Blackpink: Light Up the Sky

[osprey_archer]

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.

Comments

[littlerhymes]

That was one thing I found really fascinating in kpop vs western pop, that the apparatus and the machinery is so transparent. Whereas in western pop they often try to cling to the feel-good origin stories that are like "these are just five guys who are really good friends and liked singing together" LOL.

[osprey_archer]

The foundational myth of western boybands seems to be that they are all the Beatles, who came together organically and just naturally clicked and THEN they found a manager and the music industry got involved etc. I think there's a fear that if fans saw the machinery putting the groups together, they would turn away in disgust... and to a certain extent I think that's true (I remember I felt crushed when I learned the A*Teens had not come together organically, but were cynically formed into a band by money-grubbing music industry tycoons!), but it's a danger the western music industry has basically created for itself by fomenting the whole storyline of "oh they're just a bunch of friends who were discovered when an agent just happened to be walking by as they rocked out in their garage."

[littlerhymes]

I can understand the appeal of both having been in both western and kpop fandoms. Like, the appeal of the homespun garage band childhood friends narrative vs the these are the ones who stuck it out and were chosen to be the best fit with each other. In kpop there's a lot of very popular survival tv shows which directly build on that idea of whittling down a big group of trainees to the best/most popular ones who get to form the group. Which is also similar to how One Direction was formed - a bunch of reality tv wannabes who had never met before they were lumped together by a manager - so the narrative can work in western fandom too.

[calandrahunter]

Yeah, we've seen One Direction and Little Mix and so on get put together, and there you get the competitive aspect of One Direction against other groups and solo singers, and obviously plenty behind the scenes stuff of how well the lads are all getting along!

[littlerhymes]

The behind the scenes stuff is the crucial stuff, you can form the band any which way as long as you can convince us afterwards that it's a happy family!

[osprey_archer]

They may have met through their manager, but NOW they are all fast friends until death, by God! Certainly not coworkers thrown together by circumstance who might or might not like each other.

[calandrahunter]

There are several rules for the boys in a boyband, as per Take That's 2006 performance that's part pisstake and part catharsis, "they must never become to close to one another, they must never become real friends" is one of them! Keep up those pretences, lads, and sacrifice that privacy!