wrapped up for 2007’s final EP, Hot Issue, in early 2008, there were schedules through the summer for BigBang as they went on an Asian tour and released a second Japanese EP.
If you recall from the first part in the series, YG had three key takeaways from the era of the fathers of K-Pop, Seo Taiji and Boys—1) the mystery strategy of undersaturation/not catering to media outlets but doing your own thing instead, which unfortunately also comes with a great deal of antagonism from the press, 2) FASHION is as important as the songs, 3) keep an eye on where your fans are, and in 2008, increasingly they were online… and global.
So, as we enter 2008, YG managed a clever bit of undersaturating that wasn’t quite undersaturating, by splitting off the members into various solo activities. It was a great way to both expand BigBang’s popularity without pushing the group too much, and, importantly, a way to multiply the revenue streams coming in. There was one BigBang but there were five members. And just to hammer it in, again, Se7en was still doing nothing in America, so YG could use the cash. This would also set the template for BigBang as a group for essentially the rest of their career—bursts of group work followed by fallow periods of individual solo work.
T.O.P. cemented his reputation as a noona-killer, not only by landing an infamous kiss right on 30-year old Lee Hyori’s lips in the 2008 MAMA Awards but also by appearing as a featured artist in three older female singers’ comebacks that year. “I’m Sorry” from the lovely R&B vocalist Gummy, “I See Only You” by ballad singer Zia, and “DISCO” with the 40-year old K-Pop diva, accomplished actress, and all around legend: Uhm Jung-Hwa, who we heard from in part one, collabing with JinuSean. In 2008, Uhm Jung Hwa was in her Madonna “Ray of Light” era, a female singer “of a certain age” hitting big with the club kids.
Uhm Jung-Hwa’s DISCO EP was a special collaboration with the YG Entertainment production team. The title track, the aforementioned “DISCO” was written by Teddy and Kush, with TOP contributing his verse. It’s a hook song like “Tell Me” but one slathered in a glittering disco nostalgia. The styling of the video and the stage performances was retro-futurist, with Uhm Jung-Hwa herself decked out in a variety of flashy neon leotards, chunky earrings, and sparkly make-up. When T.O.P. enters, tall, dark, and oh-so-handsome, it sends the sex appeal of the song up to 1000.
And just to give you a sense of just where BigBang were positioned in Korean pop culture at this time, 2008, T.O.P. was dubbed part of K-Pop’s elite “F4,” a reference to the pack of hot guys from the Japanese manga Hana Yori Dango, which had recently had two live action adaptations that were big hits across Asia, first in Taiwan and then in Japan. The other members of this elite F4 were Yoochun and Jaejoong from TVXQ, the most popular boy group at the time, and Kim Hyun Joong from SS501, the one who would actually end up in the Korean adaptation. This cross-group “F4” fed into the TVXQ-BigBang friendly “rivalry” which has now mostly been forgotten but at the time it made for a lot of fun media play.
Okay, so while T.O.P was out slaying noonas, Sunshine boy Daesung was slaying aunties and grannies as the newest cast member of very popular variety show, Family Outing. He joined the cast in the summer of 2008 and released his own comedic digital single titled, “Look At Me Gwisoon.” It was a novelty song, of a sort, a pastiche of the popular trot genre—a genre close to something like the German schlager or Japanese enka—and showcased both Daesung’s goofy sense of humor and his powerful singing voice. Daesung was BigBang’s dark horse; the secret weapon. He came across on television as extremely approachable and funny and he was able to reach an audience via shows like Family Outing that had a wide audience that otherwise might not have been exposed to a teenage pop group like BigBang. Without Daesung, it’s very unlikely that the group would have been invited onto a general audience show like the Young Stars of Trot, on which they performed in September 2008. Daesung would also be cast that year as Rum Tug Tugger in the Korean run of stage musical Cats.
Taeyang was chosen to be the first member to release his own solo EP. Hot, was released on May 22, 2008. The title track, “Only Look At Me,” written by Teddy and Kush, gives a good sense of both Taeyang’s growth as a vocalist since 2006’s “Ma Girl” as well as the direction in which his solo work would be heading: pleading, mid-tempo R&B panty-droppers about how much he loves you, specifically, girl.
The accompanying video is a delight, showcasing short king Taeyang’s good looks and his dance ability. Have you seen an angsty body roll? Let Taeyang demonstrate! The narrative in the MV has Taeyang in unrequited love with a girl who is shown dating all of the other BigBang members in turn before… Taeyang wakes up! It was just a dream!
Promotions for “Only Look At Me” overlapped to an extent with “DISCO,” which means there were weeks in the summer of 2008 where, despite BigBang not having group activities, you could see Taeyang and TOP back to back on various music shows and then flip the channel to catch Daesung on Family Outing.
Taeyang would also have his first solo concert on July 20, 2008, and was tapped to open for singer Alicia Keys when she performed in Seoul on August 7, 2008.
Maknae Seungri, again, still underage at 17 years old, got a role in a stage musical, Sonagi, and would be paired up with Daseung for some additional hosting and variety work.
But while the other members were busy with solo promotions, G-Dragon had retreated to the studio and what emerged would become one of BigBang’s best remembered songs, “Haru Haru,” the title track of BigBang’s third Korean EP, Stand Up, released August 8, 2008.
