Thus far, we’ve had such fascinating theories on the objective of her eponymous film: 1) It’s about having an existential crisis (and also, death). The release date for "Barbie: The Album" is set for July 21, the same day the film premieres. What is 'Barbie: The Album (Best Weekend Ever Edition)'? Because Andrew sang on the demo and he has such an amazing range, I thought, OK, let me make this a little bit easier for Ryan — lower it a key or two. As Ryan started to warm up, I was like, OK, we could kind of bump this up another key. Oh, now we can bump it [to] the original key — he's just giving this wonderful vocal performance. And also, because he's such an incredible actor, he's imbuing all these words with a different context and emotion than what Andrew and I had even been able to to add to it. It felt like he was inhabiting the song, which is really wonderful. Because it’s 'Barbie,' the instinct is to go to something a little Euro and sugary, and that’s just never what I do," he told Vanity Fair. Young girls] are “funny and brash and confident, and then they just—stop,” Gerwig told Vogue in May. “How is this journey the same thing that a teenage girl feels? All of a sudden, she thinks, Oh, I’m not good enough.” It’s clear that a big chunk of Barbie’s aim is to explore why girls abandon not only their Barbie dolls, but some of the positive beliefs associated with them.

I brought in [songwriter-producer] Andrew Wyatt, who’s one of my favorite collaborators, to help finish it. And when they started to edit the film, they were like, “This two-minute song actually needs to be drawn out for a seven-minute sequence, so can you essentially score it, and make sections and breakdowns?” If we’d just looped sections of the song it would have been really boring and uninspiring. So we just started to play around and we essentially scored this seven-minute battle scene around the song. And then they gave us the opening credits, and we slowly ended up writing more and more music until a couple of months ago they were just like, “You’re scoring the film.” I was so inspired by this script," Ronson says. "I love the whole message of it, I love the whole idea of it. Obviously, Barbie's story is so wonderful." The logline attached to the full Barbie trailer lays out an intriguing path for Ken, Barbie’s eternal boyfriend: “To live in Barbie Land is to be a perfect being in a perfect place. Unless you have a full-on existential crisis. Or you’re a Ken.”Thank you. And I remember trying to alleviate annoying the crap out of him by saying, “When our daughters are watching this, 15 years from now or whatever, you can be like, “… And this is the scene where daddy’s friend Mark annoyed the shit out of him to get finished in time.” (Laughter) But really getting down and dirty, in the weeds, and being on these intense Zoom calls twice a week, and having to go to, like, [label CEOs] as the diplomat and asking for clearances and doing these kinds of things that are not necessarily my favorite thing to do — it’s much easier to just be the artist — but that was my job on this film. I don’t think I would have done it if the movie wasn’t so great. I’d done scenes here and there, but I’d never scored an entire film. I don’t think anybody knew how musically driven this film was going to be when we started. So, then, what is Barbie about? My hope is that actually watching the plot play out will only heighten the debate. The film’s IMDb logline encourages that possibility: “Barbie suffers a crisis that leads her to question her world and her existence.” If Barbie’s questioning herself, why would we not want to do the same? Mark Ronson, Kevin Weaver and Brandon Davis attend the Barbie premiere. (Eric Charbonneau) Eric Charbonneau

The movie is kind of kitsch personified — it’s not like the vibe of your “Late Night Feelings” album and some of the more serious things you’ve done. Was that a challenging transition to make? Kevin Parker of Tame Impala attends the world Premiere of Barbie in a light blue Versace set. Barbie The Album is set to feature a new original Tame Impala song titled “Journey to the Real World.” We can’t talk about Barbie without talking about the marketing of Barbie. It is everywhere: on Krispy Kreme donuts and Ruggable rugs and OPI nail polish and GAP T-shirts and toothbrushes and luggage and pool floats and ice cream and frozen yogurt and makeup and cars and blankets and hairbrushes and heels. Her Dreamhouse is on Airbnb. Every publicist pushing sunglasses or sex toys has retooled their strategy around “Barbiecore” for the summer. I have never worn so much pink in my life.Barbie is a plastic paradox. She is a narrow vision of womanhood, and she is also an everywoman. She has hundreds of jobs and has never worked a day in her life. (She is also, importantly, not alive.) She is more than 60 years old and eternally, vaguely 20-something. (Past reports indicate Mattel claims she’s 19.) She is sexy but sexless. She’s a child’s plaything, with influence felt widely on adults. The secrets of director Greta Gerwig’s long-anticipated film are, in fact, starting to dissolve: The Los Angeles premiere prompted a round of spoiler-free first reactions (mostly positive), and the official critic review embargo is reportedly up soon. But even with the film finally accumulating eyeballs, there’s still a collective sense of protectiveness over the Barbie brouhaha. We don’t want the mania to break, not yet. There are still ample dopamine deposits to be discovered in deliberating what, precisely, Barbie has to say. After a promotional music video dropped yesterday featuring Gosling’s Ken serenading his second-rate status, one particular TikTok comment best summarized this feeling: “Every time I see a trailer for this movie I am more confused but I also want to see it more.” Grammy-winner Dua Lipa, the voice behind Barbie The Album lead single “Dance the Night,” graces the pink carpet in a sheer custom Versace gown. Lipa will be portraying multiple Mermaid Barbies in the film.

And that's what's so great about a lot of the songs that people wrote, because they seem so bespoke," Ronson says. "It was just so wonderful to see how every artist took what they saw, took the conversation with Greta, and everyone ran with it and did something different." It’s a “Barbie World,” and we’re all just living in it! On Sunday, July 9, Hollywood’s biggest and brightest stars descended upon the pink carpet for the world premiere of Barbie. Directed by Academy Award nominee Greta Gerwig, Barbie features acclaimed performances from Margot Robbie (Barbie), Ryan Gosling (Ken), Issa Rae (President Barbie), Dua Lipa (Mermaid Barbies), Will Ferrell (the CEO of Mattel) and Helen Mirren (the narrator), among others. Plus, Barbie® has partnered with Tynker to encourage hands-on exploration with its creative computing platform and inspire new ways to play, like creating songs and music videos with code. The acoustic-style guitar has a detachable pink strap that matches its body and is perfect for practice or performance. He continued, saying he wrote something "definitely disco ... and definitely gold and sequin-y, but it’s got a really tough driving thing to it."Where are you at with the memoir and solo album we spoke about last year? Are they both about your days coming up in the New York club scene of the ‘90s? Even if Barbie doesn’t lay out its “men are problematic” bent quite so literally, it’s already clear Gosling’s performance is one of the best of the film. If that’s the case, there’s one hell of a debate to be had over why Ken’s character arc is so essential to our understanding of Barbie herself. 3) It’s about the inescapable clutch of corporations.