Writing BigBang back into the K-Pop Narrative

I was talking with Monia from Exiled Fan yesterday about the changing narratives surrounding the Beatles over the decades. I’ve watched the narrative turn from primarily an artistic one—in which their songs blew open the doors of what was possible in pop music—to one centered on fandom. 30 years ago I don’t think there would have been any interest in a story like PAUL MCCARTNEY JERKED OFF WITH JOHN LENNON outside of maybe the National Enquirer and a handful of slash fic fan zines but in the era of Fan Service and Celebrities Encouraging Ambiguously Gay Rumors, the artistic Beatles narrative has taken a back seat to homoerotic jacking off. 

As Monia wisely said: “[T]he fight is for the public narrative.”

Paul seems to have given into the current narrative but the Beatles artistic legacy will be fine. There’s enough older critical material still floating around—as well as Beatles nerds like Peter Jackson still battling it out—that I’m not too worried that circle jerks will overwrite the impact of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The legacy of BigBang in English language media is far less certain. My goal with this new M.A.D.E. Project is not just to go through BigBang’s history because it’s interesting or to try and position BigBang as the “First and Only” as the opening volley in a misguided fan war, but to try and reclaim an artistic narrative for both BigBang and for K-Pop generally because that artistic narrative has been lost in recent years. Lost somewhere between an aggressive PR campaign about “paving the way” (what way? paved to where, Tigerbeat?) and the colonization of the K-Pop narrative by (some well-meaning, others less so) stan journalists and academics who are determined to see K-Pop as a mirror, reflecting their own worldview back at them. 

BigBang’s agency, YG Entertainment, more or less left BigBang and its members to twist in the wind as various scandals (and non-scandals) were blown up in the media and because those scandals (and non-scandals) have come to dominate the discourse when BigBang is brought up today it’s become easy for those academics and journalists to sidestep BigBang’s actual artistic impact. That’s one reason I will not be touching the Burning Sun scandal in my series.

Here’s Tammy Kim (infamously) in the New Yorker (emphasis added): 

“An army named Wang in Chengdu, China, who identifies as gay, though not publicly, told me, “There’s a big queer component of BTS. The fandom feels really welcoming.” (Contrast this with the K-pop group Big Bang, whose singers have been convicted of sex trafficking, gambling, and drug crimes.)”

In other words, the group who drove the cutting edge of K-Pop music for a decade has been turned into nothing more than a gang of thugs (who apparently hate queer people because marijuana and gambling because that makes sense??) and foils for one group in particular in the new K-Pop media narrative. It’s the K-Pop equivalent of Paul’s circle jerk erasing Sgt. Pepper’s because the Bay City Rollers PR team was just that good.

As I go through this series, I follow a number of threads that will eventually pull together into M.A.D.E in 2015. One of these is BigBang’s early adoption of the digital media transmission that allowed the group to reach fans outside of Korea from the beginning. Another is the fact that they were never a “sales” group—when I see fans trying to use sales as a metric of anything in 2015 it blows my mind because there was only one (1) group that dominated the conversation in 2015.

As I lay out in this series, albums and album sales ceased to be relevant in broad mainstream popularity in Korea well before it happened in the rest of the world. BigBang were far ahead of the curve on this. Releasing four double A-side singles with eight music videos to go with them, BigBang were the sound of 2015. Nobody else has ever come close to duplicating this feat and I doubt they ever will. I don’t care how many hundreds of millions of views ad buys, streaming farms, and fans can rack up in 24 hours on YouTube or Spotify. It still won’t be a bigger hit than “Bang Bang Bang.” 

Another important thread is how G-Dragon was constantly pushing the group forward, musically and stylistically. He starts by picking up on emerging trends before they went mainstream and eventually begins setting the trends. In part two of the series I discuss how G-Dragon had taken the emerging Shibuya-Kei dance music trend and used it to create “Lies” and then “Lies pt 2 Electric Bugaloo” aka “Haru Haru.” In part three, I’ll discuss his work with European songwriter—and contemporary of RedOne—Jimmy “Joker” Thörnfeldt. The series of songs that runs from “Number 1” through “Gara Gara Go” and into “Heartbreaker” parallels Lady Gaga’s electropop rise in America with RedOne. 

But like any learning artist, these early influences eventually fall away and BigBang really starts coming into their own around the Tonight era. That G-Dragon and T.O.P. artistic partnership sits at the heart of the group’s best work… and was recognized by their peers, globally.

Not that “western validation” is the biggest prize but, as I’ve written before, in this mid-late period era when BigBang crossed over to the West, they did have plenty of it from both mainstream arts writers and the music press more generally.

BigBang, their artistic choices, their career choices defined K-Pop while they were active; and K-Pop was the better for it. The soggy state of K-Pop since they’ve left should be a clue to how important a group they were in the K-Pop ecosystem. I don’t care how many boxes of albums fans have bought since 2018, it’s not the same.

M.A.D.E. is a modern pop masterpiece. Not just the recorded songs and the videos—although those are wonderful—but the entire era. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to BigBang’s live albums over the past few months and I’m still blown away with what they accomplished during that endless concert tour of 2015-2016 with the Band Six. The artistic growth of ten years on full display as they strip away the admittedly dated production of BigBang’s older songs in order to showcase the beautiful bones of songs like “Haru Haru.” 

Over the series, we’ll see Taeyang as he goes from “YB Taekwon” the adequate rapper to panty-dropping R&B vocal legend.

Daesung overcoming early setbacks and obstacles, including vocal nodules and an awful car accident that smashed up his face, to holding court with the audience in packed out stadiums.

T.O.P. working himself to the bone in an attempt to infuse actual art into this pop art confection.

G-Dragon shedding his juvenile hip hop persona and emerging as a global style icon and pop genius.

And, yes, the tragic fall of Seungri, who we watch over 10 years transform from an achingly cute teen idol to his “Great Seungri” character, DJing his way into the abyss as if he didn’t know the ending to the Great Gatsby—or that maybe if he tried hard enough to ignore it, it wouldn’t happen to him too.

Which is not to say that BigBang are the only good group. Of course they aren’t. There are many talented idols and groups out there. I’m currently loving (G)-Idle’s “Wife” and anybody familiar with me knows that I adore Taemin and SHINee, as well as the guys in Winner. My point is more that BigBang was a keystone species in the K-Pop ecosystem and understanding K-Pop history is impossible without dealing with BigBang. Stans may not like them, personally, but to deny their impact turns the K-Pop narrative into something completely incoherent and far less meaningful than it otherwise would be.

So join me on a fantastic journey. BigBang’s gonna raise the roof, y’all. BigBang’s gonna raise the roof.