If you recall from the last episode, G-Dragon had been caught up in an overblown media scandal around “Lies.” Netizens had baselessly accused him of plagiarizing music from Japanese artist FreeTempo. As something of an F.U. in response, Japanese DJ Dashi Dance, part of the same Shibuya-Kei scene as FreeTempo, was asked to participate in the new BigBang title track.
The result was “Haru Haru” which took “Lies” and made it even more so. In a 2012 interview with Dashi Dance he explained that his first album, from 2006, had been released concurrently in Japan and Korea. At the time all he really knew about Korean music was that they liked sad melodies, so he thought they might enjoy his music. He was correct and if you remember from the last episode, his songs were quite popular on the social networking platform CyWorld. He went on to say, (translation by me):
“At that time [BigBang] had been listening to my music and I received a production request. And well, the timing was good. Another big factor was that at the time in Korea, there wasn’t much that combined an angsty melody with dance music.”
BigBang’s offer presented an interesting challenge to Dashi Dance and he rose to it, offering a melancholy piano line looped on top of a pulsing rhythm track that pounds in your chest like a heartbeat. One of Dashi Dance’s inspirations is composer-pianist Joe Hisaishi, who among other things, scored Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, and you can definitely hear that melancholy influence in the aching piano melody that underpins “Haru Haru.”
The verses, anchored by G-Dragon and T.O.P., are the insecure teen id—the subject of the song wallowing in the idea that he’s made a horrible mistake by allowing himself to get broken up with and crippled by anxiety that prevents him from reaching out again—to the powerful punch of the superego in the chorus taking the high road and magnanimously telling their collective lady love that it’s okay and she should just go be happy and don’t worry about me, the singer, at all because I’m totally fine, ha ha. The hook line, “하루하루 무뎌져 가네” translates to something like, day by day, it all fades away.
“Haru Haru” builds and swells to not one but two climaxes, the first coming at the tail end of the second verse where G-Dragon and TOP trade increasingly intense and angst ridden lines that bleed over into the chorus and the second coming after a brief quiet interlude as the beat completely drops out for Taeyang’s verse, leaving just Dashi Dance’s lovely piano melody for accompaniment. When the full arrangement explodes back in for the finale, it still gives me goosebumps.
The video is a masterpiece in teen angst, shot in sepia tones, it tells the story of G-Dragon seemingly getting dumped by his girlfriend in favor of TOP and getting into a huge fight with him. Then the action moves to a hospital where we find out that O.M.G. she was sick with unspecified drama disease and is going to die and just didn’t want her one true love G-Dragon to feel guilty about moving on so she set up this whole charade with TOP BUT THEN TAEYANG SPILLS THE BEANS AND G-DRAGON COMES RUNNING BUT HE’S TOO LATE!!!! The whole thing is extremely intense and intercut with shots of the members singing with their faces made up to look like they’d been brawling and then all together singing around an easy chair with Taeyang wearing what appears to be a Jughead style crown for some reason. It is fantastic.
BigBang performed this on music shows for two solid months racking up copious wins and only getting knocked out of the top slot on teen playlists when TVXQ dropped their masterpiece “Mirotic” at the end of September. It truly was the “Nan Arrayo” vs “You, in my cloudy memory” battle reborn.
The fashion points for this song were deliberately more adult with long menswear inspired vests worn over t-shirts or tank tops. The sophisticated look is contrasted with G-Dragon’s hairstyle. He’d shaved half his head into something of a semi-Mohawk, giving the menswear outfit a punk feel.
The rest of the Stand Up EP is also pretty good, with the exception, in my opinion, of the rare clunker, “Lady.” There’s the “Intro (Stand Up)” written by G-Dragon with Teddy and Kush, which leans into a kind of rolling syncopated rhythm over which the members take turns singing/rapping. Dashi Dance also contributed “Heaven,” which is a very specific kind of boy group song that I associate with Japanese dome tours and is best experienced in the audience as the members travel around the venue waving at fans. TOP, working with Kush, contributed the jazzy “A Good Man.” And then there’s the straight ahead rock song, “Oh My Friend” featuring legendary Korean punk band No Brain. I think “Oh My Friend” is notable because 1) it really gave Daesung a chance to show off his excellent rock frontman voice 2) it pushed further at the boundaries of what BigBang could do musically and 3) pointed to BigBang as an act that was worth collaborating with, even for veteran punk rockers. No Brain even brought BigBang on to an episode of Kim Jung-Eun’s Chocolate—the bad boy idols and the bad boy punks, united on stage.
Following the return of TVXQ to Korea at the tail end of 2008, BigBang took the baton pass and went off to Japan, where they released their first Japanese album Number 1, on October 9, 2008. Let’s just say it’s not their best work. It was distributed by Universal Japan but was under the YG Entertainment Japan label so technically it doesn’t count as their real Japanese debut, which, you know, I’m sympathetic to that argument because I wouldn’t particularly want to remember this album either.
If you remember from the last episode, YG had wanted to try a strategy of marketing in Japan as “foreign singers” who sang in English. Keep in mind that in 2008, there was no existing K-Pop market in Japan and certainly no one template for artists coming from Korea to follow. Rain had a built-in audience from his popular dramas. SM Entertainment and Japan’s Avex had TVXQ and their senior BOA singing in Japanese and competing in the market alongside Japanese artists. Think of a Latin singer like Shakira entering the American market singing in English, it was like that.
