Blackpink: Multicolored pop to sweeten a stadium

The encores were about to begin after about two hours of concert, and the activity continued. It wasn't about clapping and shouting to request the band's return to the stage, but rather acting as a Korean audience member, being active and guided. A dozen songs, most of which had been performed on stage, were played again in fragments only for the cameras to capture how the audience choreographed them, mimicking the movements of their stars. No more enraptured couples and people smiling, or not, when they were captured; everyone was swaying and waggling in support of the project.

This is what it means to be a Blackpink fan, almost a form of activism that the public gladly embraces, shaping the K-pop phenomenon, a well-thought-out strategy that filled Barcelona's Olympic Stadium with 51,000 people on Saturday night, one of the few European dates the quartet has offered during its world tour. And the triumph, one imagines, lived up to expectations.

The craze erupted from the start, even before the show began. Fans were already equipped for the choreography, carrying pink and black hammers with heads topped with illuminated hearts that would brighten the stadium. Coldplay were candid, spending money on wristbands for the same purpose, while Blackpink, or YG Entertainment , the company that owns the group, had already earned the 50 euros, or 75 if purchased at the venue, that almost everyone brandished for the group's token of support.

If the fan is essential in Western pop, in Korean pop, it's nuclear, and the fan is the destiny of the constant repetition of songs. Before the concert, a collection of the group's hits was played, a gesture not seen in Western concerts, where the protagonist's music isn't played until the artist performs it on stage. Everything is planned, everything is under control, no detail is left to chance, and success, whether it's record sales, commercial symbolism, or concert tickets, is the result of many calculations and a huge amount of work training these stars in strict music academies where aspirants do nothing without permission. Nor afterward. It's like a cross between Motown and a talent academy with military discipline, but Asian, with control over all business areas. About three years of training and ongoing evaluation before presenting the product to the public.

Blackpink's performance was tailored to that of a product successfully tested in a global market. From start to finish, the show functioned as a mechanism in which pop music, based on hip-hop, dance derivatives, and spaces for ballads—the first, very sweet ones, by singer Jisoo—formed a syncretic sound base that drove the songs to evolve. Thus, "Kill This Love ," the concert's first song, had a hip-hop aftertaste but then opened into a conventional ballad, while "Jump ," the last single played no less than four times during the concert, had an electronic, rave-like aftertaste with hip-hop overtones and a pop punchline. A multitude of styles, frequent melodic variations in each song, and four stars to offer the audience different models of emulation and/or identification. There was plenty to choose from. And they always conveyed the feeling that if they don't like what's there, there could be something else: if there's demand, it will be met. It was easy to think that there were more customers in the stadium than spectators.

The concert, divided into five acts, allowed us to see the four stars both separately—progressing in their solo careers, testing the future—and together, displaying an air somewhere between naive and mischievous, reinforced by Jisoo's childlike appearance, the closest to a cheesy ballad; Lisa, more daring and dominant; Jennie, who with Like Jennie had the stadium in stitches; and Rosé, wearing a Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt and the song APT , on album with Bruno Mars, which the audience kept singing along with her offstage. The power of virality. Normative bodies adjusted to the canons of Korean beauty, choreographies that were precise but not original, the use of Korean in some pieces, American visual imagery (Las Vegas, desert, cars), specific color settings for each of the singers, and the temperament of almost shy schoolgirls when greeting the crowd after the third song, How You Like That . Live sound, although there were reinforced voices and pre-recorded choirs, but musicians were hidden behind the mega-screen and were introduced.

What was perhaps not predictable was the show 's halting rhythm, which featured interludes ad nauseam featuring the four stars pouting at a gas station or posing with dubious innocence. Even the audience's pressure was lessened in those minutes of video that sought to preserve individuality and create an aesthetic to emulate, a model to follow, a way of life, a visual paradigm, something to spend money on. The show itself wasn't exactly original either, but more than ever, the subject, the four singers, were the only important thing, the beginning and end of everything, the driving force behind the final explosion with songs like "Boombayah , " "DDU-DU DDU-DU ," "As If It's Your Last ," and, once again, " Jump ." And they, almost at the end, were acting like ordinary girls taking a selfie with the stadium backdrop speckled pink by the hammers the audience moved from start to finish, a symbol of their support for the pink and black cause.

It's been done before, from the days of The Monkees to the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys. Prosecuted groups are nothing new, but while they were previously generally the initiative of professionals linked to music, now entertainment companies with divisions in all areas of the entertainment world are feeding our sonic and visual imagination and promoting K-pop, even with government support, to create the soundtrack of the global future. The K-pop scene at the Olympic Stadium met a very diverse audience in terms of social and geographical origin—a large number of Asians. They are united by the cult of the new pop, a multi-colored candy in multiple formats to escape from tin-tinted times. Corporate music groups and national presidents who are businessmen are now in power.