{"id":31275,"date":"2025-07-29T07:11:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T07:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/31275\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T07:11:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T07:11:09","slug":"blackpink-review-k-pop-queens-bring-fun-to-new-york-with-a-little-fatigue-on-the-side-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/31275\/","title":{"rendered":"Blackpink review \u2013 K-pop queens bring fun to New York with a little fatigue on the side | Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2023, the four women of Blackpink \u2013 Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Ros\u00e9 \u2013 stood on top of the world. In the seven years since their 2016 debut, the K-pop quartet became the biggest girl group of all time, off the back of delirious hooks, hard-ass stunting, cut-glass choreography and relentless work. With billions of streams, sold-out stadiums and YouTube viewership records in their wake, the group became the female face of the boundary-annihilating force that is K-pop<\/a>, taking pandemonium and hype as its calling card; with the exception of their slender physiques, everything about the band was huge. Their 2023 headliner set at Coachella \u2013 the first Asian and all-female group to headline one of North America\u2019s largest music festivals \u2013 served as a jet-fueled exclamation point<\/a> on global domination. I stood in the crowd that night feeling like I\u2019d been leveled by a sonic boom, in the best way.<\/p>\n

Much has changed in the two short years since then. The band went on unofficial hiatus for each member\u2019s respective solo careers, and the four subsequent releases \u2013 Jennie\u2019s Ruby, Jisoo\u2019s Amortage, Lisa\u2019s Alter Ego<\/a> and Ros\u00e9\u2019s Rosie \u2013 all attempted to escape the Blackpink shadow with halting success; the group\u2019s two rappers, Lisa and Jennie, also launched English-language acting careers on HBO, in The White Lotus and The Idol, and returned to Coachella as solo acts with plenty of bombast but less horsepower. The once ascendant wave of K-pop, buoyed up by the massive crossover success of Blackpink and all-male peers BTS, stalled out abroad and lost traction at home<\/a>, global ambition and misfiring albums costing musical identity and momentum.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The pop banger remains, however, a universal, enduring language, and at New York\u2019s Citi Field on Sunday night, Blackpink flexed their mastery of the genre with a tour of their energy drink-style hits \u2013 unabashedly manufactured, relentlessly upbeat, the highs jagged, aggressive and borderline hallucinatory. Just two years after their last world tour, Blackpink is back for what is billed as a reunion, with the band in a precarious if still victorious position; the last North American stop of their Deadline World Tour (is the deadline age? Solo success? Fleeting consumer attention?), at a stadium in one of the largest Asian American communities in the US, is an undeniable celebration, a spectacular if familiar show of force.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also evidence of the wandering focus of a band now comfortably at the top; despite the alleged urgency of the deadline, the 2.5-hour show is more slack than Blackpink standard, the girls still stunting but no longer out for the kill. (With the exception of Lisa, the group\u2019s hardest member by far, who remains lethal, her dancing never less than crisp.) Numerous times during the group\u2019s typically maximalist set \u2013 three acts and an encore, spliced with two-to-three-song solo diversions for each member \u2013 I caught the look of fatigue on their faces. A drop of the elbow here or a slip of the mean mug there, though quickly smothered by the pyrotechnics, army of industrial backup dancers, lasers, general swirl of stadium sound and camera work that largely denied the pleasure of seeing all four in formation, in favor of one or two singers at a time.<\/p>\n

And fair enough \u2013 the New York July night was so oppressively humid that I was dripping in sweat just standing there; after the head-banging bombast of Boombayah, all four were forced to acknowledge the air\u2019s palpable resistance to any movement, or as de facto spokesperson Ros\u00e9 put it: \u201cIt is REALLY hot today.\u201d The goodwill of faithful Blinks \u2013 fittingly for the band, a stadium of many languages, diehard adults next to awed children with merch-toting parents in tow \u2013 largely covered for any lapses, and was rewarded with high-octane delights. New single Jump, making the girl power lineage explicit \u2013 \u201cSo come up with me, I\u2019ll take you high \/ That prima donna, spice up your life\u201d \u2013 layered itchy club beat, weapons-grade bass and tweaking choreography with lasers, fireworks and smoke for a full dose of undiluted, undeniable hype that got the crowd up. At their best, the siren call of \u201cBlackpink in your areaaaaaa\u201d remains as potent as ever.<\/p>\n

Less so with the solo diversions, each introduced with interludes of overdone music video imagery of the luxe life \u2013 Vegas and city lights, diamonds and furs \u2013 that underscored their relative lack of precision. Jennie delivered obligatory stunting, Jisoo sensible pop, Ros\u00e9 surprising ballads \u2013 her solo section, in which she went full Taylor Swift mode with the guitar, provided the most western-style pop moments of the show. If the solo sections hammered home one impression, it\u2019s that Lisa alone, in her dragon-skin suit and formidable sneer, has the jet fuel for a solo career. Also, that as a unit, the members\u2019 combined strengths covered their weaknesses like an airtight shield.<\/p>\n

It was a palpable relief, then, when they reunited following Ros\u00e9\u2019s turn for the pure force of breakout track DDU-DU DDU-DU, the wattage re-upped by camaraderie and their view of the finish line. Individually, they are pop artists in a crowded field, each neutralized and overwhelmed by the familiar elements around them. Together, they steamroll. And so it was that Sunday\u2019s finale of Like Jennie, in which all four came together to perform a song that Jennie just performed solo, briefly showed the stamp of Blackpink magic: the beat rips, the head-bopping with slick glasses is distinctly Jennie, but nothing hits quite like the four of them moving together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2023, the four women of Blackpink \u2013 Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Ros\u00e9 \u2013 stood on top of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-31275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}