Somebody’s been listening to too much BLACKPINK.
Honestly, I have a very low tolerance level for this specific kind of “badass” girl group track. “I’m so bad… look at me! Bla bla bla… twiddle diddle dum. I’m crazy and I ain’t sorry! Don’t you wish you could be like me? Dum dum diddle dum.” It’s meant to come across as empowering, but too often it’s tethered to a throwaway skeleton of a song. One of the first rules of writing is “show, don’t tell.” I think this applies to K-pop as well. If you have to keep telling me how badass you are, are you really that badass? I think not.
Anyway, Villain (빌런) is a pre-release single from rookie artist AleXa, following on the heels of her solid (but unspectacular) Do Or Die and Bomb. Kudos to her management for fully embracing her cool sci-fi cyborg concept, but they really need to tether it to more memorable material. Villain is primarily a performance showcase, favoring production and energy over dynamic songwriting. As such, it comes across as the “mean” girl’s song from a Disney Channel movie musical. It wants to be bad, but it’s all play-acting.
Given a more unique instrumental base, Villain could have become cheesy fun. But, the track hinges on tired trap beats and thundering EDM samples we’ve heard a million times before. With such generic production, the heavy lifting falls upon AleXa. She clearly has personality to spare, but the hair-twirling “So what?”s, “Sorry, not sorry”s and “Whatever”s come across more valley girl than confident K-pop idol. It’s juvenile stuff, and does her no favors.
| Hooks | 6 |
| Production | 7 |
| Longevity | 6 |
| Bias | 6 |
| RATING | 6.25 |
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The Bias List // K-Pop Reviews & Discussion 
How do you listen to too much BLACKPINK when there’s not a lot of BLACKPINK to listen to to begin with lmao
In all seriousness this is easily the worst release of the past two weeks. I shut it off when the first “chorus” kicked in. So tired of this. Her producers know they’re hamstrung by having one singer instead of a variety of voices/textures to work with, they’re not doing themselves any favor by sticking to bad trends that should’ve died out five years ago…
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Decoherence? Is that word that anyone uses in real life?
Once again. Alexa is selling the shit out of her single with this performance. This is what charisma looks like. Alexa pushes out more stage presence than an entire group of 4 or 6 girls do.
The song itself fits right into the current gg gestalt, noisy and in your face. What are we calling this style? Badass? I agree that camping it up would have been better than badding it down. Whatever it is called, it is not my style.
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For some reason I thought this was going to be about Stella Jang!
Seems like her team is trying to recreate all of her other singles which 1. isn’t necessary and 2. this doesn’t have the oomf of Do or Die. I wonder if she’ll migrate into a girl group eventually. I think she’d benefit a lot from sharing the load of a whole song and choreo.
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Alexa is a great performer, though that drop is atrocious. Probably ranks up there among the worst this year.
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The song gives me, “haha I’m so bad, I just jaywalked *cringey emojis*” vibes.
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At first I thought I would’ve ranked this above Do or Die because the first verse and the way she sounds in this one was good but when the second part of the chorus with the “sorry not sorry imma bad” comes up I was done 😦 what a way to ruin the song.
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