YG Entertainment was trying to play it differently, possibly maybe with an eye to a soft launch for BigBang into global English speaking markets. And to that end, again, unlike what had worked for TVXQ and BOA, Number 1 was very disconnected from what was happening in the Japanese market—2008 was the year of songs like GReeeN’s “Kiseki” and Arashi’s “One Love”—but it was looking across the Pacific at a sound about to emerge into the mainstream in America.
There were two electropop songs on Number 1 written by a team of Swedish songwriters, “Number 1,” and “Come Be My Lady.” Now, BigBang had done club music before—I just discussed the Brave Brothers produced song “Last Farewell” in the last episode—but what’s striking about these two tracks is that they were tapping into an electropop sound that had not yet broken big. Britney Spears’s Timbaland-adjacent Blackout album in 2007 was an early vanguard but as Number 1 was being pulled together, Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” was starting its climb to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, where it would finally peak in January 2009, unleashing a slew of American electropop singles over the next few years. “Number 1” and “Come Be My Lady” were tapping into that same Collective Jungian Dance Unconsciousness as Lady Gaga, just on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
The producer of “Just Dance,” RedOne, and the songwriters for those two BigBang tracks—Jimmy Joker, Martin Hanzen, and Mohombi Moupondo—all came out of the same Stockholm scene. Mohombi, who like RedOne was originally from Africa, would even later end up signed to RedOne’s label. He’d also later win a Grammy, which is pretty cool. To my ear, the similar vibe of these two tracks to this emerging Swedish via America electropop sound happening via RedOne in America, is another example of G-Dragon, like all pop culture icons from David Bowie to, indeed, Lady Gaga, being able to spot and tap into the next big trend before it happens.
Jimmy Joker will be returning to our story so keep those Logic synthesizer patches in your ear.
Number 1 never reached anywhere close to number one. While there was some interest in the group from Japanese fans, the 2008 Japanese venture spearheaded by YG Entertainment Japan was something of a shit show. In a promotional event for Number 1, October 22, 2008, G-Dragon explained that because the members had been busy with solo activities it had been difficult to get them all together to record and watching footage from the event, as well as from the mini-Japan tour that followed, it seems clear that they and their team had not really had enough time to properly rehearse. In the showcase performance of “Number 1” on October 22, 2008, TOP, whose verse opens the song, completely misses his cue. Not an auspicious sign.
Worse, on the first date of the tour, in Osaka, on October 29, the music track completely cut out during “Always,” leaving the members to perform acapella. While the performance is fondly remembered by fans as a token of the members’ abilities, it is something that absolutely shouldn’t have happened and again points to a lack of time in preparation.
The Stand Up tour final was on November 1, in Tokyo. Three days later was TOP’s 21st birthday on November 4, 2008. On November 5, he was hospitalized for exhaustion—at least that was the official story. It was shocking only if you hadn’t been paying attention. Watching the concert footage from that November 1st date, TOP looks waxy and, quite frankly, he looks unwell. Whether it was overwork, too much partying with the Korean Flower 4 posse, or an attempt to self-medicate away anxiety and depression, or maybe all three, the hospitalization served as something of a wakeup call for TOP. As he wrote in the 2009 group memoir, Shout the World, (and this is from a fan translation):
“Although my mom would come to our dorm twice a week and prepare food for us, but because of our busy schedule it’s almost impossible to bump into her. While staying at the hospital, for the first time in my life, my mother and I talked for the entire night. At that time I thought about many things, about the love my family gives me and how much they missed it. It was bigger and warmer than I’d thought it was. Because I was sad so I never said it, I regretted not being able to express what I felt in my heart.”
Wise words from a 21-year old Choi Seung-hyun.
Exhaustion or not, the show must go on. As TOP was reconnecting with his mom in the hospital, on November 5, 2008, BigBang released their second Korean album, Remember. Like previous releases, the album showcases the collaborative work of the YG stable of songwriters—Teddy, Kush, Brave Brothers—and continues the group’s movement away from the heavier R&B and urban-influenced songs they debuted with towards a clubbier sound. One of my low-key favorites is from this album, “Wonderful,” which is credited to G-Dragon, Teddy, and Brave Brothers. Kush’s “Twinkle Twinkle” is another favorite. The notable tracks are title track “Sunset Glow” and baby Seungri’s solo, “Strong Baby,” which I’ll return to later.
It’s worth taking a moment here with title track “Sunset Glow” because I think it was a very savvy decision from YG Entertainment head Yang Hyun-Suk. “Sunset Glow” is an updated version of a song by very popular singer Lee Moon-sae. The song was originally released in 1988 but by 2008 had become something of a popular standard. It was a song everyone knew. It was used as a baseball cheering song and, at least according to namu wiki, it remains a karaoke room staple to this day. A good equivalent in an Anglophone context might be something like “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond. (Ba ba ba!)
Why would a popular young boy group do a remake of a song that is essentially Korean comfort food? Well, it was autumn 2008 and as I mentioned earlier in the episode, the global financial crisis had just hit Korea in a big way. It feels like a lifetime ago now but the crisis that began with subprime mortgages in America in 2007, by autumn of 2008 had turned into a global credit crisis. The value of the Korean won fell something like 30% against the dollar, Korea lost 1.2 million jobs, and real GDP fell over 20% in the fourth quarter of 2008 as all that shiny foreign capital that had helped pull the country out of the crisis a decade earlier in 1997 up and vanished.
