With Blackpink’s ‘protest trucks’, have K-pop fans gone too far?

Active fandoms have long played a major role in helping promote K-pop globally, but social media fan groups are increasingly taking their activism offline

In March alone, three convoys of trucks were sent to the headquarters of YG Entertainment – Blackpink’s agency – to demand changes in the way the girl group is managed

3-MIN READ3-MIN

Blackpink performing on stage during the 2019 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival in California. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 6:00am, 31 Mar 2021Updated: 6:00am, 31 Mar 2021

For as long as there have been pop stars, there have been overzealous fans – but no genre seems to attract the fanaticism of K-pop. Take Blackpink, arguably the biggest girl group in the world today, with millions upon millions of singles sold and music videos that have been watched billions of times on YouTube.

Earlier this month, fans of the group sent a small convoy of “protest trucks” decked out with LED hoardings to the headquarters of YG Entertainment – Blackpink’s agency – to complain about the way it supposedly treats Jisoo, one of the group’s four members.

“Treat Jisoo fairly”, one of the messages on the six trucks said in giant red and yellow text, while others exhorted YG to “look out for [Jisoo’s] rights and interests” and show less “indifference towards Jisoo’s promotions and marketing in China”.

Trucks carrying LED hoardings, one of which reads ‘Respect Jisoo’, are seen outside the headquarters of YG Entertainment in Seoul. Photo: Twitter

The trucks were sent by a group of Chinese fans calling themselves China Jisoo Bar, who seemed upset at their favourite Blackpink member’s apparent lack of screen time and vocal parts in the group’s music videos and songs – if a fan-made spreadsheet shared online detailing the exact percentage of each girl’s contribution was anything to go by.

For YG, the experience will have been a familiar one. This month alone, fans of Jennie and Lisa – two other Blackpink members – have sent trucks to the agency’s offices to protest their alleged mistreatment, with the latter group also issuing a page-long ultimatum threatening to withdraw their support for the girl group if changes were not made to Lisa’s styling, commercially available photos and the quality of her internet connection – important for her live-streamed contributions to the Chinese talent show Youth With You 3.

Such K-pop fan activism is hardly new. Back in 2017, fans of the boy band iKON – also under YG Entertainment – threatened a boycott of all official merchandise unless their favourite band was given more promotion within South Korea. YG later issued a statement to reassure fans that more Korean iKON promotions were already in the pipeline.

YG has yet to respond to the latest Blackpink protests, but Kwon Joon-won, a professor of entertainment management at South Korea’s Dong-ah Institute of Media and Arts (DIMA) who was previously the head of an agency himself, said “entertainment agencies can’t afford to ignore the voices of demanding fans even though their requests and criticisms have increasingly become more aggressive and burdensome with time”.