BlackPink's Rose: How a joke turned into K-pop stardom for an Australian singer

I spent many months sending emails back and forth to K-pop agency YG Entertainment in South Korea - after I'd first sent an email to their US PR - to try and organise an interview with the Australian member of their four-piece girl group BlackPink. People often say it's difficult to get interviews with K-pop stars: I think this implies that they are hard to get; a better word is "laborious". You can get them, you just need to be tenacious. The next issue is what kind of interview will it be? Questions are vetted and answers are often censored, as I mentioned, when this story was published in Fairfax's Sun Herald (Sydney) and The Age (Melbourne).

Rose's answers still gave an insight into the rigours of South Korea's training system:

Within two months of passing the audition, the 16-year-old was on a plane to Seoul to begin training at YG Entertainment, one of Korea's "big three" music companies.
It was a busy schedule: she had lessons for vocals, dance, guitar and Japanese and Korean languages. Throughout her four years of training, the group had to constantly prove themselves to the label's boss, Yang Hyun-Suk, known as YG: "We would have these tests at the end of every month with YG and we would prepare a dance and song performance as a group and individually."

Read the full story at Fairfax.

First published in Fairfax Media on June 30, 2017