Bad Boy

The song

‘BAD BOY’ is a song on ALIVE, BIGBANG’s fifth mini album, released at midnight on 29 February 2012. Every one of the record’s six songs was a title track, the 44-second intro aside, and this was the one whose music video went up with the release.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction calls it a hip-hop song built on an appealing beat and a rhythmic hook. The same text says the music video was shot on the streets of Brooklyn, New York, that it carries the vintage feeling of the song intact, and that it was filmed with an Alexa camera on a steadicam rig that turns through 360 degrees.

Reviews

Choi Min-woo wrote about the song for weiv on 4 March 2012. He found the record’s will to change the impressive part of it, and this song the clearest case.

He then took the arrangement apart. “Over an ambience laid down lightly,” he wrote, “a short, sweet piano chord — one that reminded me personally of Extreme’s ‘When I First Kissed You’ — sets the mood, and then an easygoing hip-hop beat, a shimmering tambourine and a nimbly moving string section give it its frame.” The groove works, he went on, “the melody flows softly and the members take on their own parts in earnest.” His reading of the song: it is one that “recalls, as a well-made YG record does, a good deal of music from that neighbourhood, and at the same time makes you feel that the comparison is beside the point.”

Duncan Cooper wrote about the song and its video for the American music magazine The FADER the next day, 5 March. “‘Bad Boy’ is exquisite, with roots in the airiest of hip-hop/R&B summer crossover,” he wrote, and: “‘Bad Boy’ floats the way your hand does riding currents outside the car window, in and out of the sun without seemingly any effort.” Though the song is sung almost entirely in Korean, he added, the English phrases placed through it explain it succinctly and leave somewhere for a listener to sing along.

The same piece noticed that the video was filmed in Williamsburg, by the Marcy Avenue subway entrance. “Half the charm of K-pop is that it’s preciously and unabashedly manufactured,” Cooper wrote, “but there’s something seriously compelling and refreshingly unforced about weaving dances around Brooklyn subway steps.”

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the song at number two on its Digital Chart for week 9 of 2012 (26 February to 3 March), the week of release. All seven songs from ALIVE, the intro included, were on that week’s chart, with ‘Blue’ at number one and ‘FANTASTIC BABY’ at number four. The song was at number two again the following week, week 10 (4 to 10 March).