The Singles Jukebox

We’re back with (Three-Quarters of) Blackpink Monday! And also this obscure rando…

[Video]
[6.62]

Iain Mew: A few weeks ago I wouldn’t have had a confident answer for what a Rosé and Bruno Mars collaboration would sound like, but “APT.” makes the fit seem happily obvious. The pop-punk ambitions of her “On the Ground” find a complementary match in his precision retro good times. The result is an update on The Ting Tings with impressive attention to detail that also has the joy of letting loose.
[8]

Joshua Lu: As 2010s pop punk nostalgia, “APT.” is impeccable — the part of my brain that stores bands from The Ting Tings to 3OH!3 activates every time I hear that chorus. Yet the song goes beyond just millennial bait. One way is through the reference to a Korean drinking game that Rosé brings forth, unworried about a global audience not understanding. Another is that melody in the pre-chorus that, while overused, instantly counteracts the monotonous chanting verses, then swells into the bridge and fully takes over by the end, giving the song’s final chorus a transcendent climax. A good pop song is capable of housing multiple storylines under one melody; great ones make the combination seem effortless.
[8]

Maddie Lee: Gimmicks abound: the drinking-game chant that provides the song’s hook is a pre-audience tested earworm, and the two stars are a match made in executive boardroom. But the song beneath it all is undeniably perfect pop, a progression of pleasing melodies that transcends decades, genres, and the most decorative of lyrics.
[6]

TA Inskeep: Good lord, this is fun. Rosé and Mars feel so well-matched here. The song is a little cheerleading chant (hello, “Mickey” sample — climbing the chart 42 years ago this week) and a little Mars in his natural habitat (especially the snappy drums), which makes it a lot of a guaranteed party-starter. I can’t think of many circumstances where I’d be unhappy to hear this.
[8]

Andrew Karpan: At one point taking the form of largely forgotten glam punk nothing record, the allure of “Mickey” —  the cheerfully ironic drums, the sugar-rush promise of going somewhere —  seemingly abides: a somehow ubiquitous, strangely shiny ghost that haunts mass culture, both a symptom of nostalgia pop and its occasional vector. Now transformed into a bouncing howl of openness and fun, it’s a kind of noisy scrum that picks up signifiers where it can be heard. Mars, the angel-sounding King of Nostalgia himself, says it best: it’s whatever, it’s whatever, it’s whatever you like.  
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: Love that Bruno Mars is finally ripping himself off — not “Locked Out of Heaven”, but his pre-nostalgia-revival Doo-Wops and Hooligans era with songs like “The Other Side”, an urgent Ronson rip with a terribly aged guest list. The Ting Tings, Toni Basil, Nicki Jessi And Ari If They Test Me They Sorry etc all come to mind, but this totally works as its own song with a bizarrely angsty chord progression and melody. Does anyone else think of Korean kids’ cartoon Pucca when ROSÈ sings “kissy face“?
[7]

Mark Sinker: The song begins a pleasingly scrappy skit and some abstractly conceived beats and phrases. Except breaking down the actual words once the song proper kicks in, it feels like they’ll end up alone in one another’s flats: the structure needs more geographical precision programmed into it. Plus Bruno’s doom is that he turned her apartment “into a club.” Once her lines open up Shangri-Las / Blondie style, it has to be girl-group law that when she turns up, she picks someone else from the club crowd! Which serves him right!!
[7]

Harlan Talib Ockey: With all due respect to Bruno Mars, who is good here, the rest of the song is so much fun I keep forgetting he’s even on it.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Hooks it’s got. Momentum too. But if like me you get nothing from Rosé except the sense that you’re entering a no-charm zone, ding ding. Because I know I’ll be watching students wandering through campus going APATEPATE through Thanksgiving, I’ll give it a raise.
[6]

Al Varela: Rosé is so anonymous on her own single that Atlantic had to get a second favor from Bruno Mars because he’s on the payroll and still has Vegas debt to pay. The song has so many different hooks and ideas it doesn’t know what to do with, so it smushes them together into haphazard, blocky, tuneless mush. There’s no bassline to anchor its many parts. Melodies come out of nowhere and have no time to develop because the song has to move on to the next undercooked hook for TikTok optimization — not to mention the frequent glances it makes at “HOT TO GO!” for its chorus and bridge.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: Amy Allen miss challenge: achieved.
[2]

