Episode 90: M.A.D.E.—Don’t Give Up the Ship (2010-2011)
This is the fourth 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.
The third episode—A Road Not Taken (2008-2010)—covers the group’s first period of K-Pop dominance, their push into the Japanese market, and the beginnings of their solo careers. Includes discussion of “Haru Haru,” “Sunset Glow,” “Gara Gara Go,” “Strong Baby,” and “Heartbreaker.”
This episode will cover their solo and unit works from 2010, leading into 2011’s group comeback, their difficulties in the back half of 2011, and ending with a triumphant return at the 2011 EMAs.
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.
I’ve discussed the Bae Yong-Joon aunties many, many times because their erasure in the “K-Pop narrative” renders the narrative incoherent. You can read more about the aunties and Jang Geun-Suk in a post I wrote over here.
The late R&B singer Wheesung gets a mention in this episode. He sadly passed away earlier this year but was a crucial part of the pre-idol era YG Family. Jeun Goon, who would go on to work with the next generation YG Family R&B singer, Taeyang, was a frequent collaborator.
To show how BigBang were already starting to move past the “idol” label, they were invited to the Pentaport Rock Festival (which does not cater to the idol fan crowd) in 2011. Here’s a fan video showing GD and his fresh buzz cut…
The songs played are:
“Cafe” by BigBang, performed live in Seoul, April 26, 2015.
“Promise” by A.N. Jell
[Hook mix: “Sorry Sorry” by Super Junior; “Bo Peep Bo Peep” by T-ARA; “Ring Ding Dong” by SHINee; “Abracadabra” by Brown Eyed Girls; “Heartbreaker” by G-Dragon; “Bad Girl, Good Girl” by Miss A; “Bingeul Bingeul” by U-Kiss; “Mister” by KARA]
“A Fool’s Only Tears” performed by Daesung and Seungri as part of a ballad medley, Big Show 2010
“Storm feat. Sean, Masta Wu, G-Dragon” by Perry (Official MV)
“Turn it Up” by T.O.P. (Official MV)
“I Need A Girl” by Taeyang (Official MV)
“I Need A Girl” by Taeyang, performed live in 2023
“Beautiful Hangover” by BigBang (Official MV)
“Tell Me” by JinuSean featuring Uhm Jung-Hwa [Anything feat. Uhm Jung-Hwa is a delight! Check out a 2015 live performance of the classic song!]
“Intro” by GD & T.O.P.
“Bangin’ the Beat (Bangapella)” by DJ Assault
“High High” by GD & T.O.P. [Check out the banned MV!]
“It Hurts” by 2NE1 (Official MV)
“Oh Yeah” by GD & T.O.P. featuring Park Bom [The live performances of this song are all my favorite.]
“When I Think of You” by Janet Jackson (Official MV)
“Don’t Leave” by GD & T.O.P. [Check out the banned MV!]
“Baby Good Night” by GD & T.O.P. (Official MV)
“Bucky Done Gun” by M.I.A. (Official MV)
“Knock Out” by GD & T.O.P. [Check out the banned MV!]
“What Can I Do” by Seungri (Official MV)
“Tonight” by BigBang (Official MV)
“Tonight (I’m Fucking/Loving You)” by Enrique Iglesias (Official MV)
“Players Anthem” by B-Free
“Fat Girl” by DJ DOC (45RPM)
“Cafe” by BigBang
“Stupid Liar” by BigBang, Alive Tour in Seoul
“Love Song” by BigBang (Official MV)
“Baby Don’t Cry” by Daesung
Welcome to the Idolcast. I remember. The last time we did this a year ago. Hit it!
Our opening song today is “Cafe,” performed live April 26, 2015, with Band 6, at the opening dates of the M.A.D.E. concert tour in Seoul. “Cafe” remains one of my favorite tracks thanks to its unusual vocal arrangement and extremely soulful verse from Daesung.
This episode is part four of a series looking at the creation of BigBang’s magnum opus, what I consider to be the pinnacle of K-Pop artistry, M.A.D.E., and I recommend you listen to the first three episodes before this one to get the full context of the story but for those of you just joining me, when we left off in the last episode, it was early 2010 and G-Dragon was wrapping up promotions for his solo album Heartbreaker and BigBang had just completed a concert tour, which had been postponed from 2009 because Daesung had been seriously injured as a passenger in a car accident—like requiring a lengthy hospital stay seriously injured.
The members of BigBang had spent much of 2009 focused on their own individual solo works, which were all doing very well, as well as their official major label Japanese debut, which had also done very well. But at this point, BigBang’s last Korean comeback as a group had been well over a year previous at the end of 2008 with the comforting, financial crisis-era title track “Sunset Glow” and fans at home in Korea were growing impatient. To that end, Yang Hyun-Suk aka Yang-Goon aka YG, founder and CEO of YG Entertainment, had promised them in early 2010 that BigBang was definitely, absolutely for sure coming back that summer. And we definitely trust him, right, friends?
But before we get back to the story of BigBang, let’s pause here to take a look at what was happening around them in the K-pop industry at large. As we hit 2010, the domestic teen pop market in Korea was beginning to take the first steps towards its transformation into the export-driven brand that we now know as “K-Pop.”
In the last episode, I discussed K-Pop’s “Big 3” groups as things stood at the end of 2008—TVXQ, Wonder Girls, and BigBang. Now, just over a year later, demonstrating how quickly things can change in the K-Pop industry, TVXQ had completely imploded (and see my episodes on the break-up and reformation of TVXQ for more information on that), Wonder Girls had stalled out in America due, in part, to the global financial crisis, and, as I just mentioned, BigBang as a group hadn’t had a Korean comeback since the end of 2008. So, with the Big 3 groups essentially off the board in Korea, this is what was happening in K-Pop.
If you recall from previous episodes, the Japanese market was (and is) very important to the Korean music industry not only because of its size (the second largest in the world after the United States) but also because at the time it served as a major hub for distribution across Asia more generally. It was a gateway market. BigBang’s major label singles in Japan were simultaneously made available digitally in important Asian markets like Taiwan and the Philippines. But it’s important to note that at this point, the late 2000s, there wasn’t really a quote “K-Pop market.” Not in Japan, not anywhere. Korean artists BoA and TVXQ—both from SM Entertainment—had been received in Japan as part of the domestic market. Think of a Latin artist like Shakira entering the American market singing in English. It was kind of like that.
But there was a market for Korean wave product, aka Hallyu. Yes, I’m talking about my favorite cohort, the Bae Yong Joon aunties. Women of… “a certain age” had fallen hard for handsome young men coming over from Korea and at this point in 2009-2010ish, they were fueling a huge Korean wave boom of music from Korean dramas. The Korean adaptation of Boys Over Flowers had aired in Japan in the summer of 2009 and boosted the profiles of both SS501 and Kim Hyun-Joong—you may remember him from the last episode as part of K-Pop’s own elite “F4” along with members of TVXQ and BigBang. This was followed by the drama You’re Beautiful, which aired in Japan in 2010 and sent breakout star Jang Geun-Suk along with the K-Pop rock group CNBLUE into superstar status across Asia.
