Blackpink’s debut album hasn’t even been out for two weeks, and already the members of this K-pop girl group have the end in mind.
In fact, Jennie, Jisoo, Rosé and Lisa were pondering their own obsolescence more than a year ago, as we learn in “Light Up the Sky,” a new Netflix documentary about the quartet that starts streaming Wednesday.
Directed by Caroline Suh (who previously helmed Netflix’s hit adaptation of Samin Nosrat’s cookbook “Salt Fat Acid Heat”), “Light Up the Sky” climaxes with Blackpink’s rapturously received performance at Coachella in 2019, where it became the first Korean girl group to play at the annual desert mega-festival.
Suh follows the women, all in their mid-20s, as they rehearse for the closely watched gig; she’s there as they huddle excitedly backstage seconds before showtime. And she checks in with them afterward, when Lisa tells her, “It doesn’t matter if we grow old and get replaced by a new younger generation … because they will still remember how we shone so bright.”
Kind of bleak for a group whose first LP just entered the Billboard 200 at No. 2.
And yet Suh’s film makes you sympathetic to Lisa’s Darwinian perspective. Even in a tidy 79 minutes, “Light Up the Sky” provides a revealing look at the ultra-competitive K-pop industry, in which girl groups and boy bands are assembled by veteran talent-spotters and put through an intense, boarding-school-like training regimen that makes their American equivalents look lazy and unfocused.
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