에라 모르겠다 (FXXK IT)

The song

‘FXXK IT’ is one of the two title tracks on MADE, the third full-length album BIGBANG released at midnight on 13 December 2016. Sports Kyunghyang reported that day that this song and ‘LAST DANCE’ were the album’s two title tracks. G-Dragon wrote the music with TEDDY and R.Tee, and the lyrics with T.O.P and TEDDY; the track runs three minutes and 51 seconds, and the music video went up on the group’s official channel the day before release, on 12 December.

MADE was the group’s first full-length album in eight years, after Remember in 2008. Eight of its 11 tracks had already appeared on the four ‘MADE SERIES’ singles released over four months in 2015, and three were new: this song, ‘LAST DANCE’ and ‘GIRLFRIEND’. YG Entertainment’s album introduction describes the record as the full stop of the ‘MADE SERIES’ and the close of the group’s tenth-anniversary project, and says the three new songs were made with TEDDY and CHOICE37 alongside newer writers including Jeon Yong-jun and 24. In an interview published on release day, The Korea Times reported that the three new songs took the top of eight Korean streaming charts.

Reviews

IZM ran Hyun Min-hyung’s review of MADE in its December 2016 issue. Writing about what the record takes from Korea’s own idiom, he named this song first: “‘FXXK IT’, which grafts a 1980s retro style onto its music video and folds exclamations into its chorus; ‘IF YOU’, whose striking acoustic guitar figure calls up a standard pop ballad; ‘BAE BAE’, which borrows the street call of a rice-cake seller — that they go back over what is distinctively Korean deserves praise.” The same review adds that “ten years have brought them a practised ease, and it comes out as wit in the songs”.

Idology, a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, ran the record on 31 December 2016 in ‘1st Listen’, the column it gives to the releases of the middle of each month. Jo Seong-min took the three new songs in turn: “From ‘FXXK IT’, which brings on a pile of the ‘Korean’ props that have been a steady interest and theme of GD’s, to ‘LAST DANCE’, which carries on the mood of the ‘BIGBANG blues’ of ‘Monster’ and ‘BLUE’, to ‘GIRLFRIEND’, which sounds more plaintive than ever — they close it out with a work that makes the group’s own place and presence firm.”

In the same column Hamchwa wrote about what the three new songs do inside the album: “If the songs released before were each the far edge of a musical area BIGBANG can reach, the new ones are BIGBANG music inside the safe ground already familiar to us — sort them that way and each song’s character shows more clearly, and with these songs filling it in, the record looks like a pentagon graph completed at last.”

Billboard’s Jeff Benjamin placed MADE sixth in his pick of the ten best K-pop albums of 2016, published on 23 December. “It’s an album a year-in-a-half overdue,” he wrote, “but its value as a standalone piece of work is undeniable.” The same entry names this song and ‘BAE BAE’ as the album’s playful electronic hip-hop.

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the song at number one on its Digital Chart for week 51 of 2016 (11 to 17 December), the week of release. All 11 songs from MADE were on that week’s chart, with ‘LAST DANCE’ at number two and ‘GIRLFRIEND’ at number three. The song was at number one again the following week, week 52 (18 to 24 December).

Billboard entered MADE at number one on its World Albums chart dated 31 December 2016, and the record held number three for the three weeks after that.