Here’s the important part: parallel to this Hallyu push of pretty boys aimed at the aunties, in the fall of 2010, DSP’s popular girl K-Pop group KARA and SM Entertainment’s mega-girl group, Girls Generation would lead a knock-out one-two debut punch in Japan and kick off what would be called the “Girls-Pop” trend, paving the way for a broad swathe of Korean girl groups from across the East Sea/Sea of Japan. Brown Eyed Girls, 2NE1, 4Minute, and Sistar all followed in their wake. The Korean girl groups differed from their Japanese counterparts in that--like TVXQ and BigBang before them--they were lauded for their skills in singing and performance. The Japanese press noted at the time that these Korean girl groups were unexpectedly pulling a large audience of young women. And this was notable for two reasons. 1) because girl group fans in Japan had traditionally leaned more heavily male… and 2) as I said above, previously, Korean cultural exports in Japan had been consumed almost exclusively by aunties. Teen girls were a brand new market demographic for the Korean culture industry in Japan.
Feeding this push of Girls Pop was a surge of “hook songs,” which I discussed in the previous episode. Girls Generation exploded with “Gee” in early 2009, which took key elements of the Wonder Girls massive hit “Tell Me” and made them even more so. The most important part of the song was the… hook, an easily sing-alongable, easily identifiable to non-Korean speakers phrase coupled with an insanely catchy melody. This was combined with cleanly executed, unison choreography that lent itself to imitation by fans, influencers, and TV variety show hosts alike. The export-facing Girls Pop formula was then picked up by domestic-facing Korean boy group Super Junior (who deserve their own episode series) for their 2009 rebirth a few months later. And the hook song trend blew through the industry becoming what many, myself included, consider the signature sound of K-Pop.
But there were other musical trends in Korean pop music during this era besides the hook song. There was the soft rock of groups like the aforementioned CN Blue, a retro doo-wop sound, as well as straight ahead hip hop. But the extreme poppiness-—dare I say J-Poppiness—of the hook songs was something novel in Korea and there was a real excitement around the K-Pop genre at this time. The general Korean public even became caught up in the novelty with things like the television singing competition show Superstar K (domestically popular acts like Kang Seung-Yoon from the group Winner, among others, got their starts as contestants on Superstar K).
In short, while the Big 3 of the last episode had stepped off stage, K-Pop abhors a vacuum and in their place rose a new crop of acts at the forefront, in particular: Girls Generation, 2NE1, and 2PM, JYP Entertainment’s recently debuted boy group known at the time for popularizing the beefy “beast idol” trope
Another important thing to flag right here at the top of the episode is the growth of YouTube, specifically, as a global streaming platform. As I mentioned in earlier episodes of this series, YG Entertainment had kept to the forefront of Internet distribution of music and videos in Korea. The initial BigBang pre-debut reality series was even streamed online back in 2006, the first K-Pop group to do so. Rather than try to offload physical CDs in a dying market, BigBang had grown domestically via platforms like CyWorld, where young people were actually listening to music. Now, YG was beginning to pay attention to global platforms and in 2009 began uploading official music videos to an emerging global video platform: YouTube.
YouTube in 2010 was quickly becoming a global hub of not just user generated videos hoping to go viral like the inescapable “Charlie Bit My Finger” but also of music videos. MTV had years ago transitioned away from music videos to reality TV programming but by 2010, thanks to YouTube, videos were officially back in the mainstream American conversation with Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s explosive music video for “Telephone,” released in March 2010, as the tipping point.
Alongside the official uploads of music videos, YouTube also played host to hours and hours of fan subtitled K-Pop content. Variety shows, dramas, and music show clips helpfully subtitled in English significantly lowered the bar to entry for fans who didn’t speak Korean. Rather than having to learn to navigate a complex and subterranean world of locked LiveJournal communities, improperly timed subtitle files, and Korean language sites like Clubbox that hosted raw files, if a fan anywhere in the world wanted to see, for example, a video of Super Junior performing “Sorry Sorry” on Music Bank, March 13, 2009, by March 14, 2009, YouTube user Cutie78Fish had you covered. Just click a link and you’re in business.
It’s important to note here that this easy spread of content was very different from how Japanese music companies approached growing interest from foreign fans. Up until this point, foreign fans of Asian pop culture and music viewed Korean and Japanese content on a fairly equal playing field. Anecdotally I know fans of mid-2000s J-Pop who enjoyed the early Wonder Girls material without realizing it was Korean. There was an underground and locked Asian pop culture fan economy of files and information. Japanese music companies, who did not need the export market and were very conservative about the adoption of the Internet in sharing music, either ignored this growing cohort of foreign fans or took action to copyright strike any uploaded content from sites like YouTube. Until very recently, J-Pop videos uploaded to YouTube would even be region blocked to prevent foreign fans from viewing them.
Korean music companies, who were actively looking for new export markets, took the opposite approach, using the easy spread of content to bring the foreign fans out in the open. And with YouTube enabling the spread of music videos well outside of Korea, visually striking music videos were once again becoming a very important part of driving interest in musical acts.
Potential new K-Pop fans across the globe weren’t necessarily able to buy Korean CDs or stream songs on MelOn or CyWorld but they could click into YouTube and get carried away with the incredible videos starting to emerge from the Korean pop industry. Super Junior’s “Sorry Sorry” MV was posted to YouTube in 2009 and features the handsome boy group shot in black and white, dressed in suits, performing one of the all time catchiest dances in K-Pop; the candy colored BigBang x 2NE1 video for “Lollipop,” posted to YouTube a few months after its March 2009 debut was another early adopter. The comments sections for the videos were a melting pot of Korean, Japanese, English, Indonesian, Tagalog, Russian, and so on.
Along with YouTube, iTunes was also becoming a global distribution platform. Songs from many, many countries were being made easily available to broad global audiences for the first time and this included K-Pop. By 2010, while music sales overall had decreased about 13% globally in 2009, digital sales had actually increased 9% and iTunes had grown to take about 25% of that total digital market--which means it was a big deal when BigBang member Taeyang’s 2010 solo album Solar got to number two on the iTunes R&B charts in America, which I will get to later in the episode.
It’s important to also note here that the 2008 financial crisis which I discussed in the previous episode had not only caused a meltdown in the global economy but had also brought with it a shakeup in Korean tech and media companies. New regulations were put in place that encouraged the emergence of tech and media conglomerates along with a deregulation of advertising. It’s not all that relevant for what I want to talk about in this episode but just keep in the back of your mind that while K-Pop songs are starting to reach fans globally, at home in Korea, the music industry was increasingly seen as fodder for these massive tech companies rather than as an artistic end in itself. Music production as a loss leader. In other words, the push by Korean tech for Hallyu to grow globally wasn’t just a push for soft power but also a push by these tech companies to grow their user bases. We’re seeing their end goal in action right now with Weverse.
But going back to 2010, let’s look at MelOn, for example, which had switched from a music rental to a streaming service in 2009. MelOn was a creation of SK Telecom and was available to subscribers of SK Telecom at discount rates. SK had also acquired the label Seoul Records in 2005, which had been renamed to LOEN in 2008. SK transferred MelOn to LOEN in 2008, the same year singer IU debuted under LOEN Entertainment, and who is, in a complete coincidence I’m sure, the most awarded singer at the MelOn Music Awards. So already in 2010, the Korean music and tech industries are becoming entwined.
