Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Following the (deserved) pop success of “Seven”, BTS‘s Jungkook was back with another English-language single in “3D“, collabing with Jack Harlow. Unfortunately for Jungkook, he truly got outdone by Jack here, who delivered an absolute hip-hop masterclass.
Look at this poet shit:
You my bae, just like Tampa
All my ABGs get cute for me
I’ll fly you from Korea to Kentucky
Sir, they want to go the opposite direction.
I just wanna meet you in the physical and see if you would touch me
This could be an incel’s DM.
When I seen that body, you would think it was a dead body
I get the next line is probably a reference to Stand By Me, but I laughed out loud. If you just ignore that context and pretend he’s trying to compliment a woman by saying she looks like a corpse, it’s really amazing.
He also ad-libs “spy kids“, surely in reference to Spy Kids 3-D, a masterpiece.
——
Anyway, after his Craig David-ification on “Seven”, it’s more like early solo Justin Timberlake that Jungkook invokes on “3D”, which is a trend for his releases that I honestly kinda like. That said, while he does a solid job here, the song still feels oddly flat and doesn’t quite have the melody that would allow it to shine like it could. That’s even putting aside Jack Harlow’s feature, as there’s an alternate version without him, but it still doesn’t solve the issue with the song feeling smoothed out. While the hook on “Seven” is what eventually sold me on it, the “you know how I like it girlllll, 3-D” hook here became more grating than anything else on repeats.
Still, the fact that both of Jungkook’s singles have clearly been aiming for a mainstream pop career is promising, at least for my preferences.
