Pop’s perpetual Peter Pan Mark Ronson has assembled this glitzy doll’s house of pop royalty to soundtrack this summer’s biggest movie blockbuster, co-writing five tracks himself and producing a handful more. Viewed simply as an ensemble mixtape, it shines like a kaleidoscope in 20 shades of coral. But the accompanying film feels as though it’s straining to live its truth as a fully fledged musical, and as a result a few of the soundtrack’s starry contributors – Sam Smith, Tame Impala, Haim – can’t seem to decide whether they’re serving the gods of pop or narrative. Still, Ronson touches glory with the 11 o’clock number I’m Just Ken, launching Ryan Gosling’s pitch-corrected himbo into full masculine meltdown.
For all the Midas touch he exhibits on Dua Lipa’s Dance the Night, Ronson the songwriter lacks a requisite sprinkling of saccharine camp for a job like this. Fortunately, this ingredient is amply lavished elsewhere: in the beeping BPMs of PinkPantheress and Ava Max, the gloriously artificial K-pop regiment Fifty Fifty, and the merciless hit merchant Charli XCX belting her irresistibly idiotic bop Speed Drive.
Then just when it starts to feel like an orgy in a sweetshop, Billie Eilish arrives with some much-needed tragic relief. What Was I Made For? lends hushed sincerity to Barbie’s plight, and it’s this melody that Greta Gerwig repeatedly relies on to give her synthetic film a heart.
Like the movie it decorates, the album strives for a fine balance of girlish innocence and knowing irony. Nicki Minaj long ago mastered this contradiction: half hyper-feminine babydoll, half foul-mouthed man-eater. So it’s no surprise that Barbie World, the song she shares with her protege Ice Spice, is 109 seconds of pure plastic bliss. Like much of the soundtrack, it fizzes with moreish, sugary filth, simultaneously R-rated and child-friendly.
