(G)I-DLE's "I Feel" Could Stretch Its Legs
The sixth EP of the juggernaut girlgroup is spirited but could stand to go further. A review
You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation — Beyoncé’s penultimate line in Formation may well apply to Jeon Soyeon, too. The leader and primary songwriter of (G)I-DLE has been one of K-Pop’s most-talked about female idols since her debut in 2018, but struck a particular jackpot with last year’s Tomboy: a perfect storm of a key member (Soojin) leaving necessitating a re-introduction of the group as five, utilizing a blossoming musical trend (pop punk) as sonic conceit, and overtly feminist themes in the lyrics. No matter what Twitter had to say about Soyeon’s all-English rap, Tomboy had something to say with an exclamation point – that women aren’t just dolls and go against the grain of societal expectations any way they please – and was a song so catchy that the rest of the industry scrambled to create a song coming close to its punchy excellence. (Very few did.) (G)I-DLE followed this exclamation point up with another one: the carefully timed Nxde that was inspired by Marilyn Monroe — a figure that regained interest last fall with the release of the ill-conceived torture fantasy movie Blonde — and it openly questioned why men like to sexualize women to the degree of mentally undressing them. “Cause your view’s so rude,” Soyeon chides in the first ten seconds of the song. Nxde — which went viral for its recording behind — and its corresponding EP I Love was a well-deserved victory lap. But once is a coincidence, and twice is a pattern: this new (G)I-DLE, it turns out, is about female empowerment: a girl not conventionally pretty, a girl not interested in pleasing men, a girl not interested in playing the game. Or… is she? For the sixth EP and newest release I Feel, marketed as an “original series”, (G)I-DLE asks itself this very question — the valiant exploration of the crushing existence of being a girl. The protagonist? SY, played by Jeon Soyeon.
Far from the anti-Barbie in Tomboy, this SY is in a friend group full of incredibly pretty girls — influencer Miyeon, trainer Minnie, lingerie store clerks Yuqi and Shuhua — and only sees her own flaws reflected in the mirror. Yuqi, declaring her “just ordinary”, wants to give her a makeover, but at home, with a skimpy bra in hand, SY gets second doubts. Even a course on “how to be a Queen” won’t help: feeling like the ugly duckling, she makes the decision to consult a plastic surgeon in the hopes that she’ll look just like her, too, and hopefully feel as confident. Unbeknownst to her, her friends have problems, too: Minnie posts pictures with pretty boys, but feels lonely at a party regardless; Miyeon, who also only sees Minnie’s great side (Instagram feed), has a tearful breakdown that she’s without a boyfriend; Yuqi is worried Shuhua is close with people other than her, and Shuhua… eats… celery? SY lays down on the surgery table, and the surgeon assures her that when she wakes up, she’ll be a queen. Then she enters a dream state in which she lives out the lives of the other girls — partying, strutting down the cabins in the lingerie store, up everyone’s phones. This SY has no problems with the phone camera, even less so with mirrors. She’s the life of the party. She’s the it girl, the Queencard (the Korean, 퀸카, was a term popular in the 2000s denoting what we call “it girl” in English) — and all without having to change her face. SY wakes up from the surgery table and leaves. As she leaves the building, she notices her notifications and realizes that all her friends love her for who she is and how she looks. Happy ending!
One could be cynical about this: all members of (G)I-DLE look very attractive, and even Soyeon at her “ugliest” (glasses, freckles, and unkempt hair) still looks at least pretty. But there’s an earnestness to Allergy, the pre-release, and conversely a knowing wink in Queencard’s music videos. Watched together, it even feels heartwarming to see Soyeon become more and more confident in herself, instead of being relegated to Tyler Durden-esque blink-or-you’ll-miss-it inserts. If there’s something to be taken seriously, it’s that everyone, every woman, has insecurities, and this very insecurity is what feeds the algorithms (Allergy, penned by Soyeon, namechecks TikTok and Instagram). We all think of our mutuals, Instagram baddies, etc, as their perfect forms, perfect people with no problems, when in fact we’re looking at a flattened 2D mix of text and image. It doesn’t reflect real worries, real low moments, real people — a sentiment that (G)I-DLE no doubt know both sides of, considering the big follower counts on all their actual Instagram accounts. (Says Miyeon for the comeback interview: “I had no trouble playing my character at all!”) Allergy and Queencard’s music video harken to the same ideas as Beyoncé’s 2013 pageant nightmare Pretty Hurts. None of these tracks are scathing critiques, nor dissertations: and in the case of (G)I-DLE, these tracks are pop songs from a group that has always done pop music. It is the third exclamation point, by this point, in (G)I-DLE’s career, and slots in as its brightest entry yet, the least serious about it. Some have taken Queencard as satire, but it sounds too earnest in its celebration of every form of beauty for it to register as anything but honest. Smiling is for losers, Tomboy seems to say; turn your frown upside down, Queencard says in return.
