‘Critics wanted us to be a one-hit-wonder’: back in Barbie world with Aqua
In the middle of a recent New York City concert, Aqua’s male lead vocalist René Dif and keyboardist Søren Rasted looked at each other in elation and disbelief. As singer Lene Nystrøm warbled towards the refrain of Calling You – a mostly overlooked number that closed out their 1997 debut album Aquarium – the tightly packed audience of 1,200 (aged roughly nine to 65) were confidently singing along, not missing a beat.
“I went: what is going on?!” Dif tells me the following afternoon at the rooftop bar of their hotel. “They can even sing this song? And it was not just five people!”
Twenty-six years after Aquarium, and 34 years since the Danish-Norwegian band’s very first iteration, Aqua are clearly not forgotten. The New York gig is part of a current world tour (minus former member Claus Norreen, who left to pursue other projects), and they’re back in the charts: their No 1 hit Barbie Girl is sampled by rappers Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice for Barbie World, the cornerstone of the soundtrack to Greta Gerwig’s wildly hyped Barbie movie whose puckish, satirical take on the perky doll was surely inspired by Aqua’s own sly song.
The previous night was their first time headlining a concert in the US, and the response genuinely overwhelmed them. “We met with 100 fans before the show, and each of them had a story regarding our music,” Nystrøm says. “Someone said Aqua made them gay,” says Rasted.
“For a lot of them, when they had a bad period in their life, they said ‘you guys helped me come through,’” adds Dif. That is certainly true for me: in April 2019, a karaoke bar in Milan’s Chinatown neighbourhood was playing Barbie Girl, and singing this anthem about making life my own creation was the first time I really felt unburdened after my mother’s sudden death six months earlier.
They have been consistently touring since 2012, a familiar sight at 90s nostalgia festivals, and say they haven’t really got sick of each other. “We do and and we don’t,” says Rasted. “We have like 40 concerts a year, and 40 concerts is not your life, so it becomes a part that you look forward to every time you do it.”
It’s quite common to write Aqua off as a one-hit-wonder – and, certainly, the impact that Barbie Girl had on pop culture could have been strong enough to obscure anything else they produced. A tongue-in-cheek take on late-90s consumerism, plastic surgery and gender roles, with Nystrom’s utterly pliable Barbie (“you can brush my hair, undress me everywhere”) preyed upon by Dif’s insistently horny but ultimately buoyant Ken, Barbie Girl sold more than eight million copies worldwide and surpassed a billion YouTube views in 2022.
“The song Barbie Girl is a social comment and was not created or approved by the makers of the doll,” stated the CD booklet, but it was subject to a lawsuit from Mattel, who sued over the song’s lyrics (“I’m a blonde bimbo girl in a fantasy world” and “kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky” wasn’t exactly the stuff of brand partnerships). A court eventually ruled in the band’s favour asserting the song was protected as a parody and by 2008 Mattel was using a family-friendly version for its own Barbie commercial.
The tagline of the song – “life in plastic / it’s fantastic” – came to Rasted when visiting a gallery showing kitsch art, where he saw a planet-like artwork made of heads of Barbie dolls all glued together. “The hook line came like this,” he says, snapping the fingers. “The melody followed the song: it’s usually not that way, you usually write the music before the lyrics.”
They opted for a minor key, which made the tune eerie, like a haunted joyride. “We call it the plus and minus,” Rasted explains. “You can bring plus to a minor chord, and the other way around – if you have major chords, it’s nice to have something not as positive.” This plays out in the song as a whole – wildly upbeat and catchy, there’s also something really sinister about Barbie’s abject sexuality – and in the music video, where Barbie’s dreamhouse is recreated in all its rickety, plasticky glory but where Ken also tears Barbie’s arm off.
Universal marketing manager Karl Badger predicted the international trajectory of Aqua as follows: “I really believe Aqua are mass market. It will start with the teen market for its quirkiness, gay clubs will really like them for their kitschness and their tunes are so catchy. Mums and dads will like them,” he told Music Week in 1997.
He was right. Aquarium yielded seven singles, and, in the UK between autumn 1997 and spring 1998, three of them – Barbie Girl, Doctor Jones, and Turn Back Time – reached No 1. This success went side by side with hectic promo, especially in the Europop-averse American market, where Barbie Girl and the Aquarium album both managed to go Top 10. “Fourteen cities in 20 days,” Dif says of their first American tour. “It was basically: get into town, do a signing, do a radio/TV appearance, eat, hotel, repeat.”
