The Singles Jukebox

2013: A T.O.P. odyssey…

[Video][Website]
[7.40]

Madeleine Lee: Four years ago, “Turn It Up” was left for dead, baking in the desert; now it returns, staggering, loopy and vengeful. The heavy beat and one-note chorus have warped and darkened into a drone. Fashion (Givenchy, McQueen) has aged into art (Basquiat, Kubrick), and the preening messages of seduction have dissolved into a cut-up that layers images of nuclear apocalypse against a recitation of the Korean alphabet in the space of a verse. In the end it’s more noise than signal, but the endless repetition of the title is true dada: an incantation against order, an excitation to an action that never arrives, and ultimately, its own obliteration.
[8]

Sonya Nicholson: HEADLINE READS: World’s Sexiest Man emerges from six months of (not semi) seclusion, updates his previous single, surprises  everyone no one some people with a hit despite having a supposedly “non-mainstream” sound. But are we not at peak nonsense, peak hip-hop and peak alphabet? Why shouldn’t the public love T.O.P’s dadaist-ode-to-nonsense chorus over a hard hip-hop beat?  What we observe here is therefore the happy accident of someone’s genuine artistic impulse (see: the namedropping of “Basquiat”) lining up perfectly with the ultra-current-trend. Besides which, T.O.P. can rap whatever he wants and elevate the material, even the alphabet or the national anthem.
[8]

Cédric Le Merrer: I’m deeply sceptical of proclamations of power in songs. Put a little silliness in it, though, and I’ll gladly let your boot stomp on my face forever. Like G-Dragon, T.O.P is just silly enough that I gladly believe anything he says about how great he is.
[8]

Jessica Doyle: YG artists don’t make a lot of political noise: PSY’s commentary on Gangnam materialism is about as hard-hitting as it gets. Not that swagger can’t be a political statement in itself, but repeated swagger backed by cultural appropriation starts to look empty after a while. So T.O.P’s sneers on “Korean” and “mass media” promise more than they deliver, and there ends up being less to “Doom Dada” than initially meets the ear. But it’s still worth it. That combination of dread and strut make for interesting listening: TOP seems to not know if he’s unleashing the coming chaos or preparing himself for it. I hope he finds a safe enough space to keep going with this. We know labelmate CL has partied with M.I.A.; CL, can you make introductions?
[7]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Between “Doom Dada” and Taeyang’s recent dud “Ringa Linga”, it certainly feels as though YG Entertainment are handing out G-Dragon cast-offs. Perhaps it’s good business, with G-D’s future-pop off-kilter enough to seem cool and melodic enough to feel friendly; perhaps it’s damage control after CL’s Rustie-gone-ratchet-in-deep-space solo single bombed. (Familiarity breeds revenue, as Manohla Dargis says.) Taeyang couldn’t get a grab on his slippery-but-milquetoast EDM, jettisoning his skills as a singer for Life of the Party chants. By comparison, T.O.P knows his strengths and sticks to them — a commanding timbre and a nimble flow to go with it. Musically speaking, “Doom Dada” is nothing surprising: heavily filtered trap drums and wailing vocal samples mark it as a darker cousin to G-D’s “Nilira.” What surprises are the vocal acrobatics T.O.P displays, an Eminem-esque skill for morphing nonsense into commands and hopscotching around hard syllables until they turn into percussionist scrambles. He makes like gunshots and tablas and speed-raps “uju wireul bogo deudneun neukkim” (“it feels like I’m looking above”) like he’s gliding over the words. He brings the weirdness out of the familiar, which is some skill.
[8]

Brad Shoup: T.O.P’s timbre is usually a highlight for any given Big Bang tune; at full-length, his bassy flatness isn’t going to give Tyler any nightsweats (when he sings, he actually sounds like Savage), but he’s got enough ‘tude to sell the trappy, Diplo-influenced production. He’s more goon than goblin, though: purple references to his skills and the cataclysms they’ll cause, bourgeois references to pinot noir and Basquiat. There are also some weird winks at the developing world at the end; between this and “Badman” there’s some animating principle I’m just not getting. It’s hard to stay in your lane when you’re prone to free association, but I’d love more goofiness.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: G-Dragon’s more of a visual presence and better at zipping off in sudden directions, but if I had to draft one dude from Big Bang to step forward and tell me why he’s hot shit, it would be T.O.P. His voice hides a snarl, one that knows he’s great and, like Kanye West, isn’t hesitant in letting everyone know. “Doom Dada” is pure Jumbotron-flexing, complete with lines aimed at “mass media” and the especially great boast “I’m a 21st century extraordinary Korean.” And the track oozes confidence, which he caps off by actually saying the words “Hakuna Matata” without any hesitation.
[8]

Will Adams: The modulated vocals and massive bass presence recall the menacing soundscape of “Wild For the Night.” Unfortunately, amidst T.O.P’s force-accumulating delivery is that “doom dada” hook, a blank that renders the rest of the song far less threatening than it wants to be.
[6]

Anthony Easton: I like how this races forward, but paradoxically loops backwards —  layering and extending, retreating and building, collapsing and reasserting — with all kinds of sounds that move to the edge of what could be considered musical, without fully committing to noise for noise’s sake. 
[9]

Alfred Soto: I like the contortions and gymnastics, both of which suggest a way out of EDM for American pop if producers care to listen.
[6]