There are, by my count, at least 14 different versions of Barbie the Album: a vast, brightly coloured array of vinyl and cassette variants and alternative covers, all ready for purchase from your favourite big-box store, streaming service or online retailer. For a certain kind of record collector, I imagine that it will be hard to pick between, say, the Target-exclusive “candy floss” coloured vinyl and the “cotton candy” coloured vinyl, or the standard “hot pink” vinyl and the Urban Outfitters-exclusive “neon pink” vinyl.
What shade of pink record you prefer to purchase and, most likely, not play doesn’t really matter. The point seems to be that, even if you’re a little past the age to pick up one of the many toys that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film is ostensibly designed to promote, there’s still a hunk of plastic you can purchase to commemorate this auspicious union of art and advertising.
As with the film itself – which has been promoted with a culture-saturating marketing blitz involving everything from pink burgers to a real-life Barbie Dreamhouse (brought to life by Airbnb) – Barbie the Album is a veritable rat king of brand tie-ins. Aside from being a soundtrack promoting a Warner Bros-distributed film, it also serves as pretty good promo for many of the pop A-listers signed to Warner Music Group (Dua Lipa, Lizzo, Charli XCX), as well as some of the C-listers (Gayle, Ava Max). The album was curated by Mark Ronson, but you get the sense that the renowned superproducer may have been first nudged towards Warner’s own stable of artists, who comprise around half the album’s tracklist.
The cherry on top of all this corporate synergy is the fact that most of the songs on Barbie the Album are about Barbie and Ken, giving many of the songs a strange, jingle-like quality. “Hey Barbie / She’s so cool,” coos Lizzo over bouncy 80s soft-pop on Pink; “She’s my best friend in the whole world,” sings Charli on the jagged, high-octane Speed Drive. Hey Blondie, a swooning, Jack Johnson-esque number by Dominic Fike, finds the gen Z heart-throb falling head-over-heels for the doll herself, a bizarre concept made wryly funny by the fact that Fike cites the anti-sellout 90s as the era of rock that has had the biggest influence on his own music.
I’m not so daft as to believe that a Barbie soundtrack album should have made for groundbreaking or era-defining art – but on a level of pure enjoyment, listening to a concept album about Barbie does wear thin very quickly. Unlike Aqua’s subversive 1997 Eurodance hit Barbie Girl (itself sampled on this album’s enjoyable Nicki Minaj/Ice Spice track Barbie World, one of Minaj’s better singles in recent years) these songs unquestioningly metabolise the themes and aesthetics of both Barbie (the doll) and Barbie (the film). Billie Eilish’s contribution, the typically maudlin What Was I Made For?, at first scans as one of Eilish’s most salient looks at the alienating nature of fame yet – “Looked so alive, turns out, I’m not real / Just something you paid for” – until you realise a line like “I used to float, now I just fall down” is not metaphor as much as a direct description of a scene in the film.
Although much of the soundtrack feels like an opportunity for talented, ordinarily innovative artists such as Haim and Tame Impala to cash a fat cheque, there are brief moments of inspiration to be found. The most intriguing track here is Sam Smith’s Man I Am, a twisted Ronson-produced disco romp ostensibly written to soundtrack Ken’s mid-film pivot to men’s rights activism (yes, really). Smith has been trying very hard to foster subversion in their work, and for the most part they fall flat: Unholy, their recent hit with Kim Petras, possessed all the venom of one of those domesticated red pandas you see on TikTok. Man I Am, however, uses Smith’s talent for over-the-top theatrics perfectly, bringing out all the homoerotic tension in chauvinist machismo. It’s the only time on Barbie the Album that an artist sounds genuinely inspired by the idea of taking their cues from the film’s plot.
Angel, by PinkPantheress, seems not to have been written according to corporate dictum, and it too is a highlight, the wonderfully wacky producer Count Baldor welding jaunty Irish traditional music on to PinkPantheress’s usual featherlight dance-pop. Baldor is loosely affiliated with PC Music, the British avant-garde pop collective which, for the past decade, has been releasing music meant to parody the kind of hyper-capitalist pop exemplified by Barbie the Album; it makes sense that his contribution would be one of the few to not sound totally denuded of emotion or flair. Same goes for Charli XCX’s Speed Drive, produced by fellow PC Music alum Easyfun, which conjures exhilarating cognitive dissonance through its comparisons between Barbie, Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, and Los Angeles it-girl Devon Lee Carlson.
It would have been fun to hear a version of Barbie the Album that hewed closer to pure irreverence, in the style of Angel and Speed Drive. Someone like PC Music head and Beyoncé collaborator AG Cook might have been able to do for the album what Gerwig has supposedly done for her film, bringing self-referential, existentialist pathos to mainstream art. That’s wishful thinking: Barbie the Album makes it clear that there are charts to be topped, targets to be hit, and – of course – dolls to be sold.