Jel Bugle: I see this as a sort of Grease megamix song for the 2020s. It’s grown on me, it really has, even not minding Bruno. Rosé is like a fine wine and gets better with age (i.e., hearing the song more). The score keeps going up, [4], [5], [7], now [8] — better not get carried away, especially as Spotify is now playing “Whiplash” by Aespa, a solid [9]. Back to [7]. (Also, those “a-huh”s are from “Pretty Fly For a White Guy.”)
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The work of the critic is one of constant self-confrontation. Here, I realize that I am very susceptible to frothy chant-a-longs and the Elvis-comeback schtick that Bruno Mars is on right now. This is barely a song, but it’s an eminently good hang. Rosé knows that this kind of thing is a fragile balance, and she achieves much by doing very little.
[7]

Will Adams: Works better as The Tings Tings pastiche than when Bruno’s sentimentality enters in the form of those major chords.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Rosé does her cheer-chanting best to bring back The Ting Tings — someone was due to do it — while Bruno Mars is dripping in “Finesse.” Distracting me from the fun frivolity is a thought experiment: “Shut Up and Let Me Go” benefited from a placement in an iPhone ad. What even is the equivalent of that today?
[7]

Dave Moore: At a time when the post-post-teenpop (which is to say post-Taylor) A-poppers have mined sweaty cheerleader-stomp straight into bedrock, it’s refreshing to see a K-pop star effortlessly apply herself to the Fake Fun turn of the mid-aughts, while bringing the reigning (only?) male pop cipher along for the ride. (He looks like he’s having more fun on the drum kit than he sounds singing.) Makes me cringe to think of what an O-Rod or C-Roan would have done with ap-a-tap-a-teu; for Rosé it sounds like a typical Tuesday night. 
[7]

Leah Isobel: Here’s why Charli XCX’s 2014 album Sucker is underra- [I am yanked offstage by a vaudeville hook]
[5]

Isabel Cole: I know it doesn’t make sense to say that this sounds pink, but it does. “APT” could get away with coasting on stomp and sass, but it wisely gives us a moment before the end where the tension properly bursts in a wail that makes you want to scrunch up your nose to sing along.
[8]

Alex Clifton: Like a glass of champagne: fizzy, fun, goes down easy, and leaves me a little hungover from the sugar, but I don’t mind in the slightest.
[9]

Ian Mathers: This is fun! I’m not sure it’s a mark in its favour that I suspect by tomorrow the only part I will remember is the “aww p’tuh p’tuh” refrain, and that a week from now it will have developed into a vicious earworm that makes me dislike the song, but for now we’re good.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: This feels like a dispatch from an alternate timeline of trans-Pacific pop, where “Like Money” didn’t flop and “I Got a Boy” went viral in the West instead of “Gangnam Style.” Accelerate the mainstreaming of K-pop by a few years, and suddenly you’re in a universe where Bruno Mars, American music’s most profitable mimic, might be called upon to loan his Unorthodox Jukebox to a YG subsidiary. Apart from sending “Shake It Off” back to the drawing board with its Toni Basil cribbing, the alt-history “APT.” would also open Top 40’s doors to a broader range of skinny-tie power pop tributes — a “One Way or Another” quote here, a solo-ending flourish from “My Sharona” there. Mars even throws in those dub-like vocal echoes from “Locked Out of Heaven,” just to cross the wires even further. These references act as steady guardrails for the game of mutual appropriation being played, an idealized notion that’s too often imperfectly realized. Here, though, the ideal becomes real. Rosé approaches the drinking-game concept like she’s introducing it to a friend and not a worldwide audience, luring us in with promises of flirty, low-stakes intimacy before tossing the cool-girl facade across the room and uncorking the song’s nakedly ambitious undercurrent. She’s on her way, she seems to say, not just to the apateu but to the global star status that she feels is just within her reach. The whole time, the drinking game was nothing but a ruse, a pretext — a hook, in other words, as undeniable and untranslatable as they come.
[9]