All of Aqua’s early hits with those affecting minor chords, and the central double act – Nystrøm’s crystalline vocals and Dif’s growling blend of rap, song, and cabaret – proved brilliantly zany. “Every other [Europop] band had
a rapper, but René was able to sing as well, and that made the sound of Aqua,” Rasted says. “It wouldn’t have been possible to do three albums with René just rapping.”
Still, the narrative of the one-hitwonder remains in English-speaking countries. “I think some critics, they wanted us to be a one-hit-wonder, because they did not want to respect it,” Nystrøm says.
Aqua’s upbeat songs might be their best known but they also produced a host of ethereal, melancholic ballads: Turn Back Time is the most famous but Good Morning Sunshine, We Belong to the Sea and Aquarius are all noteworthy. “It is nice, once in a while, to take everything down,” Nystrøm says, while Dif appreciates having a rest during his high-energy performance. “I like the fact that I can go out, change clothes, have a beer, and see my two best friends kicking super, super ass.”
Aqua also understood the appeal of nostalgia before nostalgia became one of the few chief currencies of pop culture – their music videos all inhabit a markedly B-movie universe, taking cues from adventure, fantasy, and scifi. In My Oh My, set aboard a pirate ship, Nystrøm is a damsel in distress turned pirate queen, while Dif is the grotesque captain that promptly gets subdued by her, with a distinct Princess Bride flavour; Dr Jones spoofs Indiana Jones, while Cartoon Heroes, the lead single from 2000 follow-up album Aquarius, recycles The Fifth Element.
But Aquarius failed to reach the UK Top 20, and it then took them over a decade to release third album Megalomania. “We actually just did what we wanted to do because we didn’t have the pressure – we just played around and had fun,” Nystrøm says of that final album. By this time, pop had caught up with them thanks to a wave of Scandinavian producers like Max Martin. “It’s true,” Rasted says when I mention this – and it meant they struggled to distinguish themselves. “Of course you want to be original, but it’s hard because you can’t reinvent yourself every time.”
But come 2023, Aqua’s aesthetic is everywhere again, from helium-infused Europop edits on TikTok to “the styling I had back then, which is totally back on,” Nystrøm says (halter crop tops, butterfly hairclips, cargo pants etc). Then, of course, there is the titanic presence of the Barbie movie. When the first promotional images and teaser trailer started circulating in 2022, it was not hard to notice the similarities between Aqua’s Barbie Girl set and Gerwig’s sprawling Barbie Land. “It’s kind of fun to see the movie trailer going: ‘hi Barbie! Hi Ken!’” Nystrøm says, just as she and Dif do in their song. “It was like seeing our universe, our video on steroids – it’s the same colours,” Dif adds.
Given their past friction with Mattel, they kept expectations about their participation low, and in April 2022 Nystrøm’s manager told Variety that the song wouldn’t be used in the movie. Then, when the full trailer dropped, the outro clearly featured the chorus. What happened there?
“We thought it would be like butter on bacon,” the Norwegian Nystrøm says rather Danishly. “We totally understood that they wanted something fresh and new. And then, just two months ago, we were asked to do the [Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice] collab. It happened really quickly.” They see it as a sign that Mattel buried the hatchet. “It’s just nice to have Mattel come to us and say: ‘Hey, that’s cool’,” Dif says.
As they concentrate on live shows (they will continue at least into November and December) they’re not too fussed about new releases. “We haven’t released anything for a while,” says Rasted. “And it’s not like we have something coming up right now. But yeah, we are working.” There’s a lot of unreleased tracks still with potential, too. “When you write music,” Nystrøm says, “it takes so many writing sessions to find that song, and that creates so many other songs just to find it.”
Headlines such as Forbes’s “Nicki Minaj Saved a Pop Band From OneHit Wonder Status and Brought Them Back to the Charts” show that Aqua are still underestimated, but the group don’t seem fazed. After all, other versions of the song also currently circulating include the 2018 Ava Max single Not Your Barbie Girl and a new Tiësto remix, which pairs the vocal track with a heftier bass line. “It’s just cool to see how this song actually never dies,” said Nystrøm. “It just keeps on living, taking turns and twists.”
Of course you want to be original, but it’s hard because you can’t reinvent yourself every time
Søren Rasted