This era is also where we start to see the emergence of the “K-Pop Industry” as something separate from the domestic Korean music industry. Up until this point, a hit song was just that--a hit song. November 2009 saw the first MNET Asian Music Awards also known as MAMA (Song of the Year was 2NE1’s “I Don’t Care” and album of the year was G-Dragon’s Heartbreaker) and December 2009 saw the first broadcast Melon Music Awards (Song of the Year was Girls Generation’s “Gee” and album of the year was G-Dragon’s Heartbreaker). These were genuinely popular with the Korean public and the K-Pop fan community but soon these two audiences would begin to decouple (the domestic and global K-Pop fan communities would also eventually fracture but that would come much later).
Okay, with that out of the way, let me introduce new listeners to our main players:
As we pick our story back up in early 2010, the members of BigBang are G-Dragon, 21, BigBang’s leader, wunderkind rapper/composer, hyped as the next Seo Taiji and was under a lot of pressure to live up to the hype. He had been worn ragged by the end of 2009, even breaking down in tears at one of the ending year music shows while singing “Heartbreaker” from what must have been sheer exhaustion. He was under fire not just from the media and anti-fans for a variety of alleged sins, including plagiarism, but was also under criminal investigation for alleged “lewd conduct” at his solo concert in Seoul for dancing a little too sexily with a female dancer on stage; T.O.P., 22, BigBang’s eldest, ex-underground rapper, very handsome, and had just begun branching out from rapping into acting. The two of them formed the core of BigBang’s sound. G-Dragon’s sing-songy tenor mixed with T.O.P.’s deep, rhythmic rapping just worked extremely well together. Then there’s the vocal line: Taeyang, 21 but just about to turn 22, rapper turned R&B vocalist who was impressive enough to have been asked to open for American R&B acts touring Korea; Daesung, 20 but just about to turn 21, the big voiced OG K-Pop Sunshine Boy who joined YG Entertainment despite not really being into rap or hip hop or R&B. He’d made a big impression on the public as a member of the cast of a very popular Korean variety show but as we enter 2010, he was still recovering from the horrible car accident that had smashed his face up and damaged his voice; and last of all, maknae, Seungri who had just turned 19 years old and was desperate to shed his cute little brother image.
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. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to project his current opera buffa villain image back in time. That said, in retrospect there were signs at this point that Seungri was heading down the wrong path. In a special video for BigBang’s Big Show 2010 concert that has the members heading to a mountain chalet for an overnight trip, during a members confessional segment Taeyang warns Seungri that he needs to “get serious” about his career--hinting that perhaps Seungri is not taking his craft as seriously as he should be. You also do start to hear Seungri fall well behind Daesung and Taeyang as a vocalist. While the two of them keep improving and growing their skills, Seungri remained plateaued.
Still, keep in mind that for this episode, Seungri begins 2010 as a literal teenager—maybe a teenager heading down a bad path and partying too much—but just a teenager all the same.
BigBang at this point are the biggest act under YG Entertainment, the history of the company was covered in the first couple of episodes, but it’s important to note that one of the things that separated YG Entertainment from other K-Pop companies was their in-house stable of writing and production talent that had its roots in hip hop and in the American diaspora. This included not only Korean Americans Teddy Park and Choice37 but also Kush, formerly of Reggae duo Stony Skunk, and the EDM-loving Brave Brothers who would soon leave YG to form his own label, Brave Entertainment. YG Entertainment’s reputation as an incubator of talent, as well as their Korean-American cultural ties, would lead to the troubled but talented rapper Psy joining the company in August of 2010 (Psy had studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston), followed in 2011 by Korean-Canadian rapper Tablo of Epik High.
Sadly, Perry, who you might remember from the first episodes of this series, went missing at some point in 2010 in Los Angeles. If anybody knows what happened to him, it hasn’t been made public. He was a huge influence on the sound of early YG Entertainment and I’m sure is greatly missed by his family and friends. He remains in long-time fans’ thoughts and prayers.
One last thing it’s important to remember is that Yang-Goon had learned what he knew about the industry as part of Seo Taiji and Boys, which included the infamous “Mystery Strategy” of media undersaturation and not having a PR strategy, like, at all. While this may have served Seo Taiji just fine back in 1994, by 2010, it had become an increasingly big problem for the artists working with YG.
Now, jumping back into 2010. Here’s where we’re at. While the biggest company in K-Pop, SM Entertainment, had just gotten themselves embroiled in what would turn out to be a years-long lawsuit with members of their top group TVXQ and JYP Entertainment had stretched their resources to the breaking point in America, YG Entertainment had done very well in 2009 off of not just BigBang’s group activities (which were mostly in Japan, where BigBang had just won the Best Newcomer Award at the 2009 Japan Record Awards, to some pushback from Japanese nationalists) but also with recently debuted girl group 2NE1 and the BigBang members’ solo work. According to news reports from April 2010, YG Entertainment were the biggest of the Big 3 in terms of earnings for 2009, with revenue up a whopping 92% from 2008.
But fans at home in Korea were getting impatient for a Korean language BigBang comeback. As BigBang finished up their winter tour of Japan, ending at the Budokan on February 16-17, 2010, YG teased a Korean language album from BigBang for the summer of 2010—their first since 2008’s Remember, which featured had the comforting and domestic-facing financial crisis anthem, “Sunset Glow.” But in typical YG fashion, the promised summer of 2010 album turned into an August 2010 album.
The members were all busy with their solo work. T.O.P. had a role in the big budget drama Iris, which aired in late 2009 and was so popular it was then repackaged as a feature film, released in early 2010. G-Dragon released the Shine A Light concert in theaters, Taeyang opened for Brian McKnight, and Daesung was active in variety shows, as well as singing with Lee Hyori. Despite YG’s promise to return the group to Korea, there were still more Japanese promotions, with BigBang winning the triple crown at the MTV World Stage Video Music Awards, a fan voted global award, in Japan in May 2010.
As spring turned to summer, T.O.P. followed up his supporting role in Iris with a major film role as a patriotic soldier in 71: Into the Fire. The film opened June 16, 2010, followed quickly by a digital single released on June 21, 2010, his debut solo song, “Turn it Up.”
“Turn It Up” was written by T.O.P. and YG Entertainment in-house producer Teddy and seems to draw inspiration from the hypnotic, blow-out-the-bass in your headphones work of hiphop producer Bangladesh. “Turn It Up” is a straight-up seduction song, with TOP telling the listener that his voice in her ear could make even a dried up flower blossom. And, you know, I think he has a point.
Seo Hyun-Seung directed the visually striking black and white music video and it’s an early signal of the artistic direction T.O.P.’s tastes run in. The video includes beautiful women but they’re made up like pantomime clowns. There’s luxury goods but also surrealist imagery and references to works of art--one shot has TOP in a nice suit sitting at the head of a table of background dancers arranged to look like da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”
At the time, the song hit the promo cycle with T.O.P. pushed as something of a luxury playboy and it didn’t help that he was slapped by the MBC review panel for use of brand names in the lyrics.
Looking back on “Turn It Up,” I think we can see the seeds of artistic tension being planted. The cheeky use of the pantomime clown imagery as well as—what to my eyes anyways—look like references to wind-up toy monkeys seems to point to a man who is very aware of the wind-up toy nature of being an idol. Interfile those with the luxury brands and the KAWS pieces and you have a very telling set of symbols. T.O.P. could have easily leaned into the wealthy playboy image and put out something much safer and blander. “Turn It Up” swung for something more ambitious.
