Posted by Jacques Peterson on 02/10/2013 at 4:17 AM News

The Popdust Files: girls' generation, jay-z, K-pop

Jay-Z once famously rapped: “men lie, women lie, numbers don’t.” Hov recorded the Timbaland cut to diss Joe Budden and brag about his chart stats, but the lyrics are also perfectly applicable to Girls’ Generation. The K-pop super-group received some backlash from fans after the release of their genre-breaking franken-pop hit, “I Got a Boy,” but the numbers are in, and they’re good. Real good. According to the GAON monthly chart, Girls’ Generation had both the biggest single and album of January. “I Got a Boy,” was streamed over 10 million times and sold 910,253 downloads, while the album shifted 265,322 copies — over a 100,000 more than its nearest competition.

The girls were able to beat out some big stars to take the title as January’s highest-selling act, including ballad queen, Baek Ji Young, pop-rockers, CNBLUE, and JYJ’s Jaejoong.

Unfortunately, The Divine Nine have already wrapped up promotions for I Got a Boy to focus on their Japanese arena tour. The era as a whole wasn’t quite as ridiculously successful as 2011′s The Boys, but the girls still bagged some pretty sizable achievements. On top of the aforementioned chart domination, the music video set a record for the fastest K-pop clip to hit 10 million views, while the single was a huge hit with American music critics, earning glowing reviews from Billboard, L.A. Times, and Rolling Stone. The latter was the biggest surprise, considering that most Western critics tend to save all their praise for the more typically top forty K-pop acts like BIGBANG and 2NE1.

Good for Girls’ Gen. Here’s hoping that they’re back soon with something new, because the mere one month promo cycle for I Got a Boy just wasn’t long enough. Re-release, please.