What The Hell America!

Most singles by the bittersweet K-pop girl group BLACKPINK begin with the same catchphrase, a notice that the crew is “in your area.” Dreamt up by producer Teddy Park, the tagline turned battle cry announces what the group and its stakeholders are after: new turf. K-pop music has always been about soft power, but the it girls of the Korean talent megalith YG Entertainment can feel like the ultimate dividends of those efforts, a diasporic force engineered to feel cosmopolitan. (As member Rosé put it in 2019, “Wherever you are, we are.”) Certifying that transnational appeal, the last BLACKPINK album, 2022’s Born Pink, was decorated with firsts: first girl group to sell a million records in a week in South Korea, and first K-pop girl group to debut at No. 1 in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. These days, however, expanding that sphere of influence means dividing and conquering. When the members’ contracts with YG were due to expire in 2023, their resignation was conditional: They would return to the company as a group, but be free to go elsewhere as soloists. There would be another BLACKPINK album and massive world tour — but not before they flooded the zone one by one.

Since December, the four members of BLACKPINK — Rosé, Jisoo, Lisa and Jennie — have all launched solo projects, performed primarily in English. As one of the first K-pop acts to cross the threshold in America, the group has always had a knack for communing with English-speaking audiences, a tactic the rest of the industry has been trending toward of late. The group’s music is possessed by a pyrotechnic splendor, walking a fine line between garish and chic. As with BTS, the songs take a hip-hop-forward approach, using rap as a cultural shorthand and decoder (before he was their producer, Teddy Park was in YG’s first-gen K-pop rap crew 1TYM). But the BLACKPINK signature is its crossbred feel, a K-pop hive mind formed across four nations into an amalgamation of adaptable diva swagger, then blown up to include neon EDM and siren synth-pop. Even when soft, they’d never go quietly.

The solo records they have released find them each navigating a full-scale sector shift from K-pop to major-label pop — and, perhaps just as importantly, a perspective shift from collective to individual. The title of Rosé’s debut album, Rosie, taken from the nickname used by those nearest to the singer, hints at an up-close vulnerability. Lisa’s Alter Ego sits at the opposite end of the same spectrum: Across its 15 tracks, she slinks in and out of five different characters, each serving as part of a personality mosaic. Jennie’s Ruby rests somewhere between: Named for the alter ego she created when she moved to New Zealand to learn English, it nods to a dissociating determination. Jisoo’s Amortage, the one EP of the bunch, is significantly balder in its narrative presentation, with a press release claiming the project marks the “rebirth of the global superstar.”

Global superstardom is clearly still on the agenda for all four. The thing about the pop sphere is that there is always more of it left to annex, and they became K-pop idols performing a wide-ranging maximalism. But ironically, their respective plays for world domination feature inward-looking turns — or, at least, so the members claim. In discussing their albums with the press, they all speak of getting in touch with themselves outside the YG facilities for the first time. “I wanted Rosie to portray what I live and breathe,” Rosé said in an interview with i-D in November. “I feel like BLACKPINK was my alter ego — I grew up watching Beyoncé performances, when it would take, like, two hours to load videos on YouTube. I’m obsessed with that, and I’m so grateful because I’ve been able to live that life for almost a decade, and it still is the best thing. But then Rosie, on the other hand, would be the girl who was downloading it at home. This is all me.” “The greatest part of this solo project for me was that I had time with myself,” Jennie told Zane Lowe. “I really got to dig deep inside of who I am and what I am.” A day later, a conversation with The Wall Street Journal put a finer point on the function of Lisa’s embrace of persona. “The alter ego, it’s just me,” she said. “Everything, it’s just me.”

The subtext isn’t exactly subtle. Free from the groupthink of the BLACKPINK operation, they all suddenly happened into musical self-actualization; going it alone, they suggest, has led them to artistry that truly reflects who they are individually, beyond the stardom. They are careful not to denounce the structure that made them stars in the first place, but yearn not to be defined by it any longer. If there is an outlier in that respect it is Jisoo, the member of BLACKPINK born and raised in South Korea, who has spoken of her solo debut more like a well-oiled theatrical machine, harnessing her likeness for daring feats of pop LARPing. “I always consider the overall harmony of the image, choreography, outfits, and concept when selecting music because I perform along with it,” she told NYLON, perhaps being honest to a fault. “If I only chose songs based on my personal preference, I might not be able to showcase a wider range of performances. That’s why I select music that creates synergy with the overall presentation, allowing me to show my best self.”