Although it didn’t quite hit with Korean hip hop audiences, fans loved it and T.O.P. topped the Korean charts and, “Turn It Up” ranked in on HipHop singles charts worldwide as the first major Korean song to be pushed out to the global iTunes platforms, including in the United States. But despite making a huge splash on release, the song was quickly buried. On the other hand, 71: Into the Fire was hugely popular and T.O.P. would win a few acting awards that year. The contrast between the two directions he was being pulled in couldn’t have been more stark.
On July 1, 2010, Taeyang released his first full solo album, Solar, which contained the single, “I Need A Girl.” “I Need A Girl” was written and produced by Jeun Goon, a rookie producer best known for his work with the late R&B singer Wheesung. In many ways, “I Need A Girl” is the perfect K-Pop song of the era, seamlessly combining global R&B production with the sound of the Korean ballad. The lyrics also mesh the two worlds, combining an English hook with lines that provide a modern twist on Byun Jin-Seop’s classic 1989 song, “Wish List.” Instead of wanting a woman who is good at making kimchi fried rice as in “Wish List”, Taeyang wants a girl who is good at eating the kimchi fried rice he made her.
G-Dragon added a rap part and both he and 2NE1’s Dara featured in the music video. Unsurprisingly, the song crushed it on the TV music shows and I have it on very good firsthand information that it was absolutely everywhere in Korea during the summer of 2010 and it’s easy to hear why--Taeyang’s voice is pleasant and the song is well constructed. It’s simply a good song.
Listen to how well the song has held up with a bit of a stripped down version from 2023, you can hear Taeyang’s falsetto ringing as clear as it did 15 years ago.
The reaction at the time was positive, with not only fan appreciation but plenty of critical appreciation for Taeyang’s musicality and his growth as an artist and the album performed well in the Korean charts.
But there was a second intended audience for Solar beyond Korea. If you remember back to previous episodes, in 2006, YG Entertainment R&B artist Se7en had been shipped off to America to try his luck using the localization strategy that had worked so well for SM Entertainment in Japan with BoA and TVXQ. Se7en had returned back to Korea with nothing to show for his time. Now, just a few years later, streaming video sites like YouTube and the digital music store of iTunes had made the physical distance between Korea and the United States feel much, much smaller. Taeyang was about to do with Solar what YG had hoped Se7en would be able to do—crack into the American market as a hunky R&B singer.
The difference between Se7en and Taeyang was the rise of social media in the intervening years. If you’ve followed the story this far, you know that YG Entertainment had always been home to Korean-American musical talent but now they needed something else: a Korean-American business and PR talent in the form of Bernie Cho, founder of DFSB Kollective, in my opinion, one of the unsung heroes of global K-Pop.
As he told his story to a podcast in 2014, Bernie Cho had come to Korea from the US in the early-mid 1990s as a graduate student but had dropped out and ended up getting in at the ground floor at MNET, a TV music channel. Taking inspiration from the offshore pirate radio stations that broadcast unsanctioned rock’n’roll to the youth of Great Britain in the 1960s, Cho and his DFSB Kollective were key to getting Korean music into the American music ecosystem. He saw that the mainstream gatekeepers back home in America could be circumvented using the same methods as the unsanctioned broadcast of rock’n’roll: If they won’t play Korean songs on the radio in America, get the songs on YouTube where American fans could find them. Instead of blasting out Me2Day updates, get your artist on Twitter. And then once you’ve hooked people, make sure they can buy the songs in iTunes.
And I mean Korean music, not K-Pop as we think of it today aka idol music. Along with BigBang, DFSB Kollective clients at that time included acts like popular backpack rappers Epik High and punk legends Crying Nut. The DFSB Kollective goal was to get Korean music out of the walled garden of platforms like MelOn and CyWorld and into a global marketplace and, to that end, Cho wasn’t backed by any of the major conglomerates that dominated the music business in Korea. There was no profit for the tech companies in moving artists from the self-contained digital ecosystem they controlled and out into the pirate wilds of the World Wide Web.
In an article dated Nov. 24, 2010, about the tragic passing of indie rocker Moonlight Fairy Reverse Grand Slam (달빛요정역전만루홈런), Cho laid out the harsh truths: quote "From afar, the Korean digital music market looks quite rosy (it's the 7th largest in the world and No. 2 in Asia). But go beyond and behind the numbers, the picture has a lot of thorns. The paradox in the Korean music industry is: As more and more acts breakout and breakthrough across and beyond Asia, the current business model for selling digital music here is breaking down many artists' ability to make a decent living. For many Korean music acts, success overseas is not only a personal desire but also perhaps even a professional necessity.”
Again, Korean music acts, not idols. In a very important decision, and showing how well Bernie Cho understood the American market, DFSB Kollective was going to introduce BigBang and its members to America as artists and musicians—not as a teenybopper boy band.
This point is crucial to understanding why BigBang got a different reception than other idols acts. When the Wonder Girls were tapped to open for the Jonas Brothers in 2009, it was a great opportunity to get a wider audience, sure, but it also sealed their fate as a teenybopper act to the American music consumer. BigBang would take a different path.
So while Taeyang worked the Korean music show circuit like he’d done for previous comebacks, DFSB Kollective took Solar into the global marketplace. TOP’s “Turn It UP” had done well on the global iTunes charts but Solar did even better, hitting number 2 on the R&B iTunes album chart in America and no. 1 in Canada. He was the first Asian artist to do so, which earned Taeyang a flurry of publicity, including a profile in Time magazine which emphasized the role the Internet was playing in spreading Korean pop music.
Solar was quickly followed up by an international version of the album, Solar International, in August. And Solar International wasn’t just an audio album but a video album. Taeyang’s international social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all got big boosts.
But despite the positive global PR, the metrics weren’t an over-the-top slam dunk at home. Taeyang wasn’t just having to live up to the rosy memory of BigBang’s glory days of two years previous but also having to fight his way through a tough and crowded field. Not only was 2010 a huge year for idol releases—including a blockbuster debut hit for girl group Miss A that happened to overlap with Solar—but MC Mong had just released one of the biggest songs of the year back in June and a song that would become entangled in one of the biggest entertainment stories of the year, which, in the shortest possible explanation, involved MC Mong allegedly pulling out his own teeth to avoid being enlisted in mandatory military service.
Looking back through the Korean news coverage and fan reactions around this time, there’s this sense of BigBang being unable to break free of negative media in Korea. Through no fault of his own, T.O.P.’s “Turn It Up” got dragged into the MC Mong military service scandal thanks to some fan theories about alleged references in the video that got picked up by the media. Taeyang got flack for his album—which was well received by critics and fans—not doing blockbuster metrics at home and G-Dragon had a dating scandal with Japanese actress Mizuhara Kiko go viral, and on top of everything else had BigBang released yet another Japanese single on August 25, 2010, while their long awaited Korean comeback that was definitely going to appear in August was pushed back even further to October/November.
Then in November we finally got the announcement we’d been waiting for—BigBang were skipping out on all Japanese end of the year activities because there was a new BigBang album coming… in January! (Although spoiler alert… no, it wasn’t.)
But December brought with it a big surprise: a G-Dragon and T.O.P. sub-unit album. And it was a banger. In typical YG “mystery strategy” fashion he announced it like this (translation from JungHyori @BBVIP.net ):
“Because GD and TOP’s duet songs are originally songs for Bigbang, so their album release can be considered as Bigbang’s national activity’s practical opening.” and, “with this, Bigbang’s national activities can last longer, and of course this is for the fans that have been showing their interest towards Bigbang although they’re having such a long vacuum time,” and he emphasized, “Bigbang will give you a great time and will be active for the next one year.“
In other words, VIPs, fasten your seatbelts because 2011 is going to be a bumpy year.
