It has probably not escaped your notice by now that K-Pop is kinda big worldwide. BTS are getting the kind of fawning adoration in London and New York that The Beatles once got, and other bands are taking part in the Korean Invasion too: Blackpink, a relatively young South Korean girlband, will become the first K-Pop act to ever play Coachella.
It’s worth noting Coachella has expanded its vision to other parts of Asia as well: Perfume will also be the first Japanese pop act to play the huge California festival. But Blackpink are particularly notable as they have achieved staggering success since their debut single, 'BOOMBAYAH', in 2016: the sort of success only a few bands, like Girl’s Generation, knew before them. But where their predcessors failed to break the western market, Blackpink look set to become international superstars.
K-Pop might not be your thing: it draws a lot on western pop tropes, is almost impossibly slick, and as an industry it isn’t without its fair share of problems. However, if the music or the atmosphere isn’t for you, it’s still worth getting to know one of the biggest girlbands in the world: Blackpink are perfectly engineered to get stuck in your head, and are a fascinating insight into what pop music is today.
Backstory
Blackpink, like a lot of South Korean pop music, came out of the country’s particular system of training: a kind of pop music conservatoire. YG Entertainment, the group’s Korean team, house their own training program which the band members began to join around 2010. YG tried potential band members out all across the world, which shows in the international lives of the four members: Jisoo is a South Korean native, as was Jennie who went on to spend time in New Zealand and is fluent in English; Rosé, who lived in Melbourne, auditioned in Sydney; Lisa auditioned in her native Thailand. The preference is for young, ethnically Korean performers fluent in the language but that’s flexible: Lisa didn’t speak a word of Korean before coming to train.
Arriving in Seoul, the band estimated that there were between 10-20 aspiring performers all going through the same training: 12 hours a day, seven days a week, learning to dance, sing and rap. Monthly tests helped to prove people’s strengths and eliminate the weakest in the pack: one scored an A, B or C. There are plenty of videos out there on YouTube of people who flunked out of the training to become a K-Pop star.
The members all started at different times: Jennie joined in 2010, Lisa and Jisoo in 2011, and Rose in 2012. They debuted in 2016. It was hard training, difficult for those who had moved away from home, but the four bonded, and are all close friends. Which is good when you only get one day off a fortnight.
The members
As previously mentioned, there are four members: Jennie, Lisa, Jisoo and Rosé. Jennie often leads off songs and is a solid thriple-threat; Jisoo and Rosé are usually the ones bringing you vocals; Lisa is a top notch rapper.
Becoming an 'idol' in South Korea also carries with it the burden of needing to seem astonishingly perfect. One could argue this might be why bands like SixBomb go through extensive plastic surgery (they featured both their before and after appearances in the video for their song ‘Becoming Prettier’) or why the lead singer of boy band SHINee was found dead in his apartment in 2017 with a note saying he was “broken from inside”. It also leads to their members having to portray images that are jointly virginal and also deeply available: one of the first big scandals involved Jong Hyun back in 2010, back when South Korea's paparazzi started to boom. K-Pop fans can be known to be particularly judgmental of acts: take for example the infamous ‘black ocean’ of 2008, when the ur-Girls Generation, SNSD, came on stage to a purposeful blackout of the entire audience’s glowsticks as a protest. You can hear them fighting back the tears as they perform to what looks like an empty stadium.
(The audience are chanting 'Wonder Girls', by the way: the name of SNSD's main competition. Brutal.)
Blackpink seem interested in getting away from that expectation. “We always wanted to be out there, to be more true to ourselves and a little more free,” Jennie told Billboard earlier this year. “Even we can get things wrong sometimes. We want to just show them the real us.”
K-Pop idols are known for often being very fluid as to how many creative projects they have on the go: bands like After School, for example, where members ‘graduate’ and new ones enter, also features sub-groups Orange Caramel and A.S. Red & Blue. Girls Generation, LOONA and other big bands also have sub-groups and solo careers. Blackpink is no different: though they’re still going strong, Jennie has also released her first single as a solo artist. It’s sort of like the Avengers all having their own movies: a way of maintaining the brand without over-working the main unit.
Songs and albums
Like most K-Pop bands, Blackpink had a debut performance of a debut single which was the litmus test over whether they would be a bop or a flop. That single, Boombayah, is a personal favourite: it’s probably the most dynamic and poppy of their universally dynamic and poppy music, not dropping into anything sultry or slow. It’s also got a great dance routine (part of the fun of K-Pop) and the video became the fastest debut music video of a K-Pop act to reach 100 million views on YouTube.
Their 2018 single 'Ddu-Du Ddu-Du' is the highest-charting K-Pop single in the US Billboard charts, and is a bit more sexy and vicious. New single, ‘Kill This Love’, continues a very similar vibe: lots of horns, easier to grind to than throw shapes to.
It’s interesting to hear how the most successful parts of western pop music have been absorbed and fused with East Asia’s own highly successful, high octane pop industry: their songs always feature rap, but their choruses are often sounds rather than words (‘ddu-du ddu-du’, for example, is effectively onamatopeia for a machine gun bullet round) so anyone can sing along.
When it comes to albums, Blackpink have so far released two EPs: Square Up in 2018, and Kill This Love in 2019. In Japan they released an EP Blackpink and a studio album Blackpink in your area. A lot of songs overlap between these various releases, but your safest bet to get the whole is to listen to Blackpink in your area.
Live performances
As mentioned before, choreography is a huge part of what Blackpink do: K-Pop bands are known for their specific, tight group dance routines that are the same every time they perform the song that it goes along with, and the bands tend to release rehearsal footage on their YouTube channels so people can learn the dance too. It’s also rare to watch people cover the songs without the expectation being they also do the routine alongside. It’s hard to stress how popular these routines and the choreography videos are: within two days, the ‘Kill This Love’ choreo video had over 14m views.
Generally, the songs work to give each of the members a part that shows off their talents as rappers, singers and/or dancers. Though the band don’t have writing credits on their songs, they do have an input into their material, including making sure each of them gets the best part for them. Any performance will give you a good idea of what each brings to the table, though perhaps ‘BOOMBAYAH’ will do this most comprehensively: it was, after all, their first outing.
The videos
If you’ve never seen a K-Pop video, you’re in for a bloody treat. Whether it’s the crispness of SHINee’s ‘1 of 1’ (don’t watch if you don’t want to buy a suit after watching) or the stern, sassy dance video to CL’s ‘Hello Bitches’ (choreographed by Parris Goebel, who also did Justin Bieber’s ‘Sorry’ and Ciara’s ‘Level Up’) they are real production numbers.
Blackpink are no exception, though even in a few short years the vision of their videos has grown a lot: while the video for Boombayah serves you early 00s Rihanna, or even Britney and Madonna’s ‘Me Against The Music’, 'Kill This Love' is just a huge camp treat that sits somewhere between ‘Bad Romance’, ‘Bitch I’m Madonna’ and the Pussycat Dolls’ ‘Don’t Cha’. It also contains the classic turn-of-the-millennium image of a woman crying while driving a car, a trope I’m glad to see the return of.
Who should I listen to next if I love Blackpink?
Take the plunge into K-Pop! It's a vast and varied world, but there are lots of brilliant girlbands who will bring something new to the table for you. Spotify has a lot of phenomenally good playlists to delve into it, so just listen to a few songs and see what it is you like and work from there.
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