Also born again: your semi-annual Three-Quarters Of) Blackpink Monday!
Alfred Soto: Chromium disco with every note crease-free and ready for the night, “Born Again” will pick no pockets nor break any bones.
[6]
Melody Esme: A Future Nostalgia rip, through and through, right down to RAYE trying with all her might to sound like Dua Lipa. But that formula can’t be fucked with, and the song doesn’t coast on it. From the sexual sermonizing to the heaviest slap bass I’ve heard in some time (every time the lowest note rings out, I feel like it’s about to whip me across the face), this is an inexorable (dare I say blessed?) electro-disco track.
[8]
Dave Moore: I’ve been wondering this year about the flat-disco turn (i.e., disco minus funk, period signifiers without the feel of the era’s actual hits) from Doja Cat’s “Say So” and Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, and its impact on A-pop in ’20s. I suspect “Say So” wasn’t really getting its moves from the post-disco of the early ’80s, but instead from the way that disco got sucked into the zeitgeist engine of the last decade-plus of K-pop’s global ascension. If I’m right about that, then LISA isn’t just carving out her place in American/Anglophone pop, but reminding us where much of that pop really comes from these days — somewhere else. “Born Again” inhabits the space uneasily; it can’t decide whether it’s the fresh version of something derivative or the derivative version of something fresh. I would say that’s part of what makes K-pop what it is: its refusal of a fresh/derivative dichotomy. And that’s also maybe what American pop struggles with: its own uneasiness with being an unapologetic ripoff without covering its tracks or being annoyingly winky about it. Anyway, another decent transnational A-pop effort: Lipa lite ‘n’ late.
[7]
Julian Axelrod: We are officially out of meat on the Future Nostalgia bone.
[5]
Claire Davidson: “Born Again” seems both busy and hollow. I respect this song’s attempt to create a disco hit with some real grandeur, but Lisa, ostensibly the song’s lead, doesn’t remotely have the soaring vocal needed to match the song’s scale. It’s no wonder that Raye, with her richer, more expansive timbre, handles most of the hook, even providing backing vocals for Lisa during her verse—though the reliance on her voice makes the decision to strand her verse at the song’s end, without any natural transition, sem that much more galling. Doja Cat, too, feels misplaced; while “Say So” led the 2020s nu-disco revival, that song let her more rambunctious personality take hold, whereas here she’s forced to tamper her energy in favor of the song’s glossy sheen. Even the instrumentation, despite the sense of space the mix conveys on the hook, feels half-hearted: the song’s more dramatic strings and bass licks are stranded in favor of a galloping synth beat that doesn’t add much to the track.
[5]
Nortey Dowuona: The flimsy disco drum loop laid down by Cassidy Turbin undergirds all of the other musical flourishes by Andrew Wells, especially the bass, which forces LISA and Doja to adopt a thin soprano line in order to comfortably ride it. When Doja snaps into her own flow, it feels pointed and knowing, but she can’t break from the rhythm, which weakens her verse’s impact to the point it is soon forgotten. RAYE combines both approaches — light, thin soprano, tight, hyper-constructed raps — in the final verse, and lifts off into a daring, silvery riff that travels up the scale. It’s the most exciting and energizing moment, the rest of the song a flimsy, cloudy blur.
[6]
Al Varela: You can tell this started as a solo RAYE song that her label refused to release. This is her song, and she owns the chorus and bridge of this song with effortless prowess. LISA, meanwhile, feels like she’s playing catchup. Her performance is fine, but she’s easily outclassed by both RAYE’s powerful stage presence and Doja Cat’s snappy verse. I appreciate LISA saving “Born Again” from label hell, but she’s also the weakest part, which doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in her upcoming album. I wonder whether this song would have been better off had RAYE and Doja Cat kept it for themselves — but the song we got is still worth having.
[7]
Kayla Beardslee: Lisa is undeniably getting eaten up by Doja and (especially) RAYE here, but I feel like she also knows that: you don’t imitate RAYE’s demo and then invite her back onto her own song without knowing you’re ceding some of the spotlight. If anything, I respect that Lisa has a good ear for collaborations and a willingness to meet them halfway. (Besides, singers with far more range than her have struggled just as much to escape the shadow of RAYE’s writing.) Lisa’s post-YG solo discography has been one big eclectic experiment, and the hits and misses have landed somewhat at random based on the variables in the credits, but “Born Again” is one of the more fun and worthwhile results so far. Cosmic synth bass and a lineup of strong female performers is a winning recipe, and orders of magnitude fresher and more exciting than anything Lisa was stuck with under YG.
[7]
Katherine St. Asaph: The same conceit as “Like a Prayer,” yet somehow with no sense of sacrilege or transgression, and thus no juice.
[4]
Taylor Alatorre: The obvious answer is “because the drama,” but I’m still confused as to why Lisa would choose to act out the maltheistic vision of God as a scornful tyrant who would punish His own creation for the crime of not loving Him enough, and then ask us to sympathize with that party in the relationship. Most of the blame for this interpretation goes to Doja Cat with her “non-believer” and “bitten from the fruit” nonsense, but at least Doja tries to enumerate some of the guy’s tangible sins, namely lying and underemployment. All we get from Lisa are “receipts” that she cagily keeps out of view, as well as the implication that her man simply should’ve wanted it more — not exactly the stuff of divine retribution. And good luck trying to tease anything from Raye’s Gish gallop of a feature, where she pops in to deliver a brief and bizarrely muffled co-sign of, I assume, sisterly solidarity. We’re meant to take these lyrics as a Gothic counterpart to the vaguely noir-ish instrumental, but if the most memorable words in your liberated woman anthem are “pray to Jesus,” it’s possible you’ve crossed a few too many wires.
[4]
Ian Mathers: This has a drive and confidence that perfectly fits the “fuck you, you are now missing out” intended vibe. The disco strings and poppin’ bass give the production a sleek, nocturnal, cinematic sheen, and LISA and RAYE are fantastic, both in their own right and in the way their voices blend. Doja Cat doesn’t let the side down or anything, but if you swapped her out for more of the other two I wouldn’t complain. Maybe she should have changed her name to all caps?
[8]
Mark Sinker: I know vid-crit is an infra-dig substitute for listening, but imagine you DID reach the underlit-floor hotel room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there was RAYE rhyming cinnamon / minimum, deficient in / vitamin. Kubrick’s way better monolith.
[7]
Andrew Karpan: A knockoff Dua Lipa record that comes conspicuously close to the real thing.
[7]