This was the year the whole world turned pink. The Barbie movie turned Mattel’s beloved plastic doll into a big-screen icon, perfectly embodied by Margot Robbie. Released in July, it was a huge, rosé-coloured success, pulling in $1.4 billion at the worldwide box office. Dour World War II biopic Oppenheimer might have had the atomic bomb, but the Barbie phenomenon was truly explosive.
Even metal was swept up in Barbiegeddon. The movie left its vivid pink mark on the scene this year, both directly and indirectly. The most obvious connection came in the shape of Scene Queen, aka US singer Hannah Collins, whose hyper-femme personality, 100-megawatt smile and mix of metalcore vitriol and pop choruses saw her single-handedly leading the self-styled bimbocore revolution.
“When Barbie was called a ‘professional bimbo’, my friend looked over at me and was like, ‘This movie was made for you,’” Scene Queen tells Hammer. “The humour was also just so on point; I’ve definitely had musician boyfriends sit and play me guitar for excruciatingly long periods, just like Ken…”
In fairness, Scene Queen was ahead of the Barbie curve. Over the past two years, she’s dropped a string of pink-themed singles (Pretty In Pink, Pink Bubblegum, Pink Panther, Pink G-String, etc), as well as the Bimbocore Vol.1 and Vol.2 EPs.
But her 2022 single Barbie And Ken (‘Ken and Barbie sitting in a tree /K-I-L-L-I-N-G’) predicted both this year’s Barbie Takeover and the subversive nature of the film itself.