Group shot from Billboard Magazine’s Feb 2019 BLACKPINK exclusive (photo by Billboard)
Korea’s BLACKPINK is all-in with their 2019 US media blitz…how will the public react?
Before an all-female studio audience in ITV’s An Audience With…The Spice Girls music special, the five figures of 1990s pop star girl power sang to and mingled with their heavily marketed demographic: the young girl learning to become a woman.
Ginger Spice: Tonight, we’ve got an evening of girl power. [cheers]
Baby Spice: We had loads of faxes and letters from boys who wanted to come to this show and we said, “No way!” [jeers and laughs]
Ginger Spice: And we feel it’s about time that girls come first for a change!
Audience: Yeeeees!
Girl groups exist in a unique cultural space. On the surface, their fan bases appear the same as boy bands: a majority of young girls screaming, interspersed with a few boys and slightly larger ratio of parents who drove everybody to the concert.
But where the boy band’s show is presumably charged up with hormone-fueled cheers, the girl group’s show is charged up with….what?
“It was my way into thinking about being a girl, and why that makes me different in terms of opportunities and standards.” — Mima Chovancova
“It instilled in us the importance of being girls together...” — Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
“I unquestioningly loved them, but maybe their only success is that they taught us about sisterhood.” — George Pringle
“I think it was the sense that they didn’t care what other people thought…the Spice message was about access and equality…and all that meant something to me…I was a fan until the very end.” — Joe Parry
“Women weren’t allowed to be like that in public…getting completely arseholed seemed funny and brilliant. That ladette culture they were part of helped me to accept the way I was.” — Ciara Green
