BANG BANG BANG

The song

‘뱅뱅뱅 (BANG BANG BANG)’ is the title track of A, the single BIGBANG released on 1 June 2015. It runs three minutes and forty 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 on the day of release.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction records that ‘LOSER’ and ‘BAE BAE’, from the previous single M, had spent May at number one on the streaming charts and on the television music shows, and presents A as a record of an entirely different cast. The same text calls the videos for M film-like and noirish, and sets up the question of which genre A would answer them with.

Reviews

Idology, a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, ran the single on 7 June 2015 with four notes. Myoo followed the shape of the song: “‘BANG BANG BANG’, which tears off with explosive energy, comes to the end of its build-up, passes through ‘as though shot’, and drops into an empty space.” That empty space, he wrote, is used differently here: “This playful malice, which would not be out of place called 병맛 (byeongmat), works as a kind of tsun and sharpens BIGBANG’s contrary appeal.” Of the back half: “Unlike before, by really running in the last stretch it shows the dere that resolves even the ill feeling.” His note ends: “A tsundere dialectic of delicate engineering, tuned by experience and calculation. Harder still to dislike.” 병맛 reads in Korean as something like a sick or off taste, and the Korean internet uses it for a thing so absurd that the absurdity is the point; tsun and dere are the two halves of the Japanese tsundere, the character who is prickly before turning warm.

Yoo Je-sang, on the same page, read the song against the group’s earlier work. “‘BANG BANG BANG’ is exactly the thing the public wants from BIGBANG,” he wrote, adding that the production seems to have wanted a minimal chorus and to have stopped at a reasonable point. His note closes: “This single, which brings the old atmosphere back to life, could not be more welcome.”

IZM’s Lee Gi-seon took the song’s progress and its sense of length in the magazine’s single review for June 2015. “An opening that rather flags acquires its justification when it meets the vocal part, and the song falls into a bedlam you cannot see a step ahead of,” he wrote. He goes on: “I wondered how it came to be such a long song, and it is not quite four minutes.” The reason, he writes, is “the beat variation in the chorus and the repetition of the phrase ‘bang bang bang’, which give at once a strange sense of déjà vu and the illusion that the song runs long.”

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the song at number one on its Digital Chart for week 23 of 2015 (31 May to 6 June), the week of release. ‘WE LIKE 2 PARTY’, from the same single, was at number three, and ‘LOSER’ and ‘BAE BAE’, out a month earlier, were still on the chart at number nine and number eleven. The song stood at number two in week 24 and number five in week 26.

On the same chart’s annual table for 2015 the song finished first. Star News reported on 26 January 2016 that it had also topped Melon’s annual chart for the year.