Barbie The Album - A Review
Well, it’s finally here - the absolute fever dream of a movie with an album to match. With a dizzying tracklist and megawatts of star power contributing, Barbie The Album is a knowingly saccharine, riotously fun compilation of guaranteed party staples that provides the perfect complement to the pop culture behemoth that is Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie. The lineup of artists, the variance of approaches and the different angles of inspiration are straight from the Baz Luhrmann playbook of soundtrack tie-ins, which can only mean an instant ubiquitousness. It’s of course helped by the lineup worthy of a double-take. Sam Smith, Billie Eilish, The Kid LAROI, Nicki Minaj & Ice Spice, Khalid, Tame Impala… Greta Gerwig was well and truly pulled out all the stops.
If Dua Lipa wasn’t on this album, something would be seriously wrong. The reigning monarch of neo-disco is right in her element on Dance The Night, taking the best lessons from her opus Future Nostalgia and creating an instant club classic. Worried that there mightn’t be enough variety? Not a problem here. As has been much vaunted, Nicki Minaj has teamed up with Ice Spice and sampled AQUA’s legendary Barbie Girl in a criminally short but no less epic crossover - hopefully with enough peer pressure from their fan bases, an album-length collaboration could be made a possibility.
The biggest surprise inclusion on the album, by far, is I’m Just Ken. I wasn’t sure I was ever going to hear Ryan Gosling sing in a movie again but out of nowhere, he gets an entire tongue-in-cheek prog-rock epic all to himself, penned by Mark Ronson & Andrew Wyatt, lamenting his inferior position as Barbie’s perpetual number 2. It swings wildly between moods and styles like some hilariously unholy mashup of Queen and Pink Floyd, and it’s nothing short of fantastic. It’s surprisingly hard to write a knowing pastiche piece but, when you’ve got access to 2 of pop’s most influential songwriters and an actor whose comic abilities are finally being truly appreciated on a broad scale, it seems almost effortless.
If you want genuinely moving moments, HAIM and Billie Eilish individually contribute a moody song each, the latter of which can be a genuine tear-jerker and serves as one of the album’s highlights. Chalk it up to experience or maturity, but Eilish’s voice is sounding increasingly developed - even her trademark harrowing whisper is more bodied and entrancing than we’ve heard before. And yet, even with What Was I Made For?, there’s still a subtle undercurrent of the campy self-awareness that the entire Barbie juggernaut is built from. This is what makes a good concept album; shifts in tone, style and sound, but throughout there’s a single, pervasive idea that holds it all together.
While Greta Gerwig can certainly take a bow for her part in putting this album together, it’s more of a testament to the talent of the individual artists who’ve contributed. It’s not fun to see what happens when a bunch of big artists come together to contribute to a broader project, offering their spin. While not every track is 100% electrifying, there’s not a big misstep, either, with everyone bringing something decent to the table. Just like the movie’s trailers suggest, there is something for everyone, whether you love Barbie or hate it.
Only time will tell if Barbie The Album will have the cultural staying power of soundtrack albums like The Great Gatsby, but if the initial reactions are anything to go by, I imagine the album, or its keystone tracks at the very least, may stick around for as long as the eponymous doll herself.