The ‘Barbie’ Soundtrack Is a Pop Playhouse That Should’ve Kicked a Few Dolls Out
Greta Gerwig’s brilliantly subversive and satirical Barbie opens in a literal dream house, where all is perfect and pristine. But—and it’s no spoiler to say this, since we’ve all been pummeled with trailers since last December—it doesn’t take long before a disturbance in the force casts a rain cloud over Barbie’s pink paradise.
Hitting play on the film’s accompanying soundtrack, Barbie: The Album, gives you a similar sensation. After starting off strong with an A-list cast of stars who understood the assignment—Lizzo, Dua Lipa, and Billie Eilish among them—things hit a speed bump, and we tumble into drab-pop territory. And “drab” is certainly never a word that ought to be associated with Barbie.
Indeed, the soundtrack has its requisite share of glitz and glamor. Lizzo opens both the album and the movie itself with the fizzy, horn-laced “Pink,” which finds her narrating exactly what Margot Robbie’s titular idol is doing on screen and delivering this gem of a spelling lesson: “P: Pretty / I: Intelligent / N: Never sad / K: Cool!” There’s also the album’s lead single, Lipa’s disco-pop anthem “Dance the Night,” and Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice’s “Barbie World,” a drill flip of Aqua’s 1997 hit “Barbie Girl.”