The “best self” is the K-pop ideal, often sanitized to a point of impenetrability, and the U.S.-focused press junkets for these releases have provided rare insight into how being a K-pop idol can mess with a young person. “We were trained to always present ourselves in the most perfect, perfect way,” Rosé told The New York Times. “And so even when we were interacting with fans online, it was when I was ready to give perfect answers and give them what they wanted.” In this sense, it can feel like performing in English, for Western audiences, is part of two processes — release from the strictures of the world they know as a group, and an opportunity to speak their minds for the first time. To be clear, the shadow of the K-pop machine appears to loom nonetheless: When asked in the i-D interview to comment on the group NewJeans‘ battle with its label, HYBE, Rosé declined, circling the question to provide the kind of bipartisan nonanswer of someone media trained. But what’s more interesting is what the artists have each chosen to do with the opportunity to present themselves to the wider world.

It is impossible to talk about this spate of releases without first considering their stateside focus, the underlying but obvious aspiration to break away from the K-pop industry and what doing so symbolically represents. Each member signed to an American major (Rosé to Atlantic, Jisoo to Warner, Lisa to RCA, Jennie to Columbia) with reinvention in mind, pursuing the cross-market multi-hyphenate status bestowed beneath the Hollywood banner. Various industry professionals with “global” in their title helped them into what RCA COO John Fleckenstein referred to as a new pop architecture, different and disengaged from the one they are used to. Despite BLACKPINK’s success on Spotify and the Billboard 200, they’d never broken into the Top 10 of the Hot 100, as a unit or individually, until Rosé’s Bruno Mars collab “APT.” in October, signaling that they haven’t quite taken middle America yet.

Assimilating into a new power structure hasn’t come without friction. “It’s been a long process because American artists, they usually take a few years to make one album, but we have time limitations because [this year] she’s got to go back into BLACKPINK activities again,” Alison Chang, head of global business for Jennie’s Odd Atelier, told Billboard. There is a noticeable predisposition to keep the brand top of mind, which leads to some cognitive dissonance: One cannot gain distinctiveness without sacrificing some universality. American pop stars have the benefit of building their personas bottom-up, through a careful evolutionary arc across which they grow as an artist alongside their mounting fanbase. Building something top-down, or purely on the basis of an existing, largely featureless popularity, is trickier.

Of the four projects, Jisoo’s Amortage feels the most like a traditional K-pop release: vaguely conceptual, polychromatic dance-pop putting presentation and uniformity before selfhood. It is the shortest of the four, and yet has the most Korean lyrics of them all. It also is one of the better of the bunch, perhaps because it is least beholden to the BLACKPINK aesthetic. The songs that defined the group’s sound were assembled around sass-weaponizing, rap-inflected prima pop, prickly and clamorous (“Kill This Love,” “How You Like That,” “BOOMBAYAH“) or melodramatically gaudy (“Pink Venom,” “Shut Down,” “Typa Girl“) with pop rock (“Lovesick Girls,” “Yeah Yeah Yeah,” “Don’t Know What to Do“) as a counterpoint, the loose black-versus-pink dichotomy at work. Amortage, by comparison, is posh and buoyant, in keeping with her two previously released solo songs, drawing a line in the sand between group and solo without shunting the formula. Jisoo is not attempting to break away: The whole endeavor is low-stakes, a franchise for a chain.

On the surface, Rosie is the most intimate in its presentation, collecting softer sounds as if arranging them in a scrapbook. In interviews, Rosé has presented as a forthcoming, sympathetic charmer, a regular girl suddenly swept up into a pop star fantasy like The Lizzie McGuire Movie — and she’s described this album as a little journal, written from inside conversations with people that actually know her. Yet for all her talk of bringing fans in close, the music on offer feels distinctly practiced, as if she has been rehearsing to be candid. Granted some distance from the BLACKPINK ruckus, Rosé shows herself to be a Taylor Swift acolyte, preoccupied with doomed romances and their tortured poetics, with 1989 and Lover as sonic touchstones. But Taylor has always been detail-oriented — something her most astute students, Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter, adapted for their unique voices. The lyrics that build out Rosie, by contrast, could be authored by anyone, for anyone. They lack in-the-room ambience, and Rosé gives little of herself in performing them. “I can’t stand these four walls without you inside them,” she sings on the prim ballad “stay a little longer,” but there is no sense of what her life there looks like, the shape of the shadows cast or the particular tension between the “you” and the “I.” The record asks, “What is this girl if not a star?” and leaves you without an answer.