So you have 1) the plummeting value of the won making it much harder for even a mid-size company to do things like support an artist attempting to break into a huge market like America, 2) American entertainment companies walking back potential investment because they no longer had the funds, 3) major job losses in Korea—and in other markets—which means people don’t have as much disposable income which affects things like music sales, a number that declined globally by about 10% in 2008 and looking at physical media alone was down 31% in America that year.
Call this moment something of a fork in the road. Two roads diverged in the Seoul Woods, to paraphrase Robert Frost, and unfortunately there wasn’t money to travel both.
To the left we see that in 2008 America had taken a shine to Rain; Lost which featured two prominent Korean characters was one of America’s most popular shows; and thanks to the success of movies like Oldboy (2004) and The Host (2006), Korean films had become de rigueur for American film buffs. The costs would be high—especially for an independent company and especially during the entertainment business’s financial belt tightening—but the potential opening was there and the rewards could also be massive.
To the right we have the large core fandom in Korea, the small but growing market for K-Pop boy groups in Japan, and the growing popularity of “Hallyu” around Asia more generally thanks in large part to the accessibility and popularity of Korean television dramas.
JYP Entertainment would veer left. Park Jin-Young had spent time in the United States when he was younger and was comfortable speaking English and with the culture. After his plans to launch a younger sister group to the Wonder Girls fell through in 2008, he decided to go all in on the American market and would bring the Wonder Girls to America in 2009.
YG Entertainment, headed by the more provincial Yang Hyun-Suk, turned right. Although BigBang would still be mentioning a potential 2009 stay in America in interviews into November 2008, those plans would apparently be scrapped in favor of a pan-Asian strategy, focusing on markets closer to home, including a reboot of their entry into the Japanese market, this time with an eye to the broader market in Asia, especially Southeast Asia.
This is the backdrop to “Sunset Glow.”
As the financial crisis was hitting Korea, Yang-Goon went to Lee Moon-Sae and as Lee Moon-Sae told the story in 2011, via a fan translation:
“Yang Hyun Suk called me one day and said, ‘hyung! Big Bang might re-vamp ‘Sunset Glow’ and sing it as their own, is that okay?’, so I just told him, ‘Do all my songs!’, and I gave them permission. I didn’t do much to help. G-Dragon put my name in the rap for me. When I do events, I actually sing the Big Bang version of ‘Sunset Glow.’ That’s the only way I can get the 20-something year olds [to] get up and start clapping!”
If “Lies” and “Haru Haru” had established BigBang at the forefront of trendy music for young people, then “Sunset Glow” was aimed squarely at cementing BigBang in the nation’s heart as their representative boy group.
Rather than the trendy electropop or YG’s representative R&B sound, “Sunset Glow” has a campier Eurobeat feel to it, a pleasant midtempo track perfect for an audience of uncles and aunties to clap along to.
The video for “Sunset Glow” showcases this domestic focus, with a storyline that has the fresh-faced members cheerfully gathering up ordinary folks around Seoul and getting them on a party bus to Mallipo Beach, a tourist community which had been deeply affected by a terrible oil spill that had happened the year before. It was shot guerilla style and with a vibrancy to it that positions BigBang not as snotty teen punks but as the nation’s loveable and charming little brothers.
Despite “Sunset Glow” being a something of a departure from the group’s previous songs, it won on Music Bank and Inkigayo and they performed it solidly for two months into the end-of-the-year television festival season.
The stage performance was as sweet and cute as the MV, with the main choreography point coming in the bridge where the members all line up and turn to first the right, then the left, bring one hand up to their mouths to emphasize the “Ah Ah Ah” line. The main fashion point were the sparkly sneakers all the members wore.
With TVXQ returned triumphant from Japan with their megahit “Mirotic”, the end of the year stages in 2008 were a lot of fun. The SBS Music Festival on December 29, 2008, featured TVXQ’s Junsu and BigBang’s Taeyang on dueling pianos a la Donald and Daffy Duck in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. G-Dragon and TOP also appeared in a special collaboration with popular Korean rappers Dynamic Duo that ended in a celebratory cover of CB Mass’s “Jincha” that had the entire artists viewing section on their feet dancing. You can even spot a debut era SHINee, including baby Taemin, in the crowd with huge smiles on their faces.
For the KBS Gayo on December 30, 2008, BigBang performed “Haru Haru” with a full orchestra. And then for the MBC Gayo on December 31, 2008, BigBang had a massive showcase, including member solo duet stages with the Wonder Girls.
2009 dawned with solo promotions from Seungri, who had just turned 18 years old in December. 18 years old. According to interviews at the time, “Strong Baby” had originally been written for the long-rumored YG Girl Group meant to be a counterpart to BigBang, but it had been decided that it worked better for Seungri. Is there any truth to that? Who can say.
“Strong Baby” was intended to break Seungri’s image as the cute baby of the group. In the tradition of youngest siblings everywhere, he appeared to desperately want to catch up with the older members and be thought of as sexy, not cute. “Strong Baby” certainly is sexy. The songwriter who worked with G-Dragon on “Strong Baby” was a guy named Bae Jin-Ryeol aka JR Groove.
