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(CNN Spanish) --
BLACKPINK does not stop causing a furor: the K-pop band has had a meteoric rise since its debut in 2016 and this year it pushes new boundaries with the leading participation it will have at Coachella and the "Born Pink" tour that will bring it to Latin America.
Here, the keys to understanding one of the musical phenomena of the year.
At the origin of BLACKPINK is the powerful South Korean record label YG Entertainment, which evaluates artists in search of potential stars and trains them intensively.
This is what happened with the quartet made up of Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rosé, who since their debut in 2016 have made their way with a force reminiscent of BTS.
They have their "ARMY" of fans and they have their "Blinks", who are looking forward to the show scheduled for April in Mexico.
From South Korea, but with cosmopolitan origin
Part of the group's worldwide success is due to its cosmopolitan origins.
The New Zealand-born, Australian-raised singer Rosé said in an interview with Time in 2022 — when the magazine named them artist of the year — that it's an "advantage" in the studio that they're all from "different cultures." .
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Jennie was born in South Korea but grew up in New Zealand, while dancer Lisa is from Thailand.
Singer Jisoo is the only one of the group born and raised in South Korea.
K-pop band Blackpink is named artist of the year 2022 1:10
'Super women'
In the recent
Time
report , the young women reviewed their career.
"We work really hard to be able to look like superwomen," rapper Jennie said.
"At the end of the day we are very normal girls."
Speaking of their success — and the pressures that come with it — Jennie said the group acts from the heart.
"If we were looking at this from a business standpoint, we couldn't do it," she said.
Last year, the band spoke in an interview with Rolling Stone about their participation in the process for creating music.
“We don't just get a finished song,” Jisoo says.
"We were involved from the very beginning, building the blocks, adding this or that sentiment, exchanging opinions... and this process of creation makes me proud of our music. If we only received pre-made songs, it would feel like a mechanical thing. I feel more love for the process, because we're like, 'How about we add this into the lyrics? How about we add this movement into the choreography?'"
The documentary 'Blackpink: Light Up the Sky' allows us to delve into the career of the four young women and the sacrifices they have made to reach the top: the training sessions planned by YG Entertainment begin in the early adolescence of the future stars, who eventually they get to have a day off every two weeks.
(Courtesy of YG/Netflix)
And although in the film the young women express their enthusiasm for what they do, they also reflect on the losses of a life that is full on stage, but can have a hint of emptiness when the lights go out.
A record breaking machine
Since their debut in 2016, BLACKPINK has not stopped breaking records, leaving artists as popular as Justin Bieber behind.
One of his first big achievements came in 2018, when he reached several top spots on the HOT 100, Billboard 200 and Emerging Artists charts, all three of Billboard.
Since then she has been on the charts repeatedly ("Ice Cream," a collaboration with Selena, stayed eight weeks on the chart.
A year later, when they already had the record for the most viewed video by a K-pop group on YouTube, the band achieved what was, in 2019, the biggest debut of a video on the platform: in one day it arrived. to 56.7 million views.
That year, their popularity on the platform reached such a point that they achieved the first video by a K-pop group with 1 billion views.
It was about the song "Ddu-Du Ddu-Du", published in 2018.
2019 was also a year to remember for BLACKPINK, because it was their Coachella debut.
A year later three Guinness World Records arrived thanks to the video for "How You Like That", which dethroned the male group BTS.
Records were followed by awards: in 2020 they became the first K-pop women to win an MTV Video Music Award.
A year later, they became the most subscribed artist on YouTube, surpassing Justin Bieber with 65.5 million followers.
By 2022 the band reached 75 million.
It seems that nobody is left out of orbit: in March the tennis player Roger Federer published a photo with the quartet in Paris and, just as his children foresaw, it became a success.
He got more than a million likes.
How K-pop made its way into the West
BLACKPINK's success is not an isolated case: the band adds to a list of South Korean cultural products that have made their way and in which BTS stands out in the musical field and series and films such as "The Squid Game" and "Parasite" in the audiovisual.
Jung-Sun Park, a professor and coordinator of Asia-Pacific studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills, said that social media and the internet have "totally transformed the transnational flows of pop culture."
"The various social media platforms have revolutionized the ways that people find and consume pop culture and have greatly diversified the routes of pop culture flows and influences," he told CNN. In the past, media platforms Traditional networks like radio and television stations have controlled what we see and hear.
East Asian pop culture also offers something else: diversity.
Susanna Lim, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Oregon, told CNN that Western fans are demanding more diversity than in the past.
She points precisely to K-pop lovers as an example, noting that many come from diverse backgrounds and may also feel marginalized by mainstream American culture.
"The growing interest in East Asian pop culture reflects these changing demographics and cultural awareness in the US and the West," he said. K-pop is full of Western influences, so it can be both familiar and unfamiliar to the public. Western public, Lim added.
A guide to listening to BLACKPINK
If you are not one of his millions of monthly listeners on Spotify, we leave you here the list of his most popular songs so that you can get to know them.
With reporting from CNN's Hafsa Khalil, Marianne Garvey, Brian Lowry, Leah Asmelash, Julia Hollingsworth, Mario González and Issy Ronald.
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