“This. Is. The best night of my life.” A big call at the age of eight, but given how much my younger daughter enjoyed watching Blackpink become the first Korean band to headline a major UK festival, she might yet be right.
She screamed – really screamed – from the moment the all-female K-pop quartet rose up through the stage at BST in London’s Hyde Park and didn’t really stop until they waved goodbye 90 minutes later. All around us, 65,000 people including many more of primary school age were doing likewise.
They were, like both my daughters (the other is 10), Blinks. For the uninitiated, that’s the widely-used term for fans of Blackpink. In the past 18 months or so, their rap and EDM-infused pop has dominated our kitchen discos, and has routinely been heard seeping through bedroom walls.
I’d never fully grasped the appeal, but when I told my daughters we were going to Hyde Park, the eight-year-old literally cried with excitement. The 10-year-old is a tween and thus played it cooler, but that façade didn’t last long once Jennie, Lisa, Jisoo and Rosé began busting out their high energy tunes and higher energy dance moves.
“Lisa; LIIIISSSSAAAA!” the younger one bellowed into my ear from her perch atop my shoulders as the band kicked off their set with “Pink Venom” followed by the bombastic “How You Like That”. Thai-born rapper Lisa (real name Lalisa Manobal) is, in the parlance of K-pop, her “bias” (favourite).
I’d wondered whether the big crowds and inevitably obscured view of this heroine would make the gig something of a letdown for my girls, who’ve spent many an hour watching Blackpink perform online. Yet setting real life eyes on these women, the first music idols of their young lives, was apparently as intoxicating as my first audience with (ahem) Take That – by coincidence the previous night’s Hyde Park headliners – 29 years ago. It was hard not to be swept along.
Blackpink might be less well known to big chunks of the UK population than Gary Barlow et al. Yet since their 2016 debut “Whistle” they have become megastars, and here they put on a slick show with all the semi-naked dancers, lighting effects and confetti cannons which befit their status as the world’s most-followed band on YouTube.
Although they are in illustrious company headlining one of this year’s BST gigs – alongside the aforementioned Take That, Pink, Guns ‘N’ Roses and Bruce Springsteen – Blackpink are by a number of metrics the biggest star turn of the lot. As well as their 89.7 million YouTube subscribers they are the most streamed girl group in the world on Spotify, scored a number one UK album with Born Pink plus a Brit Award nomination this January, and in April became the first Asian band to headline California’s Coachella festival.
With South Korean boyband megastars BTS currently on a break it is Blackpink who are currently driving the global K-pop juggernaut, and they are doing so in some style. Here, they sandwiched a middle section during which each of the four band members showcased their solo offerings (Korean-New Zealander member Rosé’s “On the Ground” came out top here) between two tightly-produced blocks of Blackpink hits. The second of these sections kicked off with the ultra-catchy “Boombayah”, in which the band switched seamlessly between Korean and English in trademark fashion.
It also included the more risqué “Tally”. This track, a paean to sexual freedom – a boundary-pusher for the glossy world of K-pop – was one I hadn’t heard much before this gig thanks to our Alexa smart speaker’s explicit filter. It made me wonder. There are a substantial number of F-bombs here, and the explicit, English-language lyrics were helpfully projected onto a mile-high screen behind the stage. As my girls merrily sang along I mused about whether I’d be as relaxed about their arguably premature obsession with mildly sweary, scantily-clad singers if it weren’t for K-pop being a world about which I know so little.
So why is it that British primary school children like mine are so on board with K-pop in general and Blackpink in particular? Partly, there is a formidable machine behind this group, who were signed by South Korean agency YG after six years of intensive bootcamp. In addition to wildly popular social platforms there’s a Disney+ concert movie and a Netflix documentary, and a back catalogue peppered with high profile collaborations including Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa.
There’s also a kind of structure to Blink-dom and indeed K-pop in general which seemingly appeals to the young. It includes a shared language – Who is your bias? Who is the “visual” (read: most conventionally attractive) member of a given band? Who is the “maknae” (youngest)? – which provides an intoxicating sense of being in the know.
But there’s also the simple fact that Blackpink have some great tunes. What’s more, they have a real presence about them performing live that doesn’t quite come across on record and, despite being a carefully constructed product as a band, also a sense of four distinct personalities.
Notwithstanding the raunch, it was striking that there was a genuine sense of family among the diverse crowd in Hyde Park. Strangers helped lift my girls to get a better view and smiled warmly as they belted out their best phonetic efforts at Korean lyrics, the meaning of which they have no clue about. Before I knew it, I was joining in. I haven’t picked my bias yet but I’ll gladly admit it: I’m now a fully paid-up Blink too.
