BAE BAE

The song

‘BAE BAE’ is one of the two songs on M, the single BIGBANG released on 1 May 2015, the other being ‘LOSER’. It runs two minutes and forty-nine seconds, and the Bugs (벅스) album page marks both songs on the single as title tracks. The music video went up on the group’s official channel the day before release, on 30 April.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction announced the single as the first of four: M, A, D and E, one a month, collected into a full-length album that September. The same text calls it the group’s first release as five in 1,157 days, since ALIVE in 2012.

Reviews

weiv’s Ju Min-hyeok wrote about the single on 6 May 2015 and spent most of the piece on this song. “‘LOSER’, with its strong, rock-recalling beat, is striking too,” he wrote, “but the song that shows where BIGBANG has arrived at this point is ‘BAE BAE’.” On the sound: “A beat thick with Teddy’s colour holds the centre of the song, and G-Dragon and T.O.P shape a sound at once lyrical and singular, keeping a certain distance from the trap sound that is everywhere at the moment.” He added a note on the words, “the line ‘chapssaltteok chapssaltteok / our match, our our match’, which feels alien against the trap sound, is what made this song something more.”

Idology, a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, ran the single on 16 May 2015. Myoo wrote: “From a Korean pop melody dropped suddenly into an atmosphere thick with nineties alternative, to the way it finishes from the ‘chapssaltteok’ in the back half as though another song had been pasted on and left unfinished, this is meta K-pop toying with statelessness inside a stateless context.” He went on: “Since ‘Fantastic Baby’, probably, BIGBANG have kept up the business of first handing you bewilderment and then turning it into fearsome persuasiveness, and on this song alone they let themselves show off without minding the second half of that at all.”

IZM named the song one of the ten Korean singles of 2015 in its December round-up. Kim Ban-ya, who wrote the entry, opens: “It is BIGBANG’s most unorthodox song of the year.” The entry then describes how the group put a crowd-facing song and an experiment out together on one record, and closes: “‘Bae bae’ is an unusual song in which that mainstream appeal and that experiment go down completely smoothly, a perfect match.”

The Singles Jukebox, where a panel of British and American music writers each file a note of their own on one single, covered the song on 13 May 2015. Of the six, Alfred Soto wrote: “Some of its hairpin turns work, like the Young Thug mimicry in the second verse and the guitar hook throughout.”

Billboard’s Jeff Benjamin placed the song fifteenth in the magazine’s twenty best K-pop songs of 2015, published on 30 December, writing that it saw the group take the trap genre that was then popular and turn it K-pop with flecks of electronica and bizarre samples, paired with animated rapping and heartfelt croons. Dazed’s Taylor Glasby placed it eighth in the magazine’s twenty K-pop tracks of 2015 on 30 November: “Big Bang’s ‘Bae Bae’ offered a playful wander through young love in contrast to their signature airtight construction.” The entry takes up the video as well, “a tongue-in-cheek fantasy of cherry blossoms, flowers tunnels and free-falling through the star-studded cosmos.”

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the song at number three on its Digital Chart for week 18 of 2015 (26 April to 2 May), the week of release. It rose to number two for weeks 19 and 20 and stood at number five in week 21. On the same chart’s annual table for 2015 it finished fourth, with ‘LOSER’ from the same single second.