Bae Jin-Ryeol was not part of the YG Family; in fact, he was a classical music composer who—whether to test his abilities or simply earn some cash—had submitted a songwriting demo to a bunch of K-Pop agencies and ended up over at JYP Entertainment, where he wrote for Rain among others. Important to our story, Bae Jin-Ryeol had previously worked with Rain on Rain’s super sexy mega-hit “Rainism,” the title track of Rain’s album Rainism released in October 2008 and which had promptly been banned for including the lyric “magic stick” which the censors thought probably maybe referred to his penis. “Strong Baby” is essentially “Rainism”’s little brother.
So, that’s the background we’re going into with baby Seungri’s big image-changing solo song.
Was it appropriate for a fresh 18-year old to be singing lyrics like, “Let’s make love tonight 오늘밤 내 눈을 가려줘” which translates to “Let’s make love tonight, cover my eyes tonight”? You be the judge. But did it get attention? Yes, yes it did.
Perez Hilton, the infamous American gossip monger and key booster of online content in this era, even covered the release on January 9, 2009, posting “Y’all know we love us some good K-Pop, but this really transcends the genre.”
“Strong Baby” gets compared to Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back” for good reason. “Strong Baby” absolutely does echo that sleazy EDM, just a little bondage please vibe of “Sexy Back.” Interjected throughout the song is the hooky syncopated line “Crack Crack Crack,” which is accompanied by a smacking dance move, again implying something of a just a little pain please daddy vibe. Hilariously, the official lyric had to be changed to “Clap Clap Clap” for television appearances because the censors thought “Crack” referred to the drug, crack, and not because a just-turned-18-year-year-old was implying he was going to smack some lady’s booty.
The “Strong Baby” MV features G-Dragon in the Timbaland hype man role, showing up for the intro before Seungri is shown passed out in bed, in rumpled evening wear, with a mysterious red rose by his head. Seungri is then shown in a sharp suit being driven to some mysterious location populated by women in Eyes Wide Shut masks except for one woman in a red dress who is bare faced. He follows her, they make out, and then—in a point that was singled out for the media—he flashes his abs. (He’s barely 18, remember.)
Seungri’s styling for his music show performances was a sharp three piece suit with a giant red rose boutonniere. He was clearly aiming for, again, that Justin Timberlake in “Sexy Back” vibe. A debonair, adult, GQ, high roller vibe. Because he’s still a weedy teenager, even in his sharp three piece suit, the feel is more prom date than champagne room. The prom date feeling is only further emphasized by some of the hover hands choreography he does with the female dancers. Listeners, Seungri tried his hardest but he was still quite cute and baby-faced. Imagine a much hornier Sexy Zone and you’ll get the picture.
The “Strong Baby” promotions ran through the first part of 2009, alongside the other members’ solo work and the group’s annual Big Show concert in Seoul. The song was very well received by fans and the public more generally with Seungri even winning on M Countdown and Inkigayo into February.
At this point, spring 2009, Wonder Girls, BigBang, and TVXQ were essentially “The Big Three” of K-Pop. As I mentioned earlier, the Wonder Girls, at the top of their game in Korea, and while the American entertainment industry was still recovering from a recession, were shipped off to Los Angeles by JYP. TVXQ was about to implode with three members filing a lawsuit against SM to terminate their contracts (see my series on that for more information). That would leave BigBang as the Big One left standing.
Again, as I mentioned earlier, there had been some teasing from YG of sending the group and/or just Taeyang to America but with the global economic crisis YG’s plans changed. Even Se7en finally hung up his heeleys in LA after releasing a single digital single, feat. Lil Kim, on March 10, 2009, and headed home.
Meanwhile, YG Entertainment had begun the soft launch of their long awaited lady counterpart to BigBang; they would be called 2NE1. They were introduced to the public in March 2009, with an extremely catchy collaboration single with BigBang called “Lollipop.”
“Lollipop” and the MV are worth taking a moment on because everything about it feels like a massive signpost indicating the road K-Pop was traveling on, an over-the-top candy colored road, paved with very commercial hook songs. Literally commercial in this case, as “Lollipop” was a CF song for LG Electronics’s new flip phone.
“Lollipop” was written by Teddy, who leaned deep into the emerging electropop genre. There’s this twinkling synthesizer that hits on the offbeats that is just like honey in my ears. And the “Lolli-Lolli-Pop” “Pop Pop” lyric was right in line with this new genre of K-Pop hook song. If “Tell Me” was the advance warning, Girls Generation’s “Gee,” released in January 2009, was the opening volley, then “Lollipop” was the killing blow.
The MV was directed by Seo Hyun-Seung, who had been around the scene for a few years but had come to prominence with his work with rap group Drunken Tiger. Since then he’d directed videos for other hip hop acts like Dynamic Duo but had also worked with YG Entertainment acts like Lexy, Se7en, and Stony Skunk. He also did Uhm Jung-Hwa’s pop art “Disco” and Seungri’s black-and-white Eyes Wide Shut “Strong Baby.” His videos not only had won awards but he was considered one of the country’s best music video directors, if not the best music video director. His trademarks were the use of very quick cuts, bold visuals—especially his use of real sets not CGI—extreme close-ups, and his love of cars. As G-Dragon explained to American hip-hop magazine XXL in an interview posted December 10, 2012:
“Suh Hyun-seung is really, just crazy. He’s a real outsider. Kind of an otaku. He’s not social. Doesn’t meet a lot of people. He’s not driven by money. If he’s shooting a video, he’ll listen to the song, and if he likes it, he’ll work on it. He needs to have a vision. He needs to have a creative connection with the artist. I feel like a lot of other artists, even though they want to work with him, they can’t. [Suh] is the type that if he listens to your music, and doesn’t like it, he won’t answer you.”
