Review BigBang explodes K-Pop convention at the Honda Center

Pop artists aren’t often regarded as the best and as the most popular group at the same time. In the English-speaking pop world in the last decade, only maybe Adele, Beyonce and Taylor Swift have earned the same, simultaneous caliber of critical praise and concert tickets sold. 
In South Korea, however, there is BigBang. The established quintet is one of the most successful boy bands going in all of K-Pop today, with a sound that spans American hip-hop, R&B balladry with a local twist, and the high-octane electronic dance music that defines pop the world over.
  

Many of its members have had solo hits and breakthrough combinations with other members (frontman G-Dragon has even collaborated with Diplo, Skrillex and Missy Elliott) and their boundary-pushing videos have laced some sex and violence into typically sugar-sweet K-Pop.

At the Honda Center on Sunday night in Anaheim, on the band’s first U.S. tour in three years, they proved why they’ve lasted through this sea change in K-Pop’s place in America, and how they used an absence to re-imagine this stalwart band as one of the most inventive, aesthetically visionary acts in their genre.
Like all good single-gender pop acts, BigBang has a self-evident chemistry from the moment they walk onstage (a moment that, in Anaheim, was preceded by a great Quentin Tarantino-style car-chase-gunfight movie starring the band). G-Dragon is the steely-eyed leader, quick to use venomous rapping or a pure falsetto to drive a song; Taeyang is bawdier and rakish; and T.O.P. is his foil: reserved except for when he raps in a baritone growl that can turn a song from catchy to menacing. Seungri, the youngest, is the sweetheart while Daesung is the muppety goofball (a gifted drummer in his own right, he’s definitely their Ringo Starr). They helped make their parent firm YG Entertainment into a global pop powerhouse (which has a similar set of superstars in the all-woman group 2NE1) and blend punk, futurist and formal fashions in atypical ways that make them global style heroes.

Source: LA TIMES

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