“Shoong!” featuring Lisa of Blackpink

After being discharged from the military, I would go to the studio and work, but I didn’t know what story to tell, what direction to take my music in. It was difficult and I felt lost. It wasn’t like I could come out with a confident song about being the best, but making a really sad song in my sorrows wasn’t it either. I thought long and hard about what story to tell and what mood to convey. Then THEBLACKLABEL’s producers brought me this track, and we made a melody together while just joking around, throwing out words and lyrics. We were just spitting, but the song came to fruition. A vision for the album came out, like a ripple effect. After this song, the rest of the music came more easily. The racing concept comes straight from the title: “Shoong” is onomatopoeic, often used for cars passing by in Korean. The sound is repeated in the song. A Lamborghini is mentioned in the song, and from that, we dove into the racing concept visually.

The collaboration with Lisa happened so quickly, without any hurdles. One special thing is that when Lisa first came to YG, literally when she first came to Korea, I was there working on music and ended up watching her audition. At that time, she was a baby, a young kid who just came from Thailand. She sang “Baby” by Justin Bieber and it was so endearing. My heart was hurting. (Laughs). I really wanted her to succeed. I told our CEO at the time, “I think she will do well no matter what.” I’m not saying she did well because of me or anything like that (Laughs.) Watching her become so successful makes me proud.

I thought maybe this song would actually be the first to be released. That was the plan. Lisa, thankfully, said OK right away and that she wanted to be part of the project no matter what. The song was completed so naturally, so quickly. The arrangement and producing, we finished in under a month.

The choreography for the song was done by Bailey Sok, who also did “Vibe.” It really brought me back to my roots. Bailey Sok’s choreography is really hard. I wasn’t sure if it was just because it had been so long for me. But the best dancers in Korea, who were on the show Street Man Fighter and Street Woman Fighter, they learned it as well and had a hard time too — that gave me a lot of confidence. “Ah it’s not just hard for me.” (Laughs.) Yesterday, I even filmed a dance challenge video for it with Jay Park and he also said it was hard.

cr. Rolling Stone