2NE1's Ugly: A retrospective

Or, is it possible to be a bad bitch in the K-Pop industrial machine?

With 2NE1 finally having a reunion tour, I think there’s no better time to reflect on one of their best songs, one that changed my perception of K-pop.

My memories of K-pop in its purported “golden era” (circa 2008 - 2012) are a befuddled mess, but not because I cannot possibly recount the songs I’ve listened to. On the contrary, I was bombarded from all fronts, sometimes involuntarily, with songs whose melody I somehow can still recall out of nowhere even now. It was the time where I was starting to get exposed to music, and faced with such a deluge of tunes that sound so similar, I was utterly confused. I recall trying to convince myself that Super Junior’s Sorry Sorry is not sung by a single heavily autotuned robot with these numerous handsome men just lipsyncing.

K-Pop was a glittery, bombastic, seductive, overwhelming mess - it still is, but back then I was not desensitized. Listening to K-Pop is sailing between Scylla (boybands with messy spiked hair and music full of anarchist teenage angst/punchdrunk lovesick singalong) and Charybdis (girl groups with adorable miniskirts singing about how boys have stolen their heart). Amongst that, 2NE1 stood out for me - albeit not for good reasons initially. I was growing a hatred for I am the best, whose annoyingly catchy hook was playing invariably every half-an-hour wherever I go.

After having had enough of it on the radio, I finally paid attention to the I am the best music video. Four punkish women, leather-clad, spike-studded, smashing prop TVs with their baseball bats, walking down the runway overflowing with swagger, while singing about how you can’t be like them. I was convinced that this was (and probably still is) K-Pop’s absolute idea of fierce women. Suddenly, I became a fan.

Now that I am more familiar with 2NE1’s discography, I can’t help but feel that they were at their most badass in another, relatively less famous single, the 2011 Ugly. Just a few months after the sweeping confidence of I am the best, the four girls changed direction, and deliver a bombastic rock ballad about their insecurities. If such a song had managed to make me feel wonders about the magic of K-pop, even as I grew wiser and cynical about its hollowness, this is the one.

One question that I ask myself whenever I listen to K-Pop nowadays, which I had not been aware of 12 years ago: do these idols genuinely feel what they are singing?

Popular entertainment is a highly performative industry everywhere, but K-pop is particularly so. If you’re not familiar with K-pop, just imagine the devious machinations of the western pop industry, with record labels, talent gurus, schemes and competitions, and then triple that. Record labels would pick up a bunch of teenagers, either through audition or scouting, and then trained them in vocal, rap and dance. After a few years and a few ruthless eliminations, the final lineup is confirmed, and a K-pop group is born. The agency usually has extensive creative control of the groups’ activities: what vibes they will portray, what song they will sing, who will sing which part, how their hair will look like, what clothes they will wear, which choreographer they use, etc. This goes on for almost every comeback, with non-stop music show appearances, extensive promotion, until a group either gets famous enough to headline their own tours and enjoy the fruits of their labors, or languish in ‘nugudom’¹ and disband without a splash.

Such knowledge of the industry’s reality had fundamentally changed the way I view K-pop. As I grew up, this realization had dimmed the lustre for many K-pop songs which I once held in high regard. If what I admired in them was the music, the visuals or the choreography, then this had meant that I can only admire the idols themselves for their execution and not their conception. These attractive and talented men and women are often no more than the facade of an emotionless towering behemoth. Consequently, K-pop idols always feel detached from their creative output: if any particular idol did not exist, the industry would surely find another to sing the exact same song that it had written, dance the exact same dance that it had created, and we would not even notice.

Yet Ugly somehow survived that shattering realization, in fact, such a knowledge has made my love of the song grow even fonder. The reason is simple: I could not envision anyone but 2NE1 performing it. They were primed by their circumstances for such a song. And to see what I mean, let’s go back to 2009.

When 2NE1 was starting out, they were routinely criticized for being “ugly.” K-pop, superficial by design, is infamous for its beauty standards, especially towards female performers. To exist in such an industry and not conform to its standards, one must be exceptionally talented (since there are, of course, many performers who are conventionally attractive and adequately talented). On one hand, this means that 2NE1’s talent had never been under doubt: CL as the embodiment of bad-bitchery, Bom with the unmistakable voice that anchors every chorus, Minzy the prodigious dancing machine. In fact, the only one whose talent has ever been questioned is Dara, who conveniently is the most conventionally attractive of the lineup. But on the other hand, the industry did not take kindly to their image - apparently, even their agency’s CEO called CL ugly to her face.