Despite occupying an entirely different sonic universe, Alter Ego has a similar problem. In the months leading up to its release, Lisa talked about the album as an opportunity to spread her wings in ways that her role in the group wouldn’t allow. “In BLACKPINK, I’m a rapper, so I always rap,” she told Billboard. “But now it’s a chance for me to show the world that I’m capable of [so much more].” There is some variation between the role Lisa plays in BLACKPINK and her mission here, but “more” may not be the word. All of the alter egos seem to seem to cohere around a one-dimensional caricature of high-octane fantasy — which could be interesting if her manifestation of a rush-filled luxury life weren’t so lacking, especially for someone linked romantically with LVMH heir Frédéric Arnault. She’d be the first to admit she isn’t really a singer, and in English, without home-field advantage, she’s a second-rate rapper compared to, say, Doja Cat. A constraint a lot of K-pop has is that it must be experienced through multimedia, turning the music itself into a component of a broader exhibition — and it’s easy to imagine Alter Ego gelling better in that context. Without that extramusical supplement, the music feels scattered and the characters quickly flatten. Lisa is a born performer onstage or before the camera, but within the confines of her songs, she shrinks.

There is a startling contrast between Alter Ego and Jennie’s Ruby. Both are albums by rappers about celebrity, but where one feels generic, unwilling to say anything interesting about how it feels to be in the limelight, the other feels customized, carefully curated and wielded like a stiletto red-bottom heel to the jugular. And unlike Rosie, which runs from BLACKPINK’s outsized influence, Ruby leans all the way in, the persona larger than life and blasé. The top-down cruiser “Mantra” and industrial romp “like JENNIE” set her up as a debutante — new to you, maybe, but certified by those in the know — and on “with the IE (way up),” she cheekily waves off anyone trying to block her glow: “Target on my name / But your aim’s way off / Why are you evaluating me on your day off?” Throughout, we see Jennie clearly, a savvy negotiator of multicultural cool with a take-no-prisoners mentality, fed up with leering eyes and the incessant bulb flashes but refusing to let disapproval harsh her vibe. “Money can’t buy sixth sense,” she snaps on “ZEN” before declaring supremacy: “Baddest, they can’t make me badder / Fire aura quiets chatter.”

The command she injects into the lyrics is only reaffirmed by the creative decisions that surround them. In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Jennie keenly noted the gap between BLACKPINK’s performance of rap and the real thing, saying, “Maybe if the really cool rappers in America, who do ‘real hip-hop,’ look at us, it can seem a little like kids doing things.” As if to counter that perception in her first American outing, the singer and rapper enlists Compton’s K-pop connect Dem Jointz and producer Mike WiLL Made-It and his in-house EarDrummers team for over half the album’s songs, giving much of it a distinct flavor. There is something choice about the collabs, too — Doechii riding a hot streak, alt-rap singer-songwriter Dominic Fike, Donald Glover dusting off the Gambino suit and supreme auteur Kali Uchis. It all feels carefully mapped out, not just for a reintroduction, but for placing Ruby in the context of BLACKPINK amid transformation. It sounds like emerging from the cocoon fully formed and ready to thrive in a new ecosystem.

As Jisoo suggested, synergy is the best word to describe what the K-pop trainee system produces at its apex; attempting to unlearn it must come with growing pains. That seems to be exactly what most of the BLACKPINK soloists are seeking: freedom from a precisely manicured collective identity, in exchange for a messier one they can claim for themselves. But that exchange can land you in a paradox. Your “best self” isn’t always your most authentic self, especially when you are a pop star, and putting yourself out there for real requires risk. This is the uphill battle all of these releases face — not just breaking off from the group or extending its jurisdiction, but balancing a desire to be more sincere with a need to preserve the trademark. In managing the weight of those responsibilities, you can often hear the music pulling itself apart, the artist emerging from camouflage of the crowd to inadvertently expose the limitations of their identity.

Ruby is instructive for how to manage this kind of transition. It feels true to the brand Jennie established as a BLACKPINK member, while also sketching a complementary future. It never abandons flamboyant K-pop energy in its search for an integrating makeover. And the album is the only one of the releases to make a case for itself as a standalone project, a reminder that being famous isn’t enough of a reason to make and release a pop album; you must also have a point of view, and something worth saying. Listening to the lot, I kept thinking about “BLACKPINK in your area,” the insistence of it, imagining it not as a tagline but a warning sounding off, advanced notice of an incoming invasion. Now that they are undoubtedly here — Rosie debuted at No. 3, Alter Ego and Ruby at No. 7 — it’s worth asking if there is more to this than taking up space. Proving that you are more than what the system made you starts with knowing who you are without it.