맨정신 (SOBER)

The song

‘맨정신 (SOBER)’ is one of the two songs on D, the single BIGBANG released on 1 July 2015, the other being ‘IF YOU’. It runs three minutes and fifty-seven 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 June; The Korea Times reported that it was approaching two million views by the afternoon of the day it appeared.

YG Entertainment’s album introduction calls D the record at the exact centre of the four-part MADE series, the one holding the group’s effort to get past its own limits. The same text records that ‘BANG BANG BANG’ and ‘WE LIKE 2 PARTY’, from the previous single A, had filled the month of June.

Reviews

Idology, a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, ran the single on 7 July 2015 with three notes. Myoo opened his: “‘Sober’ is fun.” The song, he explained, borrows the clichés of the loosely defined genre usually called EDM while its base is a rock sound. “Since EDM was invented for a rock audience rather than an electronic one,” he wrote, “it is hard to call this greatly new, but cheerful, shall we say.” On how it is assembled: “The elements shared by the EDM-styled intro and the rock part of the first verse that follows it change places with one another, and the alien parts inserted here and there land steadily, so that at the level of method there is a kind of handiwork that is good to hear.”

Kim Young-dae, on the same page, set the song beside the single’s other one. “‘If You’, which puts nothing but the voice forward over an acoustic guitar, is the most affecting ballad they have made in some time, and ‘Sober’ is a song in which a punk mindset and the retro running rock beat that is the current of the American indie rock scene are handsomely combined; both belong less to ‘idol’ music than to the category of real Korean pop,” he wrote. Of the group’s method: “What is interesting about BIGBANG is that they fill the gaps of the deliberately loose texture, or of the strangeness, that a song itself carries, and fill them convincingly, by putting their craft and their character forward.” Kim Yun-ha read the distance between the two songs as the point of the single: “Listening to ‘If you’ and ‘Sober’, two entirely different songs that seem to have been dragged in from the two extremes of the colours BIGBANG has shown so far, you find yourself thinking again about the persuasiveness a group has, rather than a single song.”

IZM’s Kim Ban-ya took the song’s construction apart in the magazine’s single review for July 2015. The progress of the song is “a provocative rap traded between G-Dragon and T.O.P as though in couplets, a melody that goes into the ear easily and is shared out between Taeyang, Daesung and Seungri each in his own style, a fierce development and then a reversal of mood at the climax”, and then: “The way it is worked is familiar and standardised, but thanks to the devoted care spent on the sound the song is wrapped smoothly and fluently.” The entry also describes the series’ release pattern, “the current release method is a two-for-one, in which a crowd-facing song and an experiment that adds something are put out together”, and places this song as the support under ‘IF YOU’ on the same single.

Numbers

Circle Chart placed the song at number two on its Digital Chart for week 27 of 2015 (28 June to 4 July), the week of release, with ‘IF YOU’ from the same single at number one; the four songs from the two earlier singles were on the same week’s chart. It stood at number six in week 28 and number twenty-one in week 31. On the same chart’s annual table for 2015 it finished forty-second.