NEWARK — It’s hard to overstate how imperious T.O.P. looks onstage. The oldest member of the outlandishly popular K-pop boy band BigBang, he walks slowly, almost reluctantly. He regards his surroundings with Clooney-like reserve. If it’s possible to be rolling your eyes while maintaining fierce eye contact with several thousand people, he can do that. He stands ramrod straight, making it seem as if he’s always peering down on what’s transpiring around him.

What’s happening is an extreme, intense, overwhelming Korean pop carnival, and at the Prudential Center on Sunday night — the second of two shows here — T.O.P. was almost certainly the only one over it all. For about a decade, BigBang has been one of the most innovative and popular acts in the flooded-with-talent and always-in-flux world of K-pop. Nothing has derailed the band — not the occasional scandal, romantic or legal; not long breaks, like the years that pass between albums; and not the success of G-Dragon, the group’s breakout star.

BigBang is at work on a new album, “MADE,” and has been releasing singles over the past few months that are in general less Technicolor and frenetic than its songs of a few years ago, which helped the group break out beyond Asia. (The last time BigBang played the area was three years ago, at this same venue.) This is a sign of musical evolution, and also a realization that the boy band mode comes with built-in time limits. There is also the looming specter of conscription: South Korean men are required to perform two years of military service.

But for now: G-Dragon, G-Dragon, G-Dragon — so many of the screams here were for G-Dragon, fashion show front-row habitué and collaborator with Diplo and Skrillex. Slight and baby-faced, he was toned down from his usual visual excess. As in all boy bands, there is a hierarchy here, of course: G-Dragon is very much at the top. He gets the best clothes — a fascinating patch-covered oversize bomber jacket, or a snow-white turtleneck — followed closely by T.O.P., who at one point wore what seemed to be a Mondrian print on a suit.

In most boy bands, that would be enough — the rest would be filler. But there is no Chris Kirkpatrick or Howie Dorough here. There’s Daesung, with the same lovable-scamp affect as Ed Sheeran and a powerful voice; Seungri, the youngest and most mannered of the bunch (they’re all in their mid-20s); and Taeyang, the most feline and the most impressive singer.

G-Dragon and T.O.P. drew the most eyeballs during this electric, ecstatic show, in which multiple songs were accompanied by fireworks or lasers or streamers, and in which costume changes came Instagram fast.

But it was actually Taeyang who stood out the most. His hair fried into a crisp 1991 drape, he stalked the stage with ferocity and sang with real force on songs like the recent single “Loser” and an impromptu (but not, really) snippet of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” late in the night while Daesung danced.

Throughout the night, the group’s indebtedness to American pop, hip-hop and R&B was on full display, from Taeyang’s vocal runs to T.O.P.’s post-dancehall toasting to G-Dragon’s nimble rapping and strange allusion to the “school of hard knocks” he and the band had gone through. (Well, not always full display: BigBang’s backing band, made up wholly of black American musicians, was hidden in the dark at the rear of the stage for most of the night.)

The show and the group were almost perversely chaste, at least onstage. Less so in the interstitial videos shown between songs, which show the band members as what they are: men playing at being boys.

But even if BigBang is nearing the end of its reign, appetite for the form remains, as was clear from the young and extremely diverse crowd here. Boy bands are an industry and aesthetic all but abandoned by the American pop machine. But like, say, automobiles, South Korean success with the form is another example of a concept kick-started here but perfected elsewhere. A night with BigBang is a loud reminder that American exceptionalism is waning — long live imports, though.

Source: NY Times

In a recent interview with popular U.K. television program Chatty Man, 5 Seconds of Summer drummer Ashton Irwin told host Alan Carr that their label, Capitol Records, calls them "the biggest band that no one's ever heard of." He's only slightly joking, but the sentiment is there: Success, in 2015, doesn't necessarily mean visibility — or, at the very least, it doesn't guarantee visibility in the way it used to. Acts with the largest fan bases are able to foster and sustain them without bombarding us in our everyday lives. Some of these acts are sought out: You have to almost earn your love for their music.


