BIGONE is Back with a Bang and Ready to Show All His Colors in “COLORFUL ZEBRA”
Try playing “COLORFUL ZEBRA” by BIGONE (빅원) and not feel like jumping around - while whipping your hair, of course. This track of just over two minutes is an infusion of energy that screams “Let go!” Of what? Whatever, just get it all out and feel liberated.
That’s the feeling you get as you rock to this tune, with its infectious yearning to break free from stereotypes. In his latest single, released on January 31, BIGONE screams out loud that he doesn’t want to be confined within the simple choice of “black or white”. To express this idea, he envisioned a colorful zebra: the animal usually defined by its black and white stripes is reimagined as a colorful one. And considering how in one of his Instagram stories, published just a couple of days after the release of the song, he recalled the curious incident of a zebra that broke out of the Seoul Zoo in March 2023, maybe we can infer that that episode played a part in choosing this specific animal for his latest single?
In the refrain we hear him singing: “하얀색 아님 까만색으로만 칠하기엔 난 알록달록
어떤 색을 칠하든 내가 원하는 색깔로 다 알록달록” (“I'm too colorful to be just white or black
No matter what color you paint me, I want to be all colorful”); and on his Instagram profile, the artist teased such a concept already a few days before the song's release, in a post where he wrote: “The world tells a zebra ‘Zebras are either white or black’. The colorful zebra answers: ‘Why? I‘m colorful’”.
BIGONE previously stated that three of his biggest influences growing up were the legendary Seo Taiji, Yoo Jaeha, and G-DRAGON. Indeed, in his music, there’s an undeniable affinity for pop and rock, a taste for very personal and intimate themes, and the will to present himself in a no-holds-barred way. If we had to find a fitting tag for BIGONE we’d borrow the title of one of his songs and define him as a pop-punk artist: all his tunes so far, and probably “COLORFUL ZEBRA” even more, have a gritty and edgy punk-rock vibe that evokes the sound of ‘90s sacred monsters of the genre such as Blink 182 or Green Day, to name just a couple.
Born in 1991 as Kim Daeil, BIGONE broke on the scene as a member of the hip-hop dance crew MBA and also joined the boy group 24K under the stage name Daeil. He left the group in 2017 and went on to pursue his solo career, under the alias we know now, which is the simple and clever translation in English of the hanja characters for his birthname: Dae, meaning “big, great” and Il, meaning “one”.
He writes and composes his songs, working on the arrangements as well, and already made a name for himself with his albums full of exciting collaborations, such as PEACH BLOSSOM (2019), Flame Blossom (2020), and LOVE+EMOTION+BLOSSOM (2020). More recently, he released the EP BIGONEISTHENAME (hence the actual handle on Instagram) in 2022, followed by three singles in 2023: "hope" feat. Han Yohan, "Season Of Love,” and "Pop Punk” feat. Dive&DOHANSE. There’s more in his discography that’s worth checking out, but probably one of his most known works is the collaboration with his long-time friend JAY B, for the single “Windy Day.” A little curiosity: the two have known each other since they were young, and used to hang out also with Jinyoung of GOT7!
So, have you already added “COLORFUL ZEBRA” to any of your playlists?