On December 15, 2010, GD & T.O.P. drop two pre-release singles, “Oh Yeah” which featured 2NE1’s Park Bom, and “High High.”
After a GD & TOP teaser performance at the MAMA Awards in Macao on November 28, the first promotional performance was December 23, 2010, on M Countdown, the day before the album dropped and it gave us a preview of the style points for this comeback. The GD & T.O.P. logo was a cheeky take on the Playboy bunny logo, turning the dapper bunny into a hand making the peace sign. GD and T.O.P. appear wearing slim fit suits with black bowties with GD in a black suit coat and T.O.P. in a white one. These are accessorized with massive gold chains and, for GD, a novelty fur hat in wild colors. It’s classy but also irreverent. 2NE1’s Park Bom makes her entrance in “Oh Yeah,” wearing a short black dress and colorful stole, just adding to the high roller 1960s Monte Carlo of it all. Their stage presence is playful and full of confidence; they’re hosting the best party of the decade and you’re invited. It’s a modern update on a YG classic. Two rappers and a hot girl. Think back to JinuSean’s “Tell Me” or BigBangs own “We Belong Together.”
The Playboy logo would eventually have to be dropped after pressure from Playboy—and some of the promotional videos taken down—which is a shame. The Playboy brand, which at the time was on the downslope of its final burst of global cultural relevance, would have been better served, in my personal opinion, by letting them use it for a token negotiated fee and a cut of merchandising. For example, I would have paid handsomely for one of the velour GD & TOP Playboy logo track jackets. Anyway, as a fan of the vintage Playboy aesthetic, I love how the pair really leaned into it. Later performances even featured dancers wearing a captain’s hat in a nod to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner.
There’s almost a giddiness to the blatant references to Playboy, like young men anywhere pushing at the boundaries to see how far they can go. Oh, you made my life hell over totally bogus plagiarism accusations for “Heartbreaker,” what if we just hang a hat on it to show how little we give a fuck about your faux pieties about the sanctity of IP?
Musically, the album is a lot of fun and definitely worth listening to. The first five tracks plus the intro feature both GD & TOP, while the back half of the album are solo songs, including T.O.P.’s “Turn It Up.”
The intro, co-written and produced with Kush, is cheeky braggadocio. Kush samples a classic R&B riff from Freda Payne’s “It’s Yours to Have” over which GD & TOP inform the listener of their greatness. “My voice is thin but my zipper won’t stay up,” raps G-Dragon, while TOP replies with “I'm only a Bumblebee you can meet through your speakers or earphones.”
Track 2, “High High,” was co-written and produced with Teddy, and plays with the Detroit Ghettotech aka Booty music sound that had been having a global moment in the late 2000s thanks to the playlists of culture vulture DJs like Diplo. Here’s a bit of DJ Assualt’s “Bangin’ the Beat (Bangapella).”
“High High” ends with a gleeful shoutout to the genre. GHETTO ELECTRO!
“High High,” has just an irresistible giddiness to the lyrics and performance: the hook to “High High” is just “High High, I’m so high. High, high, up in the sky. High, high, I'm so high. Fly, fly, touch the sky.” A native English speaking audience in 2010 would have taken one, uh, particular party-related meaning from that while apparently the Korean censors just let it go unquestioned. Yeah, high in the sky, like a bird, right? Sure, Lucy in the Sky with what now?
Track 3, “Oh Yeah feat. Park Bom,” was co-written and produced with Teddy and Sunwoo Jung-ah, who is a talented and award winning jazz vocalist and songwriter. Just to give a taste of where YG was positioned at this time in attracting major talent. “Oh Yeah,” comes on the heels of 2NE1’s “It Hurts,” which she also wrote and produced.
“Oh Yeah,” is basically a sex song with the stuttering rap verses about like, like, liking it when your lady scores a goal in your heart punctuated by blissed out, “Oh Yeahs” from silky voiced Park Bom. It remains one of my favorite tracks of all time, pure frothy joy.
Jib e kajima (Don’t Leave),” track 4, is a throwback 80s track, co-written and produced by G-Dragon, Kush, and Teddy. There’s a fun sample of the peppy horns from the Whispers’ cover of Bread’s “Make It With You” which really adds to the nostalgic feel and the music video and stage performances put me in mind of one of Janet Jackson’s Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis theater kid Everybody Get Out in the Street music videos like, “When I Think Of You.” The vibe is an over-the-top pop art, cartoony one, very like a Lichtenstein panel, where GD and T.O.P. work to weedle a girl into giving into their amorous advances. Unfortunately, unlike “High High,” the Korean censors knew exactly what GD was playing at when he sang, “Don’t go home, I have a present for you right here.” (It’s jewelry, right? The present is jewelry?)
Track 5, “Baby Good Night,” is another one that has unfortunately been lost to time. This song was co-written by GD & TOP with Kush and Seo Won Jin. I really like this one because it’s the kind of song that shouldn’t work. You have G-Dragon’s overly affected singing style over top of this corny syncopated jazz guitar and T.O.P. rapping about being the whipped cream to his lady’s strawberry but then GD hits that falsetto and I’m like, yeah. That’s the ticket. “Baby Good Night” is pure, straight up baby-making music.
And then we have the track I think acts as a pivot point for K-Pop. “Buk i Gayo” aka Knock Out, Track 6, co-written with Diplo. I’ll read for you now a blog post written by Diplo and posted on January 19, 2011:
"i went to seoul to DJ last year for the first time.. i dont even remember how I met any of the Kpop crew.. but some one i got in touch with someone.. i was a super fan of 2NE1.. those girls are killing it.. people dont know that Kpop sort of runs all of asia and now Japan is the main market for these artists.. but everyone of these guys have proper korean and english skills.. so my beat was for some kids in the Kpop crew.. One of the biggest groups is BIG BANG. the sort ot nkotb/jayz/mileycyrus and justin beiber all mixed into one act…
GD and TOP are the main rappers that go in for verse 3 in every big bang song... but u can tell from GD and TOP.. they are rapper rappers.. not phony.. the have crazy flow
they wear tiny pants on top of tanks talkin about Swag.. these are my favorite new rappers.. so i didnt realize they were a big deal. its just a beat i sent over a couple months back and then the youtube hit and got @mil views in 2 weeks.. kinda swag.. the styling is sooooo much better then US rap its really sad. anyway im moving to Korea now.”
Diplo in 2025 comes with some not-so-great accusations and allegations but try to rewind back to 2010-2011 when Diplo was a tastemaker and trend setter, known for bringing niche genres to mainstream audiences. Think of something like M.I.A.’s Bucky Done Gun. He described himself, DJs generally, as a post-modern songwriter in an interview from 2008.
I think what Diplo recognized in the YG Family of circa 2010 was a similar desire to mix and match pieces of global music and art into something boundaryless. Something brand new and exciting.
