꽃 길 (FLOWER ROAD)

The song

‘꽃 길 (FLOWER ROAD)’ is a digital single BIGBANG released on 13 March 2018, fifteen months after the album MADE and without an announcement beforehand. The song has no official music video.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction states that all five members took part, that G-Dragon shares the composing credit, and that The Fliptones — who had worked on GD X TAEYANG’s ‘GOOD BOY’ and Taeyang’s ‘Stay With Me’ — arranged and produced it, with lyrics by G-Dragon and T.O.P. The same text places the release: T.O.P and G-Dragon had begun their military service and Taeyang’s followed, and this was the day Daesung enlisted.

Reviews

Idology, a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, ran the song on 29 March 2018 in the column it gives to the releases of the middle of each month.

Third began with what the song announces about itself. “The moment G-Dragon’s humming opens it,” he wrote, “you know it is a BIGBANG song. And just when it seems like the obvious BIGBANG style, it turns out not to be easy to name an earlier song much like it.” He read it as a song that makes you wonder, he wrote, “whether how practised and how familiar the five of them sound trading lines is what plants an easy preconception in the public’s mind, and what BIGBANG-ness even is.”

Third also took up the metaphor in the title. The phrase, he wrote, “is by now a nearly worn-out metaphor, used here without variation, and yet the skill with which even that ordinariness is folded into the song’s high spirits and made convincing is a territory only opened by the kind of ‘BIGBANG-ness’ that grew out of hip-hop with a strong strain of Korean pop feeling mixed in.” Because the members’ enlistments meant the group would not be seen whole for some time, he added, the song reads as a hymn to its fans, its parting lines taking even the drifting-away that a hiatus can cause into the song itself.

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the song at number one on its Digital Chart for week 11 of 2018 (11 to 17 March), the week of release. It was at number one again the following week, week 12 (18 to 24 March).