In “Lollipop,” the BigBang members were dressed in radioactively bright colors and danced with the equally brightly dressed 2NE1 members on a set so colorful and vibrant it looked a rainbow had a bad case of the beer shits. Interspersed throughout were intense closeup shots showcasing each member’s individual charms. Particularly memorable in this era is Sandara Park aka Dara in her ludicrously tall palm tree hair. And presiding over it all like a demented tin soldier is G-Dragon in bright pink coveralls and wildly permed hair topped off with an oversized conductors hat.
Believe me when I say, it is an incredible work of art and, in fact, I demand you stop this podcast right here and go watch it.
So, while “Lollipop” was blowing up in Korea, and the new girl group seemed set to hit big, on April 30, 2009, YG announced that G-Dragon needed a mental health break and that BigBang were going on a short hiatus…while they picked up and decamped for an extended stay in Japan. This would not only allow YG Entertainment to devote everything to 2NE1’s official debut single, “Fire,” released May 6, 2009, but was a crucial investment of putting the time into the Japanese market for BigBang. Over the course of their extended three month stay, you can even hear the growth in Japanese language skill from Taeyang, Daesung, and Seungri.
The extended stay had worked for TVXQ even as it had pushed the group to the breaking point. As BigBang worked for a proper Japanese debut with major label Universal Music Japan, this time they would follow the TVXQ strategy to the letter, releasing two singles in quick succession. The first of these was “My Heaven,” a remake of “Heaven,” which I mentioned earlier in the episode was a song they’d done with Japanese DJ Dashi Dance and a song that sounds very much like a J-Pop boy group song. In a nod to BigBang’s focus on digital distribution and pivot to the Asian market, this single would also be made available concurrently in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and mainland China.
Again, things did not begin auspiciously. At BigBang’s debut event held at the now-closed VenusFort shopping mall in Odaiba, Tokyo, the Japanese ground team, perhaps remembering the previous year’s promotions, had prepared a modest 400 person capacity space. Reminiscent of the Bae Yong-Joon riot in 2004, 2000 fans showed up, overwhelming staff. Despite an attempt to limit the number of fans allowed inside, the crowd pushed through and rushed the stage, creating a dangerous potential crowd crush situation and the event was canceled except for a brief performance of the new single to placate the fans.
“My Heaven” did respectably on the Oricon sales chart for the week, ranking in at number 3 with about 26,000 copies sold in Japan, coming in right behind girl group AKB48. “My Heaven” is sweet but the coupling track, “Emotion,” is more in the vein of “Lollipop” or “Number 1” and points at the direction that G-Dragon was getting interested in. Despite the heavy vocal processing on the recording—or maybe because of it—“Emotion” was also the track that the group sang acapella on Japanese variety shows, again following in the footsteps of their industry seniors, TVXQ, who also showed off their musical skill singing acapella on Japanese television. There’s a reason second generation Korean idol groups developed a reputation as skilled performers.
Two weeks later, on July 8, 2009, BigBang released one of my personal all time favorite songs of all time, “Gara Gara Go.” You know we gotta do it again, right?
The central thesis put forth in the lyrics is this: BigBang rocks. Specifically, that BigBang rocks the night. And come on, are you going to argue with them??
Musically, the song builds on the electropop sound they’d been dabbling in. The lyrics are credited to a mix of people including Big Ron, who was a rapper signed to Universal Japan at the time, and the music to our old friends… Jimmy Joker and future Grammy winner Mohombi Moupondo. The boys from Sweden bust out their logic patches and dial in the main hook—buh buh buh buh-buh… which just relentlessly pounds its way through the song. The song is so addictive I can’t listen to “Gara Gara Go” once without listening to it like five times on repeat. GD and TOP each get a rap verse and while Daesung and Seungri trade lines in the sung verses and Taeyang handles the pre-chorus. It’s not exactly a showcase for musical or artistic ability but it’s very fun and very catchy.
The video, again, continues in the direction of “Lollipop,” with its use of very bright colors with a kind of cartoony pop art look. Again, each member is dressed in a different and very vivid primary color. The background is simple, a neon backdrop that makes the members look like they’re filming inside a pachinko machine and the video is full of quick and clever editing. At one point, the screen is even wiped to a new cut in time with hand gestures from Seungri. Unfortunately for all of us, YG Entertainment has never updated their 480p version of this glorious video on YouTube.
To make up for the canceled debut event, on release day, BigBang performed a free concert for 8,000 fans in the Tokyo rain in Yoyogi Park and then they hit the promotional circuit on television, including performing on Music Station for the first time, and a special live event from Mezamashi in which 10,000 fans applied for 3,000 tickets.