“Knock Out” takes Diplo’s beat—an off-kilter mash of sine waves and noise—and layers it with clever wordplay and an infectious hook. The Korean title was popular slang at the time and while the stated meaning is something like being knocked out by something cool, the phrase allegedly also had a sexual meaning of being, uh, knocked out. The verses play around with the idea that GD & TOP are so cool they’ll, uh, knock you out. Imagine me doing air quotes here. Unlike their haters, they aren’t fads and don’t need tricks to impress. G-Dragon even sneaks in a reference to his kid rap verse in Perry’s “Storm” from 2001, a decade earlier. That’s how long he’s been in the game.
The music video, directed by Seo Hyun-Seung, adds a distinctive visual element to the package and does, in fact, as Diplos said, feature GD wearing mustard yellow stockings while rapping on top of a massive tank. Although the video got taken down on official channels due to the Playboy copyright strike, the video remains in circulation and, in my personal opinion, is one of the best K-Pop music videos of all time. An opening salvo for the Korean Wave about to hit globally. Filmed against a stark white background, GD & TOP pop bubble wrap, dance with a bunch of GTOP bunnies, dance with some tiny girls in matching track suits, lounge around in lawn chairs reading Bailey White’s 1993 book Mama Makes Up Her Mind, and rap while trying to avoid getting hit by the giant tank’s wildly swinging cannon. All of this is punctuated by Seo Hyun-Seung’s dynamic cuts and camera movements that emphasize the off-kilter beat. It’s worth pausing to watch this post-modern masterpiece right here.
With the hindsight of 15 years, I see GD & TOP first album as something of a pivot point. It contains the beginnings of the hooky, trend forward global BigBang sound with songs like “Knockout” but also reaches towards the perfection of the early pop BigBang sound. G-Dragon, despite his image as a rapper, has a real ear for a traditional pop song, which is what something like Jib E Kajima actually is, if you strip it down. The theatrics and young love woven into Jib E Kajima come from the same place as the theatrics and young love of a song like “Lies” with G-Dragon’s cheeky and affected singing style adding an edge that keeps things from getting too treacly.
While looking at contemporaneous fan writing on the album, the overall opinion felt very positive, despite the censors going overboard on seemingly everything except “High High.” But two things stuck out to me. The first was BigBang fans’ complaints about YG Entertainment’s lack of PR. The Diplo collaboration wasn’t pushed nearly as hard as fans felt it should have been. To that point, all of the articles I saw were Korean content mill puff pieces basically just re-writing Diplo’s blog post that I read earlier. This lack of PR strategy, especially in English, is something to keep in the back of your mind when you encounter BigBang doing something like this collab with Diplo. It wasn’t about getting the headlines… because YG had no media strategy whatsoever. Again, while this “mystery strategy” may have served Seo Taiji just fine back in the 1990s, as we head into the 2010s, it would become a real liability for YG Entertainment artists.
The second point is one that feels very clear in retrospect. A review on a Korean blog dated January 9, 2011, said that GD & TOP felt like they were still chasing trends rather than setting them. And by chasing trends, the reviewer didn’t mean plagiarism but what I described in the previous episode with the fuss over GD’s “Heartbreaker.” “Heartbreaker” didn’t rip off Flo Rida’s “Right Round” but GD was chasing the same trends as his contemporaries in the US--only with a time lag of a few months. This time lag wouldn’t have been an issue a decade previous but, in 2010, in the global marketplace, where listeners are consuming songs from around the world on iTunes and YouTube, fans felt like GD was a half-step behind.
There was an interview G-Dragon gave in September of 2010 that points to his awareness of this trend chasing and that he and BigBang needed to work to make something bigger and better. As translated by Hypermaniac @ AKP quote:
One of the main concerns for the group was the changed music tastes of the mass public and the fast cycling of the music market. G-Dragon solemnly continued, “I have no confidence in the market anymore. These days, singers finish their promotion cycles in three weeks, and everything changes again. The thought of preparing for two years and only receiving three weeks of love is upsetting.” G-Dragon brings up an interesting phenomenon that has been occurring lately. Songs are ever-changing and receive the “old” treatment once three weeks go by. New songs are always pouring into the market and singers are constantly releasing new songs in order to keep up. G-Dragon concluded, “I want to sing songs that receive love over longer periods of time. We’ll be working our hardest to make sure that a new Big Bang album is released by the end of this year.”
Following closely on the heels of GD & TOP was a Seungri solo E.P. release: VVIP, on January 20, 2011. And as January bled into February, GD & TOP promotions overlapped with Seungri’s. The big single from Seungri’s EP, “What Can I do” is… fine.
Seungri worked with YG producer PK aka Choi Pil-Kang, who had joined the company after working on Se7en’s “Digital Bounce,” which featured a rap verse by T.O.P., earlier in 2010. As someone who lived through this era and very much remembers being in da club, VVIP feels very Max Martin -Shellback-pop of the “DJ Got Us Falling in Love” variety. Again, it’s fine. But—at least according to the media—Seungri himself was all over the writing and production of this EP. Was this the best he could do alone?
Needless to say, expectations were sky high for the BigBang comeback, the mini-album Tonight, which finally dropped after months of speculation, two plus years after their previous Korean release, on February 24, 2011, with title track, “Tonight.” Undersaturation thy name is BigBang.
Again, just to give you a sense of what this period was like, the hugely popular boy group TVXQ had just released their huge comeback, “Keep Your Head Down,” which marked the group's rebirth as a duo after a lengthy hiatus due to the lawsuit filed in 2009. And IU had just dropped “Good Day,” one of her signature hits which would go on to crush all the popularity awards at the end of 2011. So, this was an extremely competitive and busy time. But in the middle of all that noise, the plaintive trill of a synthesizer echoes in a lonely desert…
“Tonight,” co-written by G-Dragon, PK, and Kush, hasn’t quite pulled free of the trend chase but you can feel BigBang getting very, very close. The production has echoes of then-current, now-forgotten club bangers like Enrique Iglesias and DJ Frank E’s “Tonight I’m Loving/Fucking You” but the lyrics are all heartbreak. Unlike Iglesias’s confident protagonist of “Tonight I’m Loving/Fucking You,” BigBang are collectively brooding under the cold moonlight wondering why they’ve lost their passion. G-Dragon is known for his clever wordplay in Korean and the chorus ends with word tonight, 이 밤. The last lines of the chorus translate to something like “I still don’t understand love; another pitiful night alone.”
Tonight tonight tonight tonight
아직 난 사랑을 몰라
또 홀로 가여운 이 밤
Not quite the theme of the hornt up and rousing club anthems from across the Pacific in America. BigBang were crying in the club (before 11 o’clock).
One of the things I find really charming about “Tonight” is the addition of some crowd noise over the beginning which is then echoed in the bridge as rhythmic clapping. There’s no reason for it except to add some drama, which I approve of. After all, this is the group that brought you “Lies,” they are no strangers to dramatics. When the song is clipped short, you don’t get the full experience. The breakdown with the handclaps and then beat drop to… moody acoustic guitar strumming over which Daesung and Taeyang trade adlibs is divine. Look, they are divos and we must respect that.
That said, despite all the theatrics in the song itself, the live performance stages from the music shows aren’t very interesting. BigBang, collectively, are not the best dancers and the pulsing beat of “Tonight” lends itself more to jumping while fist pumping than to the kind of dancing seen in K-Pop idol stages. There’s an attempt to spice up the stage with some overly fussy microphone stand work and G-Dragon smashing an acoustic guitar at the end for seemingly no reason but it falls somewhat flat, in my opinion.
