And just 14 hours after the VMAs, it remains PROBLEMATIC O’CLOCK!

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[4.25]

Patrick St. Michel: One of the biggest reasons I geek out for K-pop is because of how many songs from South Korea are unafraid of pivoting mid-track. The first part of “Badman” is a surprisingly smooth number punctured by dramatic lyrics. “I will overthrow everything/This crazy world/I will change it,” they sing, before jumping into a dystopia-ready chorus. “I will imprison you in darkness” — that is dark and badass all at once. Then the twist, where a synth that sounds like a toy laser gun or a broken police siren comes in and the group raps over it, the song changing completely (and, in a later verse, featuring nightmarish vocal manipulation). Whereas so much of the Western world’s pop music is content finding one good idea and running with it, “Badman” refuses to sit still.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: The best idea in the song is the violent shift between the croony “I gotta feeling” sections and the spatter-drop EDM of the “I’m a bad man” chorus. So of course they repeat it twice, and fill the rest with gleeful posturing and silly evocations of 90s hip-hop. When the song opened with a rapped verse, I was hopeful that it would be a rap song. No such luck: just more jigsaw.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Do I listen to this or run Disk Defragmenter?
[3]

Jessica Doyle: In June B.A.P. released “Coffee Shop,” a sweet, smooth-jazz breakup take that features the six members looking contemplative in various American cities. To that a blogger I follow remarked on how relaxed and lived-in the video looked, how easily she could identify with B.A.P. in their new settings. Then “Badman” came out, and not long after that same blogger declared her Tumblr a K-pop-free zone and deleted all related posts. I’ll defer to Kay Thompson to explain why the video is such a colossal misfire (and she doesn’t even get to the use of Black Panther imagery!). Meanwhile, there’s little reason to listen to the song on its own, as it has 70% of the sonic incoherence of “I Got a Boy” and almost none of the verve. The one point is for reminding me of my crush on John Cena.
[1]

Alfred Soto: Not hip-hop-influenced so much as boy band influenced by hip-hop: think of the burbling soundscapes on which ‘N Sync yelped in their incoherent multiplicity at the dawn of the millennium.
[7]

Brad Shoup: At first, it’s pungent urban-life fetishism. I think I hear the “Juicy” beat, and I can imagine a Double Dragon film with a Snake Plissken cameo. But then it goes to wub hell. There’s problematic pitchshifting, obvious edits in the raps, and a general sogginess where I assume they’re dancing.
[4]

Madeleine Lee: What to make of this level of cultural appropriation — not the flash style-skimming we’re used to from the YG roster, but one that comes perilously close to invoking the word “soul”? For “Badman” is not entirely the product of some context-poor upper-level corporate decision. B.A.P’s leader and creative nucleus Bang Yongguk, whose Neruda-quotin’, Kahlo-admirin’ ways have surely earned him a Complex interview by now, has made reference to MLK in his lyrics, once cited Black Like Me as a book he reads several times a year, and is the kind of guy who tweets about “becoming one through music beyond race.” So this is coming from a more enlightened place than it may seem, but enlightened fetishization is, well, still fetishization. If anything, the problem with “Badman” may be that it knows too much, and so tries to do too much. The song stumbles from post-Kanye electronica to dub to generically “exotic” breakdown to their usual slogan-shouting, all without apparent forethought; the last one seems more like a default safe stance than an attempt to bring things together. The video is just as confused: Is it helping Detroit or exploiting it? What’s with the painfully obvious kissing white couple/violent black men parallel? Does its portrayal of a riot glorify violence or glorify the struggle, and which is worse? Half a black face doesn’t count, right? Of course, expectations can be adjusted. This is still pretty bold for a mainstream idol group, and for the other stuff, stans have continually invoked the cultural relativism defense, which is fair. But the thing is, “Badman” positions B.A.P as global saviours. And when you’ve decided a bunch of people need saving, but insist your own cultural standards be upheld, that’s not aid — that’s imperialism.
[4]

Anthony Easton: The post-apocalyptic video is nearly as amusing as the heavy breathing that invades the track.
[2]