Twice ft. Megan Thee Stallion – Strategy

Having been released last December is not so old for a hit these days…

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Kayla Beardslee: Welcome to How to Craft a Successful English K-Pop Single with Twice! Follow these crucial steps to secure an elusive crossover with the American market, retain your musical integrity, and be oh so glad that they met ya. Step One: Build an accomplished Korean (and Japanese) discography whose fun, endearing pop sound is more accessible to general audiences in the U.S. than any of your peers. Step Two: Perfect the formula by releasing multiple excellent English singles that experiment with K- vs. A-pop influences while staying true to the spirit that fans love about your music. Step Three: Source a delightful demo with unfussy production and a ton of sticky hooks that will bridge the gap between grooves simple enough to catch on with American radio and irrepressible K-pop panache. Step Four: Spend a decade performing and maturing as artists so you have the confidence to sell the flirty lyrics with just the right amount of theatricality. Step Five: Link up with an American artist who’s a genuine fan and can meet your group halfway while adding fluency and bite to a feature. (Bonus Step Six: Sprinkle in a pinch of luck by getting a placement on the biggest soundtrack of the year — ironically just as you’ve started to promote your next English single, which is fun but not nearly as perfect a crossover as this.) Follow all these steps, and congratulations! You’ve finally accomplished an almost impossible feat, where so many other groups have failed or sacrificed their style before you. Now don’t overthink the alchemy any more than this, and just be yourself: do your dance in the moonlight, and enjoy as everyone follows along. 
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Joshua Lu: One of Twice’s most median singles getting a second wind through the group’s tangential involvement with KPop Demon Hunters is evidence of nothing if not the sheer randomness of how hits are born. “Strategy” is pleasant pop nothingness, with the only distinctive qualities being the recurring three-count hook and that weird twist in the bridge where Megan Thee Stallion does her best Doja Cat impersonation. The song doesn’t even seem to care about engaging with its titular concept — the strategy in question is initially explained as making yourself hot and then being hot in the presence of boys, and then the remaining three quarters of the song are about how effective said strategy is. I have no reason to doubt the efficaciousness of this strategy for everyone involved, but it doesn’t make for a particularly interesting song.
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Nortey Dowuona: Cleo Tighe, Lee Woo Hyeon, Boy Matthews, Earattack: for the crime of the back end of Megan’s Doja Cat impression, all of you will not see heaven (working with Erika de Casier). Song’s pretty good otherwise.
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Alfred Soto: When I got past the obvious rhymes, I was there for the whomping beat and the determination of Twice and Megan to get that boy. You can complain about “I’m gonna getcha!” as a strategy, but then Operation Torch was a fancy phrase for “kick the shit out of the Germans in North Africa.”
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Julian Axelrod: Anytime a K-pop group commissions a feature from an American superstar, I always wonder what the guest artist is doing that one of the nine group members (all of whom appear on this song) couldn’t accomplish on their own. I thought the whole idea was to be a self-contained Swiss Army knife of singers, rappers, dancers, and whatever else the song demands. The obvious answer here is overseas exposure; the secret answer is maybe none of the Twice girls could impersonate Doja Cat as well as Megan does in the second half of her verse.
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Andrew Karpan: The way Megan stunts on these K-pop records has a kinetic authenticity, even when she isn’t really trying very hard at all. These half-asleep Stallion bars move with an inspiring confidence that elevates the surrounding nostalgia karaoke into something vaguely moving. 
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Tim de Reuse: At first, the “getcha”/”betcha”/”metcha” chants drove me up the wall, and I was sitting here like a grump ready to write about how “Strategy” isn’t even a particularly catchy word as far as words go. After a few listens, though, it’s all just passing through my head as pure sound, bright colors bouncing off the insides of a bubblegum clothes dryer, 808 cowbells and Reese basses fluttering in the wind. Deeply obnoxious, but there isn’t a single wink-to-camera moment I can cling to as evidence against their sincerity, and so despite my toothache I have no choice but to respect it. On the other hand, I think Ms. Stallion is taking the assignment a bit too seriously.
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Iain Mew: The version of “Strategy” used for the video with its 100 million views has Megan Thee Stallion; the one that appears briefly in KPop Demon Hunters and at full length on its soundtrack doesn’t. Her rap was so thoroughly aligned with the light style of the track that its removal is both a weird choice and one that doesn’t make a huge difference to how it sounds. This is not a song that has much to do with fine details. Instead it’s about the projection of a continuous sense of softly held power. In the movie it is used to soundtrack the opulence of having a room with the outfits for all your future promos hanging up ready, but more so the pleasant confidence of having promo mechanisms ready to swing into place at the tap of a screen. It works unobtrusively and perfectly, since the song is already that but for romantic seduction rather than pop music. “Winning is my trademark”: with certainty like that, who needs dynamics?
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Perfectly good Neptunes-core K-pop; unfortunately, they’ve found one of the few situations where you’d rather have Latto or Coi Leray over Megan, who is charming as always but in a way that threatens to overturn the balance here. A song like this wants as few distinct characteristics as possible.
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