The video, on the other hand, is excellent. It was filmed in Las Vegas and although there are shots of the guys driving down the strip, the use of the open desert and, especially, the use of the old signs in the Neon Museum in front of which G-Dragon wears a coat with a fur hood that has been covered in various patches, give the video a much different vibe than something like the video for Three 6 Mafia’s “Feel It”. The Vegas of “Feel It” is 1 am on a Saturday night on the Strip white girl wasted and loving life. The Vegas of “Tonight” is a gilded but empty palace at 5am on a Tuesday night regretting that last overpriced G&T… and all the ones before it. The last scene in the video shows TOP getting dressed after bedding a baddie and leaving the hotel room while she’s sound asleep in bed. “Tonight I’m fucking you… and then leaving with feelings of regret and emptiness.”
Despite the huge build-up of GD & TOP, Seungri’s VVIP, and the dramatics of “Tonight,” the rest of the mini-album mostly feels like filler. Both “Somebody to Love” and “Hands Up” were coupling songs for Japanese singles with “Somebody to Love” being notable as possibly Perry’s final credit with the group. “What is Right” is a sludgey mid-tempo song that seems like it would be more fun to belt out in a karaoke room than it is to listen to.
There is one exception and that is the final track, “Cafe,” which in my opinion is the most interesting and sophisticated track BigBang had released up until this point. “Cafe” is a jazzy minor key torch song built on this rolling, syncopated beat. The song was co-written by G-Dragon, DJ Murf, who was an old friend of Perry’s, and PeeJay with TOP also contributing his rap.
It’s worth taking a moment with PeeJay here because I think his inclusion demonstrates that despite the YG Entertainment company’s pivot to idols, their ties to the Korean hip-hop community were still very strong in 2010-2011. So, there was a rap scene revolving around DJ DOC’s label BUDA SOUND, which included hip-hop act 45RPM who were signed to YG Underground, YG Entertainment’s underground rap label. There was some back and forth with the BUDA SOUND scene and YG at this time, including TOP even appearing in the MV for Red Roc’s “Hello”. PeeJay and DJ Doc’s Lee Ha Neul were close and that’s how I’m guessing PeeJay also ended up working with BigBang.
PeeJay has a soft touch and a musicality to his tracks that shines through even in something like Be-Free’s “Player’s Anthem,” which you wouldn’t necessarily expect to sound so majestic. Listen to a bit of that here. PeeJay varies the instrumentation between verses to add forward momentum; the use of timpani at the lower end; and then the bridge hits…
DJ Murf and PeeJay also collaborated on one of my favorite tracks on DJ Doc’s Pungryu, the simply titled “Fat Girl.” It’s a fun song. Here’s a bit of that.
One of the things I think is so striking about “Cafe” is the vocal arrangement. This is what Daesung had to say about it in an interview in GQ Korea, translation credit to solshin3@21bangs:
[W]hich song were you satisfied with your voice?
Personally, ‘Cafe.’ Originally, it wasn’t my part. Most of the parts in the song are sung in high tone. I can’t really sing that high. My voice becomes hoarse quick and within the 24 hours, my voice is warmed up good for an hour. Even though my voice is like that, I like singing in high tone. I like listening to it and singing it. We first recorded my singing in high tone, but no matter how many times I tried, it just wouldn’t come out right. So I suggested I do the 2nd verse. Luckily, it matched well so I like it.
It does match really well. In many of the live performances I watched of “Cafe,” if the crowd noise was audible, you can hear a cheer go up when Daesung cracks into the second verse. The way TOP enters with his deep voice as Daesung finishes singing is just perfect.
G-Dragon doesn’t have a verse in the song which makes me wonder if he may have given up his verse for Daesung, recognizing that it would make the song better to have Daesung’s soulful voice dig into that run. G-Dragon, Taeyang, and Seungri sing their parts in falsetto, with G-Dragon taking the refrain:
네가 앉아있던 그 하얀 의자만이
네 향기를 기억하고
네가 떠난 후로 차가운 정적만이
널 기다리고 있는 작은 카페
Only that white chair you sat in
Remembers your smell
After you left, only a cold silence
waits for you at the small cafe
“Cafe” takes the jazzy musicality of PeeJay’s production and combines it with BigBang’s ability to get really and truly up in their feels about heartbreak. “Cafe” wasn’t trend chasing. It was something new, something unexpected, and showed that BigBang had both the songs and the performance chops to get to the next level.
Tonight did very well in Korea and even got to #6 on the iTunes Top Ten album charts in the US as well as ranking into the Billboard World Album and Independent Album charts. While we are used to K-Pop appearing in Billboard today, you have to keep in mind that this is the era before K-Pop companies and K-pop fans had turned the Billboard charts into a battlefield of bulk purchasing mp3s and zombie streams. In early 2011, ranking into the American charts meant only one thing—the number of American K-Pop fans was growing.
BigBang’s group activities continued non-stop through March with promotions for the mini-album and then into April with the release of a repackage of Tonight/a special edition full album, on April 8, 2011. The repackage dropped a couple of the filler tracks from the mini and added previously released solo songs from Seungri and Taeyang, the unit songs from GD & TOP, a beautiful new solo ballad from Daesung, and two additional title tracks. When I listen to Tonight, this is the version I tend to go for.
Both of the two new title tracks,“Stupid Liar” and “Love Song,” are band songs. “Stupid Liar” was co-written by G-Dragon and Choi Pil-Kang. In an interview with Choi Pil-Kang from 2013, he talks about becoming tired of straight EDM and playing with a mixture of analog and electronic sounds and I think we can start to see that here. The harmonics on the guitar as an intro, the band instrumentation using a real drummer and bassist in recording. The song has a straightforward rock structure and translates seamlessly to a stadium rock anthem to get fans on their feet and jumping around and was a staple of the BigBang stadium set list for the next five years. Again, Daesung really shines with a big belted out pre-chorus.
The music show performances also wink at the punk theme with a faux mosh move from TOP and G-Dragon starting off the song. They wear punk-themed costumes too, including Sex Pistol’s inspired plaid trousers—and in one memorable performance on Music Core, black and white check ska trousers—along with metal studded jackets.
Along with “Cafe,” “Love Song,” with its endlessly repeated refrain of “I hate this love song,” is another song that pushes past the trends. It’s got this very interesting structure that goes build, build, build, build… gentle release. Build, build, build… gentle release, and so on. The guitar, credited to YG stalwart Seo Won-Jin, always puts me in mind of that classic 1980s Joshua Tree U2 sound. It’s both a wistful and kind of frustrating song. I mean that in a good way. “Love Song” is a breakup song but a romantic breakup song where the collective BigBang is still half in love with the idea of being in love with this woman who vanished. “I hate this love song, I’ll never sing it again,” repeats Taeyang over and over.
“Love Song” was promoted with a pricey black and white music video directed by Han Sa-min and shot with a fancy 4-point camera rig. The video has the members in slim fitting suits plaintively singing on an empty plain among the smoldering ruins of an exploded possibly what was a gas station-slash-metaphor for a broken relationship. The video is really beautiful and almost narrative, done in what looks like just two shots. It was a different style to the frenetic direction of Seo Hyun-Seung but suited BigBang just as well. After five years deep in the idol trenches, the members knew how to give good face.
And both the mini-album and Special Edition sound fantastic. And showing how much had changed since their last album release in 2008, the mastering was done at Sterling Sound in the USA.