This brightness extends musically, too. Queencard is a song stuffed to the brim with sonic brightness: the commanding, Seven Nations Army-inspired bassline cedes to warbled synth, as if turning to dance, then to simple snaps before exploding to electric guitars as Soyeon shouts: “Queencard! I’m hot! My boob and booty is hot! Spotlight! Look at me! I’m star star star!” There are bubbly drums, scratching, hand chimes, synthesized guitars — it’s a lot at once, and before a bridge appears, there’s another chant “I’m a Queenca, I’m a Queenca, I’m a-I’m a” and then it’s over in under three minutes. Though the pop punk slant of Tomboy continues on Queencard, the payoff that made Tomboy so satisfying at the end is missing here. On the first couple times I’ve listened to Queencard, all I could hear was the bassline that kept buzzing like a mosquito through the song from beginning to finish with nary a point of rest (sans the pre-chorus). Repeated listens smooth this over and reveal a catchy pop affair, but its elements are still turned up to eleven, and the effect of it being a little too loud and too much remains the same. Allergy proves far better on repeated listens (though if the sound at the beginning is meant to convey logging on, it’s actually closer to the Windows USB connection sound, which is mildly amusing). It slots right after Queencard in the EP, and its pop punk influences drive from Avril Lavigne and the Disney rock star fare. Its mostly English chorus of latent inferiority (She’s so pretty, oh so lovely, she’s got everything, why am I not her?) is sung with a convincing hurt in both Miyeon’s and Yuqi’s voices in the chorus. Allergy is followed by highlight Lucid, penned and composed by Minnie, goes instantly sultry and sexy, with a thumping, bouncy bass driving most of the song; All Night, written and composed by Yuqi, begins with heavy Trent Reznor-esque piano notes before turning to something akin Twice’s Set Me Free, here performed to success as (G)I-DLE are unshowy vocalists and uninterested in big vocal runs. The other Minnie-penned song, Paradise, is an ethereal synthpop track with an engaging percussion (although one strange clicking sound swirling in the verse?) as the girls sing about a lover being paradise to them. Soyeon’s fantastic rap at the end suggests love as self-sacrifice as she raps should you disappear from this world / I’ll follow you and close my eyes. Bookending I feel is the campfire-song-esque Peter Pan is a letter from (G)I-DLE to themselves, reflecting on diets, and not feeling like an adult. Like the ending of Queencard, its earnestness pushes this obligatory slow closer from serviceable to enjoyable.
In Allergy, Shuhua sighs, “I want to dance to Hype Boy too / But on the screen, I look like TOMBOY / I’m sure he’s laughing at me, that boy.” There’s a savviness to it that goes a couple of ways: one, that (G)I-DLE are alternative to the current girlgroups (having debuted before them, yes, but also in their edgy, direct sound), but also the idea that there comes a point in time in which you can no longer keep up with trends, and the resulting FOMO leaves you ostracized from a society seemingly always online, chipper, and up-to-date. It’s a subtly powerful statement and canny proof that idol groups don’t all live in their own bubbles. True to its name, (G)I-DLE’s I feel runs the gamut of human emotions; certainly, as an album experience, it is immediate and more satisfying than the mostly alright I Love last year. But unlike I NEVER DIE, which managed had a strong beginning and ending following a scorned ex-girlfriend dying her hair blond, fashioning herself as villain, and leaving her undeserving lover to God knows where, I feel fizzles out near-instantly with its message. Perhaps it is unfair of me to state that — I wouldn’t bat an eyelash at other groups doing the same. But (G)I-DLE put so much thought into their titles, their visuals: they have an active hand when deciding their leads in a way many groups do not, and their B-sides boast three competent songwriters and composers, as well — Soyeon, Yuqi, and Minnie. With a cast of characters and the whole release billed as a series, there could have been a story, here — or at least a sonic world in which these characters get a chance to live and breathe. The album could have become part of the package. Though Queencard’s savvy 00s packaging is a serviceable (and, in many ways, far superior at it than Spicy and most of NewJeans’ releases) attempt at capturing the Tomboy lightning twice, I feel chose not to go where it could — and should — have gone: all the way. That’s a shame, because I consider that the next logical step to (G)I-DLE’s career: the leap from pop singer to artist, when you don’t feel the pressure to chase the latest conversation but are the conversation – marking your sentences not with an exclamation point, but a well-placed period.