FANTASTIC BABY

The song

‘FANTASTIC BABY’ is a song on Alive, BIGBANG’s fifth mini album, released at midnight on 29 February 2012. It is one of the six songs the group declared title tracks, the intro aside, and its music video came a week after the record, on 6 March.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction says the record’s songs run from electronic to hip-hop and names this one among the titles it singles out. The same text credits a large group of YG producers, G-Dragon and Teddy among them.

Reviews

The Singles Jukebox, where a panel of British and American music writers each file a note of their own on one single, ran the song on 12 December 2012 in the column it keeps for records it had missed that year.

Iain Mew set out how it is built. “‘Fantastic Baby’ has a lot going for it,” he wrote. “Great hulking blocks of synth noise, a succession of verses which make good use five different voices and vary between playing similarly aggressively and playing against the grain, and a great build-build-build-whoosh-intone-DANCE structure for the chorus.” He liked how far over the top the video went.

Patrick St. Michel wrote that for all the resemblances, the song still holds things that are found nowhere else in the YG family, and listed the pitch-shifted vocals, G-Dragon’s ad libs and the chorus’s chant. Brad Shoup put it another way: “It’s not a song so much as an event, or a series of set pieces.”

Writing about the whole mini album for weiv on 4 March, Choi Min-woo placed the song among its club tunes, a fierce one that put him in mind of 2NE1’s ‘바람났어’ (Baramnasseo).

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the song at number four on its Digital Chart for week 9 of 2012 (26 February to 3 March), the week of release, and at number three in week 10 (4 to 10 March), the week its video came out. It was still on the chart at number 68 in the first week of June, when the special edition Still Alive arrived.