osprey_archer | Blackpink: Light Up the Sky

Blackpink: Light Up the Sky is a documentary about the extremely popular K-pop girl group Blackpink, which I watched on a whim and found unexpectedly fascinating for the glimpse that it offered into the K-pop industry and the way that South Korean record labels prepare prospective stars for stardom.

The big labels put prospective stars through intensive training programs: all four members of Blackpink had at least five years of training, fourteen hours a day, with one day off every two weeks. (Just thinking about it makes me want to lie down on the floor and die of exhaustion.) Their label originally envisioned a larger group, but eventually decided that the four girls who became Blackpink had the best dynamic and cut the others loose. (

littlerhymes tells me that at least one of those performers ended up in another girl group with a different label.)

It occurred to me that I don’t know anything, really, about the analogous process in the US. I’ve always vaguely believed that pop stars just appear, like Venus rising from the sea - doubtless because the US pop star machine works hard to make me believe it. It was fascinating to see a documentary about a pop group that bluntly acknowledges the label’s overriding influence: they trained the girls, picked the group, and shaped their images as they sent them out to debut.