But controversial on purpose?
[Video]
[3.64]
[1]
Leah Isobel: My early bet on Katseye continues to pay off in the absolute worst way possible. The girls are undeniable stars with enough gravity to force Le Sserafim and Illit into their orbit, flattening the former’s omnivorous mischief and the latter’s post-NewJeans whimsy into one-dimensional symbols while leaving their own militant dominance unchanged. There is a certain thrill in hearing a group of women communicate that level of cutthroat ambition. But “Gnarly” worked because it still indicated that the girls were still underdogs: its cartoonish rendering of a world made shallow by fame an outside projection of their fears and hopes, shaken up together to fizz. “Iconic By Mistake,” on the other hand, offers no such complexity. It is pure defensive emptiness, a brand maintenance exercise. It affirms that Katseye are the defining group of the moment, and that’s all. What a waste.
[3]
Hannah Jocelyn: The title implies none of these acts were iconic before their haters, which is an admission that this is pure ragebait music. I dislike it because it’s not annoying or bad taste enough: how do you fail at trying to fail?
[3]
Al Varela: I’m aware that playing into the outrage and anger toward this song and these groups is playing into what they want. It doesn’t matter that the production sounds like boiling, festering ass. It doesn’t matter that the girls layer their vocals with such ugly filters and harmonies that you can barely pick any of them out of a crowd. It doesn’t matter that these embarrassing playground taunts are supposed to make me scoff and clutch my pearls as if I’ve never heard them before. They won, I lost, they’re iconic… by mistake? What kind of self-own is that!? I get what it’s trying to imply; they’re so hot and cool that despite the haters they’ve become iconic and successful anyway. But “by mistake” implies that this wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t their hard work and dedication that got them there, it was just an accident. This is not only a pathetic brag, but also deeply insulting coming from three bands signed to the biggest American K-pop label in the world, constantly given opportunities within the industry from award show performances to big-name festivals. Katseye were literally formed to be the ultimate global K-pop group, one meant to appeal to every region (especially North America) and not just Korea. Le Sserafim have a song with Nile Rodgers. Illit model for Crocs and are for some reason ambassadors of the M&M brand??? And they want me to believe they were iconic by mistake!? In reality, the machine is working as intended. Get the fuck out of here.
[0]
Iain Mew: I quite like the electronic riff, somewhere between chiptune and modem dialing tone. It’s a shame it’s the only part of the song which is remotely coherent, between the way it feels like a set of build-ups that never go anywhere and a set of lyrics which can surely only leave any haters baffled at what point they’re trying to make.
[3]
Julian Axelrod: If nothing else, this song is a marvel of scheduling and coordination: How do you squeeze 14 singers onto one track when the groups can barely cater to every member on their own songs? This feels like a brainstorming session where not a single idea from the 9 credited songwriters was rejected. Fittingly, the lines that hit feel like accidental excerpts from an alternate universe banger: Algorithm bulletproof! Your lips foaming! Demanding me in 5D! If you unfocus your gaze and let the fridge magnet poetry wash over you, it almost feels profound.
[6]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Surgically interwoven, with unnecessarily complicated amounts of fan service, yet unmistakably catchy.
[8]
Andrew Karpan: In retrospect, providing vital background noises in a Justin Tranter penned record sung by 14 different K-pop singers will be remembered as a high watermark for the larger hyperpop sound.
[6]
Nortey Dowuona: Alyx Mendoza, one of the nine credited songwriters, only has two other credits directly to her name. Here, i-dle flip between refined sugar melodies over light Soulection synths and drums, but the lyrics are still indistinct, dry and struggle to hold your attention. Here, Eladio holds the pen and the melodies, emitting a much more distinct but just as dry voice, with Alyx only credited with the production, which is heavy and groovy, laden with the heavy handed bass stabs stolen from Mike Dean. And unfortunately for Alyx’s artistic voice, I prefer her not part of suggesting any lyrics. “Iconic By Mistake” is acerbic and pouty, thus this review will continue to fan the flames of their fame, but ultimately I cannot concern myself with regarding fame as anything other than a distraction from the cool parts of music. As a co-producer though, I am very interested to hear what placement she gets next.
[5]
Tim de Reuse: The awful rhymes, cutesy delivery, and nonsense metaphors are deliberately grating, yes, but this isn’t really the problem; the problem is that they’re grating in a way that’s totally artless. It’s calculated ragebait — or, to use a prelapsarian term, low-effort trolling. This kind of behavior would get you removed from most online spaces six or seven years ago.
[2]
Katherine St. Asaph: Unlike most things in pop music today, this is not a recession indicator. In the Great Recession this stuff had a melody.
[3]
Joshua Lu: Music being warped into brainrot is nothing new, and countless trends have shown that music with even the purest intentions can reach that point (see: bitcrushed “Vampire Empire,” Miss Piggy singing “Cellophane”). HYBE’s lesson from the success of “Gnarly,” a brainrot song that manages to be interesting in its grotesqueness, has unfortunately just been that brainrot = $$$, and that they should vertically integrate along the brainrot pipeline so that the initial music is as stupid as possible. “Iconic By Mistake” is thus awful by design. The whole point is that it sucks; if it were ever conceived with the intention of being good, they wouldn’t have tried to shove more than a dozen people on a sub-3 minute track. You’re supposed to walk away from the song, with its deliberately stupid lyrics, spuriously gritty production, and complete lack of melodies, pissed off, because otherwise there would be no haters to mock. I would try to wring out some deeper insight here, but there’s ultimately nothing to be derived from a bad song that’s bad on purpose. The crucible line is funny, though.
[2]
Taylor Alatorre: If Alice Longyu Gao has lost the Mandate of Heaven, it wasn’t of her own doing. The beat, while not as revelatory as “Gnarly,” is also far from the tuneless slog its detractors would see it as. But when a conglomerate like HYBE draws from the murky well of post-post-ironic internet aesthetics, it’s easy for certain nuances — or in this case, the entire unbothered, unfussy, “nothing means anything” vibe — to get lost in translation. I’m sure Gao as lyricist would not have greenlit such would-be bangers as “heart it harder,” let alone turn the next line into a gratuitious sentence diagram. More to the point, though, did K-pop really need a cross-industry press conference on the topic of Those Damn Dirty Trolls? What’s next, a congressional subcommittee?
[2]
Ian Mathers: I saw a popular music YouTuber ask people what the worst song of the year so far was, and was surprised to see this come up more than once. Maybe it’s because I’m not in the K-pop trenches that the idea of being mad at this glitchy, stompy trifle doesn’t occur to me. It’s designed to piss off the antis more, since any views are good views. I guess it’s working?
[7]