More than anything else, Tonight, and especially the repackage, marks the point where BigBang begins to feel more like a musical supergroup, a collection of real artists, than a normal idol group. Five solo artists with their own distinct musical personalities breaking apart and then coming together to create something bigger and better than before.
After five long years together, five years grinding things out as idols, the members of BigBang were really starting to feel the limitations of the format. There’s a telling exchange from a group interview with 10Asia:
Q: Speaking of fandom, I remember you saying on cable music channel Mnet’s “Big Bang TV Live” that you don’t want to become musicians that get trapped in fandom.
Taeyang: I think it’s dangerous to let ourselves stay who our fans want us to be as our fandom gets bigger because we’ll be inclined to think we must do that. But what I want is on the other side so limitations will form to the music that I want to do. That’s why I think we’ll be able to show how we’ve improved by doing what we want to rather than mind fandom too much.
T.O.P: It’s not like we have a huge goal or that we’re heading for something but we’re in an environment where we can easily get trapped inside the structure of being idols in Korea.
He continues.
T.O.P: I think we’re about freedom, not fake freedom where we’re pretending to be free on the outside. We get stressed a lot when we’re trapped inside something.
GD: And I think that defines our group. It has become what Big Bang is about and what are performances and music are like. We’d probably end up being the same idol group as all other idols if we get trapped inside fandom or a lto of other things. But we wanted to go about things differently, we believed that what we think is right and my opinion comes first, so we made a lot of attempts musically. I think that worked with our fans as well and gave them good opinions of us.
Later in that same interview, they discuss the growing foreign market:
Q: Even the Hallyu moves within the context of money quite a lot but I think your group is different. I think the fact that the music video for “TONIGHT” received over two million hits on YouTube and ranked high on iTunes shows your music is appealing to listeners with the music itself, ahead of how it’s promoted commercially.
T.O.P: I don’t think we get a lot of hits on YouTube because we’re famous. I rather think it’s that our individual activities such as Taeyang’s solo album or GD&TOP’s duo unit album has stirred curiosity of our music amongst people overseas. Taeyang recently visited the U.S. where he met many artists and he said they were curious about Korea. In the past, we used to think a lot about what the Korean public would like when we shot music videos so it’s exciting to think that even more people will be watching it. It also feels like we’re competing with foreign artists.
GD: We’ve been proud of the fact that we were known for our music first and it has been what makes us work harder. The reason we have more fun with promoting our album or just working these days is that we’re inclined to work harder because we’re under the determination that this album could go to any country.
The awareness that they were now in competition with foreign artists is also mentioned in other interviews from the time. The pressure was on not just to deliver domestic hits like the nostalgic “Sunset Glow,” but global hits. Songs that would be known across the world. We’d already seen BigBang cracking into the global iTunes charts, being featured on American celebrity gossip websites, and hitting Time magazine, and in April 2011, BigBang were even featured on a Mexican morning show Venga LaAlegria after the show was deluged with requests from Mexican fans.
The momentum was building and building and things were moving faster and faster. In the wake of the success of Special Edition, YG announced that BigBang had resigned their contracts for an additional five years and the group had big plans for the future. Totally coincidentally I’m sure, YG was also at this time preparing to take his entertainment company public and be listed on the KOSDAQ. Meanwhile BigBang returned to Japan where the Love & Hope tour kicked off to big fanfare and they released a new Japanese album BigBang 2, which shot directly to the top of the Oricon charts. Celebrities were spotted at their concerts!
And then it all came to a screeching halt at approximately 1:4o am on May 31, 2011, on the south side of Yanghwa Bridge in Seoul. Based on news reports, to the best I was able to piece together, what seems to have happened is this: 1) a motorcyclist was driving drunk and crashed into a streetlamp. His body was in the right lane of the road. 2) A taxi driver saw the body, changed lanes, changed back, and stopped ahead with emergency lights on to call for help. 3) According to the taxi driver, Daesung was driving behind another car that swerved to avoid the body and the taxi. Daesung, being behind the other car, didn’t see what was ahead, in the dark, in time, and so crashed into the back of the stopped taxi.
The motorcyclist didn’t survive the accident; we don’t know whether the motorcyclist was alive or not when Daesung hit the taxi.
And because stories get twisted in fan retellings, I want to note that the police measured Daesung’s blood alcohol level and he was sober. This was just a tragic accident.
If you remember back to the previous episode, Daesung had just been in a traumatic car accident as a passenger in 2009 where he’d ended up in the hospital with severe injuries. He almost certainly would have been in severe shock after this.
Daesung would eventually be exempted from possible charges of neglectful driving in August but that summer would be a full-on media circus for Daesung as updates on the accident investigation trickled out into the media. He went on hiatus after apologizing to the motorcyclist’s family and offering to cover the funeral costs--not breaking his media silence for four months, when he finally gave an interview to his church’s newsletter. Translation here by @rnosel:
6. How about the first 3-4 (after the accident)?
– It was impossible to step out from my room, felt very guilty, the scene always appeared on my mind, alone thinking about negative stuff, and that was what i did for the whole day.
While Daesung was drowning in guilt on hiatus, the other BigBang members scattered to their solo work. G-Dragon and Taeyang went, respectively, to Tokyo and Los Angeles to work on their solo material, TOP was spotted in New York, and Seungri was back in the studio with Choi Pil-Kang. The group--minus Daesung--were tapped as brand ambassadors for Ludacris’s Soul headphones in Korea. GD, TOP, and Taeyang played the main stage of the Pentaport Rock Festival--which does not host idol acts on August 5, 2011, with GD sporting a brand new buzzcut. We’d find out why in October when it was announced he was under a suspended indictment for smoking marijuana. He’d had to get his hair tested back in July.
The planned GD & TOP debut Japanese single release in November was cancelled.
Lesser idols would have given up.
Lesser idol fans would have moved on to the new crop of boy groups popping up in BigBang’s wake.
But this is BigBang.
There was too much riding on them to give up now. And they had an ace up their sleeve.
Back in September BigBang had been nominated for the first round of a fan voted award at the European MTV Music Awards.
That EMA nomination turned into a lifeline. A couple of weeks after GD’s marijana announcement, BigBang were voted into the final category: Best World Wide Act. And on November 6, 2011, days before the now canceled GD & TOP single was supposed to be released, BigBang won that award. And all five members attended the ceremony. Daesung’s first appearance back with the group, would be on stage in Northern Ireland, accepting an award that represented the group’s growing worldwide fan base and recognition that they were doing something worthwhile, reaching fans across the globe with their music.
All five members would also appear together on stage at the 15th Anniversary YG Family concert on December 4, 2011, where the members apologized for the trouble and worry they’d caused to their fans.
While I summed their drama up neatly in just a few paragraphs, the lived reality of the media take-downs, anti-fans out in force, and just uncertainty of whether or not the group would stand on stage together again was grueling. To this day, anti-fans will bring up Daesung’s tragic car accident and G-Dragon’s drug charges as so-called drag material. I personally don’t think either incident is very funny. What happened to Daesung was an awful accident. And G-Dragon unfortunately got caught up in Korea’s extremely strict drug laws, charged for using a drug that is as common as fancy mineral water in the global music scene that BigBang was starting to mingle in.
As 2012 began, they must have felt as if they’d made it through the devil’s tests in the wilderness. Nothing but smooth sailing ahead…
And we’ll go out with Daesung’s “Baby Don’t Cry,” written by Kush.