Smashing things!
[Video][Website]
[5.78]
Brad Shoup: It’s astounding to hear such an unremittingly bleak song about image. In the mindspace of this song, not even singing brings joy, and any reassurance of beauty is taken for patronization. You’d never be able to get away with this on Western pop radio; Pink would have an aneurysm. Text aside, “Ugly” is a earnest pop-rock concoction of slowly-strummed chords, keening vocals, and a cameo by the last single’s marching-snare rhythm. The rock-styled chorus would seem to show resolve of a kind, but the English lyrics underscore a message against which there may not be a campaign strong enough.
[4]
Frank Kogan: CL could spend an entire video jamming her thumb in her eye and her fans would find a way to find it empowering, and they’d be right and it would be totally exuberant and anyway I’m her fan. So a month ago 2NE1 were telling us, “Even if you were me you’d be envious of my body”; this time they tell us they’re irremediably ugly and if we try to convince them otherwise we’re lying. It’s the same message really, just a way to validate whatever needs validating and to provide Dara, CL, Bom, and Minzy the pretext to smash any windows they haven’t smashed already and to break barriers and harass club babes thereby liberating the babes, hurrah. Trouble is that making this song into an event, a declaration, an anthem, isn’t good for the music. Maddie over on Rolling K-pop had the right idea. Go to YouTube and search out the acoustic cover versions, and you hear net kids discovering the track that could have been: a chorus not rousing but swaying, painfully, a lullaby gone sour, a mood, a moment, a feeling.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: If you’re singing about feeling ugly and its accompanying loneliness — or for fuck’s sake, being falsely called pretty — it makes no sense to do it over a track like “Fuckin’ Perfect” after sonic liposuction and percussion implants. This song should not sound remotely galvanizing.
[5]
Anthony Easton: I love how, in Korean Pop, the chorus is emphasized with a burst out of Korean and into English. I also like how it adds extra ornamentation to basic American sentiments. The interesting thing here, is though I believe when Americans engage in angst, this seems too orchestral, too well put together to be quite as self loathing as it should be.
[6]
Jonathan Bradley: I guess this is the Korean “Unpretty,” and accordingly it’s kinda gorgeous. The soft ache of the verses is legible whatever the language and the stadium rock English chorus is worthy of a decent Kelly Clarkson knock off. Leona Lewis will sound like this if she ever grows the gametes.
[6]
Alfred Soto: The confidence with which its makers assembled this track comes through in the use of “pretty” twice in the chorus — back to back! The swirls and tape effects adduce her confusion, the martial drum taps her will to transcend it. As the “evil” twin of the Linda Perry-penned Aguilera single “Beautiful,” whose unintended irony turned its affirmations into self-deception, “Ugly” manipulates irony to its advantage. She’s alone because she’s smarter than the lovers she wants, and I don’t believe it for a second.
[7]
Jer Fairall: For all I know, the non-English verses could be entirely self-pitying in a way that would derail the whole thing if I knew what they were saying, but as this all sounds like such ebulliently happy nonsense even in the parts I can understand, I’m guessing not. If the video is any indication, they’re having way too much fun with their fluorescent paint and Slimer tees to be all that troubled by the song’s sentiment anyhow.
[7]
Pete Baran: The first verse builds as if it is going to blow up into some sort of massive chorus: instead it limps into a second verse, then a Korean chorus and finally hits a really rather good self loathing chorus. But taking so long to get anywhere puts me off and frankly the attitude on display in the video is wholly absent in the K-Pop guitarwork which is more Bucks Fizz than the Sugababes.
[4]
Chuck Eddy: “I am the Best” may well now be my single of the year, or at least very close to it, and it’s irresistible enough to carry the EP it’s on, this sweet self-flagellating schemo schaffel schlager or whatever you wanna call it included. But in general, at least so far — with one album (which I admittedly haven’t really absorbed) and one EP (and no TV show watching and minimal video viewing) to go on — I have to admit I’m fairly disappointed by 2NE1. I like the presumably inadvertent Blame Sally “Living Without You” quotes and electoburbling undercurrent of “Hate You” (which I swear they pronounce “Hey Jew”), and the silly papa-pop syllables in “I’m Busy” and pretty Eastern melody in “It Hurts (Slow).” But more often I’m getting the idea that 2NE1 are too impressed by the flattened vowels and haughty hollering and drab eh-eh-eh fillerbustering of contemporary r&b — as if I need to visit a whole ‘nother hemisphere to hear more of that tedium. Bottom line is: they seem kind of draggy, and lacking in the Latin freestyle-style transcendence of certain other K-Pop girl groups. Still, they are great beyond words at least once. So I will do my best to keep an open mind otherwise, and hope for nuances yet to reveal themselves.
[7]