BLACKPINK - SQUARE UP

BLACKPINK

SQUARE UP

2018

Spotify

K-Pop is a really interesting phenomena. For the most part it lives on the fringes of popular music, occasionally breaking through like in the case of BTS, but for the most part it has it;s entrenched fans and not much else. There are a number of reasons for this, in the past it was so sugary sweet that it was hard to listen too, but now K-pop is picking up on the last vestiges of EDM to find it's inspiration. That certainly is the case with the all girl group BLACKPINK. SQUARE UP is their first EP to really make a splash and boy oh boy is it something. Throughout the album the girls bounce between Korean and English which is a mainstay of K-pop but one that has always rubbed me the wrong way. It feels like casting a net far to wide, I wish I could use words from any language when I was trying to rap so that words actually rhymed but I don't have that luxury. Dub-step amazingly is front and center on the first two tracks. To complete the widest audience humanly possible there is even a rapper here. It just never feels like the ladies of BLACKPINK have a point of view. Who are they? What do they want to say? Because everything is blasted through this diluted filter you never get a real sense of them. They want your body to move, they want someone to love, they want to take back the night and we get it, but these are the same topics that have been recycled in pop for years now, you can't just keep rehashing them and hope for amazing results. 

Girl groups as a whole feel stuck in this place where any kind of experimentation is thrown out the window. The same can be said for acts like BTS as well, it doesn't have to do down gender lines. The issue is that a straight aggregation of pop is never going to be all that compelling. It's going to sound "like" something good but it is never going to be good in and of itself because it doesn't have a real identity. What are BLACKPINK saying that needs to be said? I don't think all that much. Yet again though, maybe that is the point of pop, especially K-Pop; It is meant to create a technicolor escape. You can disappear into the bright colors and big sounds forgetting the real world around you. BLACKPINK are trying to get to that point, but there are honestly better acts with more diverse things to say. They have talent and the music sounds like something good, it just never crosses over into actually being all that good. 

5.0 out of 10