There’s a few things to note about this extended PR push in Japan. 1) After that initial 3 month stay, BigBang went back to Korea so by the time “Gara Gara Go” hits, they—like TVXQ before them—end up shuttling back and forth across the East Sea/Sea of Japan. 2) BigBang were essentially being sold in Japan as a vocal-dance group, not idols. They were expected to be able to perform. 3) They were being sold as hugely popular in Korea, which was true, but the popularity was not taken seriously at first by the Japanese label, which is how they ended up with the potentially dangerous situation at VenusFort. And 4) again, much like how TVXQ landed in Japan at the same time that domestic boy group KAT-TUN was beginning an unbelievable run of popularity--we’re talking debut at Tokyo Dome level here--BigBang landed in Japan for a major label debut push the same year that domestic boy group Arashi began their meteoric rise to the top of Japanese entertainment.
Why is that last one important? Because Arashi’s rise was the boy group story in Japan in 2009. For example, “Gara Gara Go” sold a respectable amount, again about 20,000ish copies, in the range of “My Heaven,”coming in at number five for the week. But literally the week before “Gara Gara Go” was released, Arashi’s third single of the year, “Everything,” sold over 340,000 copies. Arashi would then go on to have four of the top five best selling singles of 2009. There could not have been a worse time to try and make a PR splash with the biggest boy group in Korea but unlike the previous venture, this time, with the help of Universal Music Japan, BigBang did manage to establish a toehold.
And then tragedy hit the group. On August 10, 2009, the van carrying Daesung, his manager, and stylist back from shooting an episode of Family Outing skidded off the highway and slammed into the guardrail. The accident footage is awful; the car was completely totaled. Daesung fractured his face and his ribs. As he described in an interview from March 2010, (this a fan translation from sjay.x @ BBVIP.net):
“I can’t remember the accident. I was at the hospital when I opened my eyes. When I regained consciousness, my lower back hurt so bad that I couldn’t walk and I couldn’t smell anything. But the thing that scared me the most was that my voice had become like a monster’s.”
Daesung would stay in the hospital for a month and it would take his voice even longer to recover. The Japanese tour scheduled for the fall would have to be canceled.
The next day, August 11, 2009, G-Dragon released the title track from his long-awaited first solo album, Heartbreaker. According to news reports at the time, the video clocked a then unprecedented 550,000 views in the first day and the song topped online music charts in Korea. And when the album dropped on his birthday, a week later, August 18, the tracks filled the online music charts, too. On Cyworld Music, where young people listened to music, his album was essentially the top ten tracks.
For “Heartbreaker,” the title track, G-Dragon brought back, yes, Swedish producer Jimmy Joker. “Heartbreaker,” like “Gara Gara Go,” is built from layered synthesizer patches over a relentless four on the floor rhythm track. There’s a sneaky triplet feel overlaid over the 4/4 giving the entire song an even more frenetic energy. The lyrics are calling out a woman for trifling with his feelings, with the accusatory chorus: you’re a heart-heart-heart-heart-breaker. That part was also the fan chant…
It is very catchy.
The MV was directed by Seo Hyun-Seung, who did “Lollipop” and, again, makes striking use of quick cuts and those bold visuals. G-Dragon’s look in this MV launched a thousand K-Pop It Boys and is still being used as inspiration to this day. His hair was bleached blond and straightened from the perm into something of 1970s style shaggy bob, with his bangs flopping sultrily over his smoky eyes.
The video is packed full of apple imagery, symbolizing innocence perhaps or love. At one point in the video, G-Dragon is even tearing into an apple while being squeezed by silky folds of fabric on all sides.
And the rest of the album is just as good. “A Boy,” a beautiful and introspective track looking back at G-Dragon’s past written with Korean-American Choice37, who we’ll definitely be hearing from again, opens the album and has G-Dragon rapping over his own looped falsetto. “Breathe” is a pure Eurobeat EDM club banger written with Jimmy Joker; “Butterfly” is a sweet, lilting love song built around an acoustic guitar loop; then there were some throwback YG Family hiphop tracks featuring Kush, Teddy, Taeyang, and new YG Family members Dara and CL from 2NE1. “The Leaders,” in particular, which featured verses from both CL and Teddy is pure uncut YG Family.
And then there was “Gossip Man,” which featured a very popular Korean singer from the 1990s, Kim Gun-Mo. The lyrics to “Gossip Man,” and translation here from BigBang Fansite: The One and Only:
Hey, man
오늘의 가십거리들은 또 뭔데
하루도 잠잠할 수가 없다
왜 난 왜
Everybody, attention, please
I’m Gossip Man
hey man~ what is todays gossip
I cant be quiet for even a day~
Why~ Why me~
everybody attention please
i am gossip man
In a later interview from 2012 in K& Magazine [Translation from GodLovesRice on Tumblr], G-Dragon would reflect on this era saying, “When I was producing the first solo album, i just wanted to convey some messages through it. The message was ’ no blood will come out even if I am pinned.’”
And the young G-Dragon had good reason to want to put on a tough exterior. He’d been through the ringer with media for nonsense before and he was about to become embroiled in yet another controversy.
This one began, of all places, on the now defunct microblogging site Me2Day, which was essentially a Korean Twitter before getting bought out by Naver and then eventually shelved in 2014. You can still find Me2Day posts archived in ancient update accounts on Twitter, Tumblr, and LiveJournal. YG Entertainment, with their “find the fans where they are” strategy, saw Me2Day where the young people were congregating and encouraged their talents to sign up in 2009, starting with 2NE1 and followed by G-Dragon.
