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Korean band Momoland: The lyrics seem strange in a K-pop context
Photo: Sony Music Germany
You can think of this song as a yeast dough that rises more and more.
A few years ago "Wrap Me in Plastic" was brought together and has been growing ever since.
Since 2019, Generation Z has been listening to their Tik-Tok dance clips a million times around the world and making their own videos for the song.
Over 44 million people have heard the various official and unofficial video versions of the song on YouTube alone.
It's a particularly effective catchy tune, the refrain "Wrap me in plastic, make me shine" stays in your head without asking.
A K-pop version by the Korean casting band Momoland has been available since the beginning of February, and in the accompanying video, young women continuously produce content for social media.
Since then, people have not only danced to the song, but also discussed it.
Is the lyrics about BDSM practices?
Or even rape fantasies?
The authors of the song did not see these questions coming.
Johannes Becker and Marcus Layton are both in their mid-30s and jointly run a music and media production company in Berlin.
Becker once worked as a product manager at Universal Music;
Layton publishes electronic pop music, but also produces and remixes for other musicians such as Coldplay and Rosenstolz.
A world hit was not there so far.
The two are surprised by the current success of their song, because the song has been around since 2017. According to Spotify, it has a particularly large number of listeners in the USA, India, Germany, Indonesia and South Korea, they say.
Almost 40 percent of them are between 18 and 22 years old, more than half are women.
Statistics are a blessing and a curse for musicians.
With their help, one can better understand consumers, but one is quickly inclined to be too influenced by numbers and algorithms when producing.
At a songwriting session in Los Angeles, Becker and Layton and a US colleague tried to do just that, to write "in accordance with the algorithm".
That means: writing songs that streaming platforms and record companies like and that can be easily classified in playlists.
"After ten days we had enough," says Layton.
"We then refused to accept all the usual rules."
"Wrap Me in Plastic" was more of a by-product.
The first line was quickly written - "It's my first night out with you" - and with each new line more joy arose: "Treat me right and buy me shoes / Let me be your fantasy / Play with me" - every syllable a note .
Almost every word is a cliché.
The song was finished after two hours.
Your song has become so weird that Marcus Layton did not even want to publish it under his own stage name, it does not fit his style, he says.
So he and Becker created the fictional character Chromance, a man with a silver mask.
Because no record company showed any interest in it, they simply released the song themselves. At first without much reaction.
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Berlin musician and producer Marcus Layton: created the fictional character Chromance for his algorithm hit
Photo: Marcus Layton
The success of "Wrap Me in Plastic" shows how music is spreading today.
Because at some point the generation Z kids discovered the song for themselves - Layton and Becker still don't know how exactly - and used it as background music for their videos.
More and more people became aware of him, at times he was number one of the most wanted songs on the Shazam app in some countries.
The musicians report that the number of hits on YouTube and Spotify has increased every day.
At the end of 2019 he arrived in China and is currently with over a billion audio streams.
For an artist who does not come from there, this is "extremely rare," says Becker.
The wave spilled from China to the United States and thus to the social media platform TikTok - possibly triggered by the large Chinese community in the United States, the authors believe.
Pop singer Jason Derulo, who had a global summer hit last year with “Savage Love”, also uploaded a video.
Charli d'Amelio, one of the biggest influencers on TikTok with around 108 million followers, filmed videos for the song.
And even the German music »titan« Dieter Bohlen danced with his girlfriend in a neon green partner look through an alley on Mykonos.
At the end of last year, the song finally landed in the K-pop world.
The girl band Momoland collaborated with Chromance on their version of "Wrap Me in Plastic".
Becker and Layton produced the new version, a few Korean lines were added.
Since then, there has also been criticism of the song phenomenon.
Because it is said of K-Pop stars that they are under massive pressure to perform and have to go through years of psychologically stressful, hard singing and dance training.
There is hardly any artistic freedom among the casting bands, and even private life is subject to strict rules.
In this context, lines of text like “I can call you master, you can call me mine” seem strange.
However, some see the song as a mere fetishization of BDSM practices.
For some K-Pop blogs from the USA or South Korea, the Momoland variant lacks mainly subversion and irony.
The setting of the video is a kind of doll's house in which the young women are exclusively available to their followers.
Influencers, so you can understand the message of the video, should always be available.
Layton and Becker do not want to participate in this discussion.
"We're not going to explain whether the lines should mean anything, but the superficiality of our society is nicely reflected in them," says Layton.
Becker adds: "In art, your own interpretation is part of it." In addition, he says, there are certainly people who see the song as a criticism of social media.
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