In July, YG Entertainment broke the news that 2NE1 are back, which is both great and baffling. I have many a thought about this, but that’s a whole other post.

For now, I am flashing back to a 2NE1 song which I felt got a middling response, despite how good it was. “I Love You”.

“I Love You” first released in July 2012 and I remember how weird this release seemed. 2NE1 were still incredibly popular at this point, so nothing they released felt like it was ever snuck out or flew under the radar. But “I Love You” didn’t feel like it got the release treatment that a 2NE1 song usually got, and the reception matched this. “I Love You” wasn’t a unanimously liked song. It still charted at number 1 and is one of their highest viewed music videos on YouTube. But the critical response seemed lukewarm. For quite some time now, charts have stopped being an indicator of how much the general public like a song and how dedicated a fanbase is to ensuring that their fave charts, regardless of how they feel about the song. This has always been the case in South Korea with K-pop, but now we’re seeing it happen in America. Just look at Taylor Swift. Her album The Tortured Poets Department has been getting dragged left and right—widely considered to not be good. Even the Swifties are like ‘Girl, this album isn’t...great’. But they stay keeping it at the top of the charts anyway. So I truly believe that the love fans had for 2NE1 is what resulted in “I Love You” being a commercial success. Because I have very clear memories of lots of people not liking it.

Me? I thought it was one of the best songs 2NE1 had put out.

I’d always liked 2NE1, but was never particularly fond of the music. “I Love You” was the first 2NE1 song that I genuinely liked enough to play the shit out of it—separate from the music videos, the performances and all the distractions from the song itself.

With 2NE1 (and I’ve found this to be the case with many K-pop groups) the visual package showed more promise than the music did. 2NE1 looked great. The music videos were (mostly) great. CL had such so much stage presence and just exuded a bad bitchedness out the gate that I hadn’t seen in K-pop before. Minzy was a firecracker. Bom and Dara were...also there. Even if I wasn’t a fan of the music, I still tuned in to watch their performances and kept up with their releases, waiting to see if the promise would be realised in the music, and it was with “I Love You”.

“I Love You” was such a nice surprise, because it was never a song I’d expected to hear from 2NE1. It was so dark and different from anything they’d released prior—being this really cool fusion of old, new, past, future, tradition and non-tradition.

2012 was a transitional year in K-pop. It was when K-pop began to go global, where lots of acts made comebacks, when the market diversified and grew to such a point that everybody was trying to do what they could to meet the demand, appeal and expectations of what K-pop had become. And you could say “I Love You” was a part of that. But perhaps it not being anything like “Fire” or “I Am the Best” is why it’s not a song that’s at the forefront of people’s minds when they think of 2NE1. Because even I can admit that “I Love You” is not what I’d deem a quintessential 2NE1 song in the same way “Fire” and “I Am the Best” are, and I get why fans who wanted more songs like that were not particularly fond of “I Love You”. And 2012 was also a year where we saw acts attempting to do what 2NE1 had already done and seeing successes with that. So fans were probably like ‘The fuck you releasing a song like this now for!?’ when it was exactly the type of song which was right for 2NE1 at the time.

The release of “I Love You” always made me curious about what was happening behind the scenes. The music video was strange, because it was not the production I felt it should of been and what I was used to from 2NE1, especially after “I Am the Best”. YG tossed the girls his wife’s old Versace earrings and a couple of outfits, and that was it. He sent the choreographer home. Cut the power to the dressing rooms before the hairdresser could finish Dara’s hair. YG seemed done with it. Or maybe there was no music video budget because of 2NE1’s New Evolution Tour which kicked off the same month that “I Love You” had released.