BigBang is back again one more time
BIGBANG, BIGBANG We're back again, one more time (“Tonight”, 2011)
Yesterday, K-pop fans got two big announcements.
1. Just about four years after their last single (“Flower Road”, March 2018), BigBang will finally be making a comeback.
2. BigBang member TOP is leaving YG Entertainment.
The reaction online has been absolutely wild between various competitive K-Pop fandoms claiming it’s not a big deal (the epitome of the guy crying behind a smug mask meme), a million BigBang fan accounts rising from the ashes, and locals hitting that “tell me more” button.
For the fans who joined the global K-Pop conversation after 2017-2018 or so, this must be something of a shock but it reflects the truth: BigBang is still extremely popular.
I’ve touched on this in past episodes but the short version is that in the late 1990s, H.O.T. was the first boy group to really break big and become household names in Korea beyond just the “teen idol” market. And the only other Korean boy group to have repeated that kind of mass cultural penetration is BigBang a decade later. Their impact is still being felt on the new generation of boy groups. I mean, Japanese boy group Jo1 covered BigBang’s 2012 hit “Fantastic Baby” on national television in December last year. That’s extremely unusual.
BigBang managed what few idol groups do and spring boarded out of the idol subculture and into mainstream music culture, and not just as variety show talents or national idols but as pop musicians. And not just as a group but as solo acts. Taeyang, G-Dragon, Daesung (D-LITE in Japan), and TOP are all household names, selling out massive stadiums under their individual brand power.
In 2015, they released their big magnum opus: M.A.D.E. This “album without a physical album” was comprised of four double A-side singles, each with an accompanying music video, that absolutely crushed every other song in the Korean charts that year. Occasionally fans of this or that idol group attempt to claim 2015 for their own favorites based on album sales but the truth is that the song everybody was listening to that year was “Bang Bang Bang”.
But with massive public interest also comes massive public interest. The BigBang members came under extremely intense scrutiny from the Powers That Be. I’m not going to relitigate every scandal but stans claiming that all of the members are “criminals” would do well to go and see what the various charges against the members actually were. There are a shocking number of stans in places where a drug like marijuana is decriminalized or even legal, speaking as if BigBang member TOP was caught running a violent, high profile drug cartel rather than smoking weed a few times.
Since “Flower Road” four years ago, member Seungri left the group to deal with his own scandals and the other four have completed their military service and have been living more or less quietly (also Taeyang became a daddy!). There was the aborted performance that was supposed to take place at the canceled 2020 Coachella but other than that the most action we’ve gotten is G-Dragon’s incredible run of Nike sneakers (news of which reached my normie hypebeast friend, that’s how big it was).
There has been rampant fan speculation that YG Entertainment was keeping TOP’s music shelved for… reasons. So, news of him leaving the company while remaining in BigBang has been something of a cause for celebration among the TOP fans I know. There were various pictures and videos of TOP in LA last year recording… something and fingers crossed now that he’s no longer at YG, we may actually get to hear it.
BigBang are truly THE global K-Pop group. The template for so many of the younger groups that followed in their wake to this day. When BigBang left the stage in 2018, they left a massive creative void that has yet to be filled. I think we’re all ready to hear those magic words: “We’re back again one more time.”