Until Ugly, 2NE1’s songs had been centered around the idea of badassery. It felt as if since they couldn’t fit the narrow mold of the Korean demure dream girl, they are liberated to be rough, to be confident, to be invincible warriors i.e. I am the best. At the same time, their image as hard-headed women seemed to have attracted even more vitriol towards their appearance, as if being (ostensibly) fearless women meant that you are impervious to a whole nation ridiculing your attractiveness. As such, 2NE1 was entangled in stereotypes even before their first song: while their contemporaries were free to alternate between demure dream girls² and edgy independent women³, the quartet were condemned to being edgy, and no amount of talent on their part could change that.

And so, Ugly, coming right after I am the best, arguably the peak of their popularity, is, in its very premise, a rebellion. It is an unspoken rule in K-pop not to express vulnerabilities, and if you do, do it in a cutesy or self-effacing manner (à la ‘oh my god, I wonder if that boy likes me, I don’t think I am cute enough’). Such “vulnerabilities” are moot anyway, because as mentioned, they are just metaphors that the industrial complex uses to be relatable, and often has little in common with the vulnerabilities of the idols themselves. In fact, for an idol, expressing insecurities that are personal to oneself is to go against the industry mandate of superficiality, to commit an act of defiance against the system. For 2NE1, whose untouchable confidence had been so well-established, even more so. And yet they did it anyway.

Ugly doesn’t boast a layered, complex premise, in fact it is very simple and nowhere near subtle: one of insecurity. An insecurity developed from years of being in the public eye, fully aware of its judgement, without showing any signs of being affected. An insecurity that made one loses faith in oneself, angry with oneself, making one incapable of receiving praises without self-doubt.

To portray this, nothing is a better fit than a straightforward rock song, brimming with angst and catharsis, tailored to the girls’ strengths so their charisma can do the magic. It might be worthless talking about the competence of the composition itself for a song like Ugly, whose message clearly surpasses the notes it’s made out of; even then, the song stands up on its own, even when stripped of its nostalgic values. CL delivers a powerful and convinced performance in the explosive chorus that forms the song’s backbone, in a rare example of K-pop English lyrics not sounding cringy. Minzy and Park Bom contribute poignant verses and pre-choruses with their distinctive vocal colors. Dara delivers what is probably the best line of her career, a vulnerable bridge tailor-made for her frail soft voice, a pleasant breather amidst the song’s power.

The lyrics themselves range from typical K-pop unsubtlety and contrivedness…

‘Why am I this unattractive/How can I smile brightly like you’

to surprising sentimentality and depth for a pop song…

‘Don’t tell me you can easily understand how I feel
I might resent you with my ugly and crooked heart
Don’t talk to me, I can’t get along with you
The coldness behind your patronizing gaze suffocate me’

This line in particular encapsulates the damage that insecurities do to oneself so poetically that I truly think nobody without 2NE1’s experience of being vilified for their appearance can deliver it with any semblance of sincerity.

In a sense, Ugly was the first song that convinced me that a K-pop act can be multidimensional without being superficial. K-pop groups switch up direction all the time: if a group has a cute concept and are not getting enough recognition, they would try going sexy or ‘dark’, whatever that may mean. We can clearly see that K-pop is a capitalist machine, aligning its forces of artistic production with the sole aim of profit. When 2NE1 released both ‘I am the best’ and ‘Ugly’, I don’t feel like I’m witnessing a boardroom of stakeholders switching it up for the public, I felt multifaceted artists expressing that being insecure sometimes doesn’t make one any less of a bad bitch. Why this is so, I cannot attribute it to anything but their absolute sincerity in delivering the song.

Thirteen years have passed since I first listened to Ugly. I have since taken up the piano and dabbled in music more seriously. From being a primary school kid, I graduated from university with a much more nuanced worldview and a much more cynical outlook at what is considered “cool” or “badass”. A lot of old K-pop songs lose their luster: when your involuntary memories strip down the nostalgia effect, they remain naked with their mediocre harmonies, vocals, and production, little horrible songs with all due respects (I’m sorry T-ara fans - I was once one of you too).

