In the late ’90s, Danish-Norwegian group Aqua sold over 30 million albums and singles and topped the charts throughout the world – and the song that kickstarted that phenomenal success was Barbie Girl.
The group was formed in 1989 by multi-instrumentalist songwriters Søren Rasted and Claus Norreen with singers Lene Nystrøm and René Dif. And in 2009, the foursome discussed their approach to music and the creation of Barbie Girl.
As Rasted stated, from the beginning they set out to do something unique in pop music.
Article continues below“We started out doing very hardcore dance,” he said. “But we became more pop. And lyrically, instead of writing straight-down-the-alley songs, we wanted to make them more like fairytales – songs like Barbie Girl and Doctor Jones, hits for kids.”
“We liked the sound and the energy from dance music,” said Norreen, “but we were writing classical pop songs with a verse and a chorus, not just a short hook like a lot of dance music, and that became a huge part of our success and our identity as a group.
“At that time the European club style was very much a pretty singer and an angry rapper, and we wanted to change that a little bit, so we had René sing too."
Rasted continued: “We had our look and our sound. Lene and René are very characteristic in their image and in their voice. And our videos were very tongue-in-cheek.
“We never had the urge to be credible. Most bands suffer because they want that. We never did – it’s just not us!
“When we met René he was DJing. He was playing all these Euro-dance bands like Snap!"
“We liked the energy of that which we combined with classic writing. It sounds like a cliché, but I just like a good pop tune that’s well written and has something distinctive in it.
“Lene and René have very distinctive voices, which immediately means either you hate it or you love it. The people that love us really love us, and the people that hate us really hate us! But I love things that are a little bit quirky.”
Rasted said of his writing partnership with Norreen: “We always had a special procedure in writing songs. Many songs have been written in major and when we started we wrote in minor. When we did uptempo, happy songs it was mostly in minor. We changed it when we did something with lyrically more heaviness – the ballads, we would do in major.”
Barbie Girl made Aqua a household name from Europe to America and beyond, selling over a million copies in the UK alone – and it took just one hour for Rasted and Norreen to write the song.
As Norreen remembered it: “We were in our small studio in Copenhagen. Soren had been to an art exhibition where there was a lot of Barbie dolls in it. He came back to the studio and we started working on the music, and within an hour we’d nailed it.
“Sometimes you work days and days on a song and it turns out horribly. But this was one of those songs that just happens.”
He laughed: “We were very secretive about the title. It was such a great idea and we didn’t want anyone else to know about it, so for a long time we called the song Burger King!”
Inevitably, a song named Barbie Girl, with lyrics referring to Barbie and Ken dolls, attracted the interest of the toys’ manufacturer Mattel. In addition, the video for the song featured Nystrøm and René Dif playing the roles of Barbie and Ken.
A lawsuit duly followed in which Mattel accused Aqua’s record label MCA of diluting the image of Barbie. The case was eventually dismissed, and Mattel would later license Aqua’s song for the 2023 fantasy comedy movie Barbie. What’s more, for the movie soundtrack Barbie The Album, a sample of Barbie Girl was incorporated into a new song by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice – titled Barbie World.
![Nicki Minaj & Ice Spice – Barbie World (with Aqua) [Official Music Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/CUj2AWEJnwQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
The release of Barbie Girl in April 1997 coincided with the launch of Auto-Tune, but Søren Rasted later confirmed that no pitch correction was used for Nystrøm’s vocal on the track.
Barbie Girl was not the first single lifted from Aqua’s debut album Aquarium. In Denmark, the first single was Roses Are Red; the second, My Oh My.
Rasted admitted: “When we released Barbie Girl as the first single in other countries, I was very afraid that we would end up being a one-hit wonder band. That would be a terrible thing, but it can happen when you have such a big song. So it was a huge relief when Doctor Jones became number one as well.”
More huge hits followed over the years, including Turn Back Time and Cartoon Heroes.
But of course, Barbie Girl will always be the song that defines Aqua.
In 2009, Claus Norreen shared a funny story involving this and another famous song, Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, the ’70s disco classic and gay anthem.
Norreen said of Barbie Girl: “It’s surreal to write something that goes around the globe on that scale.”
He then elaborated: “I live in the centre of Copenhagen and recently there was a Gay Olympics in the city. I was sitting outside with a friend when a bunch of Korean guys, athletes, came walking down the street singing.
“I told my friend, ‘If you can persuade them to sing I Will Survive, I’ll start dancing!’ And I’m a terrible dancer! The funny thing is, these guys didn’t know I Will Survive – but they knew Barbie Girl!”
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