BigBang are arguably the biggest boy band in the world after One Direction, though there's a high probability they're unfamiliar to you. New York is lucky enough to find itself a city steeped in diversity, so you don't have to look to far to find traces of them. But for most of the western world, they are, in fact, the biggest band that no one's ever heard of.

At the first night of their two-day sold-out stint at the Prudential Center, the very same arena both Stevie Wonder and the Weeknd would play days later, the magnitude of their status went all but unnoticed. The arena was littered with bright, glowing crowns (their fans are referred to as VIPs, the illuminated yellow-gold headwear confirming their status). Like any show or act predicated on a loyal, diehard fan base, the moment the lights dimmed, tears were shed. Justifiably so: It's been three years since the boys — G-Dragon, T.O.P., Seungri, Taeyang and Daesung — last graced us with their presence in or around New York City, and everyone was ready.

This summer, BigBang had eight singles chart, including their namesake track "Bang Bang Bang," the intimate "Sober" and "Loser," the One Direction-leaning "We Like 2 Party," the melancholic "Let's Not Fall In Love" (Billboard sites its T.O.P. and G-Dragon vocal performances for it's success, the pair usually rap and fall into the definitive "bad boy" member description). In the same few month period, the boy band scored three No. 1s on the World Digital Songs chart. Their YouTube videos have hundreds of millions of views. When they fly anywhere, they're met with a stampede of fans both at the airport and awaiting them at their hotel. They are, in a phrase, rock stars.

Fans in the front row of BigBang's performance at the Prudential Center, October 11, 2015 Photo by Ryan Song

There's a peculiar kind of celebrity inherent in BigBang, especially in how they function in North America. The dates are few and far between. If you wanted to m on the East Coast, you had to drive to one of these two Prudential Center dates. There were only three other U.S. tour dates, all centered around Los Angeles (the international hub for K-Pop groups; it's easier to get there than here from Seoul). Unlike western boy bands, 1D and the like, the audience was predominantly female, but not overwhelmingly so: There were men here, voluntarily. But like western boy bands, these were humans from all walks of life, coming together to bask in the glory of the one thing that makes them happiest: Gyrating, handsome men.

The whole of the show was unlike anything in the western pop schema: Where we value authenticity in our stars (what else could explain the absolute reign of Taylor Swift if she didn't come from humble country roots? Would we believe in her the same way?), BigBang values performance. At one point in the set, a few of the guys grabbed guitars and basses and didn't play them — they didn't even pretend to strum. T.O.P. spent the majority of the performance rapping behind different pairs of opaque sunglasses, each changing with his outfit to reflect the mood of the song. G-Dragon was the de facto leader, almost acting like a hype man for his own band. When it came time for the guys to vacate the stage for their costume changes, videos of the group were shown to entertain us: The guys at a club; the guys drag racing in some Nevada desert; the guys solidifying their place as total badasses (in our hearts.)

BigBang's Taeyang at the Prudential Center, October 11, 2015 Photo by Ryan Song

Stage banter stuck to English while most of the songs did not: There's something really powerful about watching a group of tens of thousands singing along to a Korean chorus of "Haru Haru." For non-native speakers, it was a battle of phonetics, and no one paid any mind.

The subject matter varied from love to lust and back again. GD and Taeyang's "Good Boy" received the most applause of the night: Their dance moves directly channeled Michael Jackson, as that was a theme for the totality of the performance. (Heartthrob T.O.P. even toted around a bedazzled cane.) There was something weirdly powerful about watching these guys swear "I am a good boy," when, in the traditional American-English sense, it's not something associated with an exciting dating life. We want good girls and bad boys, and here, they pledge trustworthiness. One Direction might learn something from their M.O.

Self-deprecation, too, poked itself into the mix between "Loser" and "Blue," two tracks that sing the blues and rue their "loser" statuses, respectively. It's juxtaposed with the heartwarming "Wings" and the rave-promising "We Like 2 Party." The two hour-plus performance served to reflect the rainbow spectrum of human emotion. Each song channeled a different sound, with moments that felt like they were straight out of Journey's catalog, or biting interludes of Enya's, even sampling Aphex Twin's, spastic beats. It never once felt cluttered, a weird power BigBang may be alone in boasting. Are they the biggest band in the world that no one's ever heard of? Definitely. Maybe that's about to change.