What does it mean to be badass anyway? Sometimes, K-pop made me feel like badassery had a price tag. As long as you bought a bombastic, boastful song and give it to some girls who can dance and sing well, you can quite easily create the impression of badassery. Yet, how can one be badass without being real? And how can one be real when one is keenly aware that one is no more than a front?

Sometimes, my doubts crept upon me. 2NE1, iconoclastic as they appeared, were still entangled in the machine. Much as they might have been personally invested in the song and delivered it with incredible sincerity, they were still at the mercy of the label. If someone told me that the girls got summoned into a meeting room, presented with the song and being told that they need to perform it to bank on the public’s perception of their ugliness, having no agency to decide otherwise, who am I to say that it never happened? If the girls were just exceptional actresses in portraying their fake insecurities, who am I to declare otherwise?

To properly appreciate K-pop, I have learned to enjoy K-pop songs without taking them too seriously. Most of the times, it is not too challenging to detach the performers from the creative work behind the song. Sometimes it is easier when songs are so superficial, on-the-nose and devoid of intrinsic merit that detaching their sonic qualities from the artists is actually doing the artists a favor - see Blackpink’s How You Like That for one particularly egregious example. Sometimes it is harder when the concept is so well-crafted, and the idols are so immersed in it that it feels slightly unfair to discredit them, but also unfair to give them all the credit - a recent example of this is NewJeans. But if there is a convincing case to be made to take the artist completely away from a song like Ugly, I might never be able to listen to K-pop anymore. As Park Bom and Minzy once said, ‘i sesangeun geojinmal/the world is a lie’.

But what is irrefutable is the ongoing relevance of the song in the industry. Every now and then, when a new group debut, one sees comments like ‘oh she must be so talented, just look at her face’ and feels like we’re living the same story again. What is even more egregious is that the beauty standard seemed to have become stricter. The members of new girl groups are nowhere remotely near ugly. And if idols are subjected to such terrifying standards, one must only imagine the scrutiny that ordinary South Korean women must be enduring. That must explains why plastic surgery is such a common occurrence there that one can casually bump into girls with completely bandaged faces at a BBQ restaurant and no one would bat an eye. In moments like this, I felt grateful that a song like Ugly exists.

Thus is the story of Ugly: while my love for the song is as fond as ever, I want nothing less than to place it and 2NE1 as a whole on an unassailable pedestal, to exempt them from the rules and trappings of the K-Pop industry, to deem them uncontestable gods. So I loved it proudly, but cautiously.

Fast forward a decade plus, 2NE1, while still revered as an icon in the industry, is now a thing of the past. They had unceremoniously disbanded after Bom’s scandal and a strange hiatus at the height of their popularity, a decision that sparked much controversy. While anyone who followed them would know that they are still good friends, the prospect of the four standing on the same stage again seemed far-fetched. At least, until they announced their reunion tour this year.

Now, fifteen years into their career, the girls have nothing left to prove. If Ugly and the whole 2NE1 had been a lie of the industry, they needn’t have kept up the front anymore. Yet CL, being the caring, charismatic leader that she is, managed to get the group back together, and that alone would have convinced me that their love and respect for each other were real, and that the songs they have sung through the years must have had some reality in them.

And then I saw them on stage - admittedly through someone’s recording of the concert on YouTube, as despite the best of my ability I couldn’t get tickets. Ugly came on, the first time they had performed it together in 8 years. Bom and Dara are as lively as ever, even in their forties. CL passionately belts out the chorus, even the parts she usually omits in live performances. Minzy sheds a tear before busting out moves on stage like a rockstar. Whatever doubts I had dissipated completely, and every word had never felt realer. They have now fully grown onto themselves as performers, especially CL and Minzy. The two are now in their thirties, looking resplendent, beautiful and completely at ease in their own skin. Yet when they sing, I felt all the emotions they gave me when they were first debuting, when they were merely 18 and 15, vulnerable teenagers thrown into a ruthless industry, acting fearless amid waves of criticisms: such emotions had been channeled into their now mature voices. The audience went wild at CL’s chorus, and I could hear a lot of women cheering. So the song lived on. I can feel my secondary-school self, ever insecure in my appearance, singing along too.

1. ‘nugu’ means ‘who?’ in Korean, so this is a cheeky way to refer to unknown groups.

2. like, Girls’ Generation with Gee

3. and Girls Generation with Run devil run