The seeds of the “Heartbreaker” controversy are planted right here. Okay, so, G-Dragon and BigBang were already incredibly popular as I hope I’ve demonstrated. So, when he joined Me2Day, a horde of VIPs joined too. According to NamuWiki, so take it with a grain of salt, more VIPs joined with G-Dragon than they’d had users in the previous two years. The influx of new users overwhelmed the servers and upended the existing Me2Day ecosystem by acting like… online Twitter stans. They spammed G-Dragon’s picture and went after anyone who even mildly critiqued him. The existing users likely found this to be extremely annoying so when G-Dragon uploaded a 30 second clip of the rap to “Heartbreaker” as pre-release promo, it was like taking a match to dry kindling.
G-Dragon had already been through a round of plagiarism accusations in the media with “Lies” and it was deja vu all over again as the exact same playbook was pulled out for “Heartbreaker.” 1) Annoyed netizens begin grumbling about alleged plagiarism. 2) The media reports on the netizens complaints. 3) The record companies are compelled to step in after the media blows it up. 4) YG finally releases a statement weeks later. 5) The whole thing eventually blows over because there was nothing to the charges and the song becomes a hit. 6) Give a big FU to the media by collabing with the artists you were accused of plagiarizing.
The charge this time was that “Heartbreaker,” released in August 2009, was accused of ripping off Flo Rida’s megahit “Right Round,” which had been released in February 2009. And everything hinges on that 30 second rap uploaded to Me2Day, which, to be fair to the annoyed Me2Day users, does have G-Dragon rapping with a similar flow to Flo.
One of the reasons I wanted to highlight Jimmy Joker so early in this episode is because of this incident. I hope I made the case that G-Dragon was aware of and very musically interested in what was happening with electropop coming out of Sweden via the United States and that he’d begun dabbling with genre (and working with Jimmy Joker) well before Lady Gaga blew up in the mainstream and certainly well before Flo Rida released the Dr. Luke produced “Right Round.”
So, is it possible—or even likely—that G-Dragon modeled his rap in the verses after Flo’s in “Right Round”? Sure. Is that plagiarism? No. As with “Lies,” in fact, as with all the great pop music trailblazers, as with Seo Taiji, G-Dragon took a sound he was interested in and molded it into a song that would be a hit like nothing the Korean public had heard before. While “Heartbreaker” is pulling from the same palate of sounds as “Right Round” and the emerging American electropop genre, the songs sound nothing alike, taken as a whole.
G-Dragon, clearly upset at being put in the crosshairs again, posted the full track of “Gossip Man” to Me2Day.
It must have been some comfort that he swept the music shows in front of very supportive fans during promotions for the album during September. He’d be back on the circuit in October with “A boy,” dressed in a punked out school boy uniform with his blond hair permed into a full Shirly Temple halo of curls. But behind the scenes, G-Dragon was struggling. In 2011, on SBS Night After Night, he would speak about the controversy publically for the first time saying (translation via BigBang Updates):
“The only thing I can do as a singer is to show a better stage next time instead of writing an apology. I didn’t do anything wrong, but I ignored family and friends’ calls and I felt like I had done something wrong. I was depressed, and all the attacks hurt me. I wondered what made them think those things about me. But I felt like I had to move on.”
Even for a guy trying to put on a hard front, getting told to kill yourself by hundreds of netizens isn’t an easy thing to brush aside.
The “Heartbreaker” plagiarism charges ultimately came to nothing but the stench of the controversy would continue to tail G-Dragon.
Flo Rida, himself, seemed taken aback by the controversy. He would visit Korea in October 2009 to perform for the American troops stationed there and must have been shocked to find himself a household name thanks to G-Dragon. Flo would eventually end up doing a remix of “Heartbreaker” with G-Dragon released in March 2010, even asking G-Dragon to appear with him on May 22, 2010 at his concert in Seoul.
Flo’s comments speak for themselves:
If there is a silver lining to all of this, it’s G-Dragon and BigBang coming to the attention of their peers in the American industry.
Meanwhile, while G-Dragon’s life was imploding, BigBang released a full Japanese compilation album, BigBang; Daesung returned to work in October 10, 2009, making his first appearance back at the Dream Concert. His voice would still take some time to recover; TOP begin filming for the big budget drama Iris; and Taeyang release a new panty-dropping solo single, “Where U At?”
Oh yeah, and JYP and the Wonder Girls get to number 76 on the American Billboard Hot 100 with “Nobody,” on October 31, 2009.
November has the group doing back to back drama themes in Korea and Japan, with the haunting “Hallelujah” for TOP’s Iris in Korea and the soaring “声を聞かせて” in Japan for the drama おひとりさま.
The year would end in a frenzy of promotions and work. Taeyang released the instantly meme-worthy and panty-dropping song to end all panty-dropping songs: “Wedding Dress.” And the group performed at a full slate of end of the year music shows in Korea and Japan, even winning the best newcomer award at the 51st Japan Record Awards.
As 2009 ended and 2010 began, YG teased upcoming solo albums from TOP and Daesung and BigBan—along with TVXQ, still embroiled in their lawsuit—would be appointed cultural ambassadors for Korea.
And nothing went wrong again ever… just kidding! We’ll leave BigBang here for this episode, preparing for an upcoming Japan-Korea concert tour and YG teasing a full group album definitely, absolutely, that summer. And we can always trust him, right folks?
I’ll send you off with Daesung’s gentle “Cotton Candy,” a digital single released January 26, 2010.