Singing in the old bars, swinging with the old stars…
[Video]
[5.60]
Katie Gill: It feels entirely disingenuous for Riot Games to build an ad campaign around these female characters, complete with a K-popesque braggadocio track, while the company is currently being sued for its blatantly sexist and discriminatory attitudes, to the point where the company has most likely violated California laws against gender discrimination. I’m at least taking comfort that this is just only an okay approximation of a K-pop song. It’s missing a lot of modern hallmarks that anyone with even a passing familiarity of the genre would notice (where’s the rap verse?). The end result sounds more like Little Mix than Blackpink — who let’s be real, is fairly blatantly who they were aiming for.
[4]
Iain Mew: From Little Mix’s beginning there was a notable aesthetic overlap and back-and-forth with particular Korean groups — the same clothes as Girls’ Generation, who then had an entire video that looked much the same; Girl’s Day’s “Female President” sounding a bit like “Wings” followed by Little Mix recording “Wings” in Korean. It didn’t stay as obvious, but “Shout Out to My Ex” was rather Red Velvet — in the video especially. So I can see why a game trying to outdo a rival with a massively popular Korean character would use Little Mix as a template for an approachable approximation of K-poppiness (this has been labelled as a “K-pop song” in much coverage despite not being any more so than “Kiss and Make Up“). It could have been fun, too, if it wasn’t for how much it’s just “Power” without the empowerment, and how much that fits with the company it’s ultimately for.
[3]
Alex Clifton: I guess “POP/STARS” now counts as a flashy sports anthem, as this was made for the League of Legends tournament (that’s e-sports, right?), but this is a sports song done right. There’s drama, excitement, and a real build of tension — a song like this makes me want to put on my headphones and go for a run immediately. The chorus is a rush of adrenaline that I can’t stop living in; it gives me such a sense of power and control that I crave from pop music. I’m really sad K/DA is a fictional band and so it’s unlikely we’re going to get more singles from them in the future, because honestly I want so much more of this collaboration.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: Videogame song tie-ins have come a long way since “I’m a Medieval Man.” But who is this for? The average gamer’s as likely to listen to this in six months as they are a Breaking Benjamin playlist, i.e., highly not. US radio/streaming obviously won’t touch it, no matter how many small cracks Madison Beer has made to playlists since being PRed as the next Justin Bieber six years ago. It’s marketed, dubiously, as K-pop-as-aesthetic; on the Gaon chart it comes in at a unstellar #48. People who stan skins, maybe, but that audience is often fickle and temporary. It all comes across as a AAA studio allocating money for pissing on and burning, money with better uses. The song-as-a-song almost seems besides the point: shiny, context-free, too big to really work.
[6]
Micha Cavaseno: There’s been rightful mistrust of the intent of Riot Games for backing this musical endeavor of product placement informing the existence of a single, and deservedly so. Furthermore, there’s also a weird sort of suspicion to be found in the idea of an artificial K-pop record means as a signifier of K-pop’s current day value — which is also itself oddly antiquidated to older perceptions of K-pop, despite using (G)I-DLE, who are admittedly doing a good job of pushing the boundaries sonically right now. But ultimately, any song that features a hook that literally celebrates the idea of being pop stars despite hiding all the contributors as a supporting elements to celebrate computer game characters has a cynicism that for all the strengths of the record just doesn’t sit right. And that’s the ultimate reality, no matter where you turn to analyze the song.
[6]
Taylor Alatorre: The title gives away the game — who else would feel the need to sing “we pop stars” except a virtual pop group? Everything else here is such a picture-perfect pantomime of the Gaon charts that it basically defies critical analysis. It does err on the side of masculine energy to avoid polarizing its immediate audience, but stays elevated and stylish throughout, never diving into the full lunkhead territory of other big-budget collaborative tie-ins. Though Soyeon’s rapping exerts a heavy gravitational pull on the proceedings, Madison Beer emerges as the understated MVP. She does the absolute most with her cleanup duty on the verses, making the case for her as someone to keep an eye on outside the world of Runeterra.
[7]
Will Adams: So the joke is that they’re definitively not pop stars, right? That’s why they’ve been stuffed into this confusing feature credits casserole and rendered as indistinguishable sexy cartoon girls in the video, all to promote a video game. It’s one thing for a song to be overstuffed on a sonic basis; it’s another to be overstuffed with context, no matter how effectively the chorus has burrowed into my brain for eternity.
[6]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Not the most compelling entry in the grand history of mostly fictional girl groups, but remarkably close to an actual piece of pop music, all the way up to embedding itself in my head and refusing to be dislodged.
[5]
John Seroff: Hyper-produced Brit-pop-meets-K-Pop League of Legends tie-in, brimming with nonspecific and hypocritical declarations of girl power, zerg rush intensity, and very expensive sounding sounds. Better-versed SJ heads than I will be able to trace the predecessor soundalikes and musical heritage necessary to construct a simulacrum this artificially precise; I’ll just note that while this is brutally effective treadmill music, the depth of the uncanny valley here offers hollow and likely only short-lived thrills.
[6]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Riot Games has had its fair share of curious music collaborations, one of which included iKON’s Bobby appearing alongside The Glitch Mob and metalcore band The Word Alive, but the most interesting has been (G)I-DLE featuring “POP/STARS.” In three minutes, the song makes exceedingly clear the difference between Western pop that’s indebted to K-pop and K-pop itself, of which this is decidedly the former. It’s there in the palette of electronic music it draws from, how much force that the chorus’s drop is allowed to have, how the song approaches its genre-blending, the timbre and vocal delivery of its American singers, and the fact that this sounds like Western pop’s greatest K-pop analogue: Little Mix. Miyeon and Soyeon’s vocals ring K-pop to me, but everything else swallows their presence whole to make this sound like nothing out of Korea. Like most Olympics songs, “POP/STARS” falls short because its victim to an organization’s lofty goal of appealing to an international audience, sounding rather empty in the process. Unsurprisingly, the lyrics feature generic uplift filtered through the lens of an empowering girl group: the least convincing “girl crush” concept yet? While “POP/STARS” was meant to promote new skins for League of Legends’s in-game characters, it’s really part of a wider marketing campaign to ensure the company continues their worldwide dominance. At the very most, I’ll applaud their in-house production team for making something halfway decent.
[5]