David: Hello there! Welcome to another edition of Lexicon Late Night featuring myself and Justin. Your favorite blinks. So today we have quite a different episode than usual. It’s one from this millennium.

Justin: Okay, this is unusual for us.

David: It is unusual for us. It’s George Orwell, usually from 100 years ago. It’s Dr. Dre from 30 years ago.

Justin: I thought our interests ended in 1999.

David: Me too, me too. But we’re going pop for this one. Okay, we’re going mainstream.

Justin: So who are we talking about today?

David: Today we’re going to talk about the phenomenon that is Blackpink.

Justin: Blackpink in your area. 

David: That’s it. That’s it.

Justin: Very cool. That’s the corporate version. Yeah. As you can see, we’re very hip. We’re listening to the same stuff the young kids are into.

David: Exactly. On the cutting edge of Blackpink seven years after they came out.

Justin: Right, exactly.

David: So, um, of course, this is not a usual subject matter. We’re usually talking about business lessons for business leaders based on storytelling from the greatest storytellers of all time. So does Blackpink qualify as some of the greatest storytellers of all time, Justin?

Justin: Um, it’s hard to say because they mostly sing in Korean, so we don’t really know what they’re saying. We can’t tell if they’re great storytellers, although I’ve seen some of the subtitles. And to be honest, most of their songs are gibberish, like most pop music. Uh, the one line that springs to mind is kick in the door wavin the coco. That one bugs me a little bit, because obviously it’s inspired by Biggie’s line kicking the door, waving the four four, right? Which is intimidating. But apparently this girl is kicking in the door and waving her Coco Chanel. Oh yeah.

David: It’s a very light door. Sure.

Justin: And it’s a very dramatic entrance to show off your new handbag or whatever, like, boom! Hey, look what I bought. Yeah, it’s.

David: Probably a Japanese. Kind of like a silk door or something.

Justin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

David: So I think we need a bit more permeable than usual to justify why this is a subject that is qualified to be on such a prestigious show as this.

Justin: Yeah, well, they are probably the biggest girl group in the world today. Arguably. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, for sure. And Lisa here in Thailand is probably the most famous Thai person on the planet, at least. Yeah. Um, they’ve got billions of streams, billions of views on all their YouTube videos, like literally billions. They’re headlining shows all over the USA. They’ve gone from, like, a K-pop phenomenon to an actual global phenomenon. So there’s some lessons that we can learn as to why they’re so successful.

David: Yeah, not to be too hyperbolic with this, but okay, I see some parallels to Beatlemania. Bear with me. Okay. So prior to the Beatles there, there wasn’t pop music as we understand it today. The Beatles put in their 10,000 hours, which we’ll come back to later. And then they took over America. She loves you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all that kind of stuff. Mop top, fab four. They changed the whole pop landscape. They led the British invasion. They changed the landscape of American music forever. The same, I think, is happening with Blackpink. Like, who could have imagined in our generation that you would have not just Korean language music, but any non-English language music at number one in the charts. Number two in the charts, headlining Coachella. They’re trailblazers. They’re defining a zeitgeist, which I think is changing the landscape of pop forever in the same way that Beatlemania did. And we’ll get into it more throughout the episode. But there’s something truly, uh, disruptive happening here, which we can learn lessons from for businesses.

Justin: They’re, uh, they’re a disruptor brand. They are indeed. Yeah, they’re a challenger brand. Exactly. No nonsense. I mean, on the one hand, it’s a little depressing. That’s it. Like, we go from the Beatles, you know, classic songs like I Want to Hold Your Hand, She Loves You, yeah, and now we’re going to, uh, doo doo doo doo doo doo, which doesn’t really mean anything but just as catchy. Yeah, it is catchy. And I don’t think you can deny that. There’s some parallels there for sure. Because. Because, yeah, I don’t know what the f*** I’m talking about.

David: There’s four of them.

Justin: Them. There’s four of them. They’re the they’re the Fab Four.

David: They’re not from America, they’re.

Justin: From not America. And they’re really changing the face of pop music today. So that’s the world we live in. Indeed it is.

David: Is. So let’s jump straight into the lessons then. So what have you got for us first, Justin? Okay.

Justin: Well, before we show any clips. Um, so these guys, they’re part of YG entertainment right there. That’s their record label, their management company. And so they actually had to be in a training camp for six years. They did boot camp essentially for six years before they made their debut in 2016. So we’ve got some clips just to show the amount of work that they actually put in.

Clip: Don’t act like you forgot. I call the shots like blah blah blah. Y’all should know me well enough, but I am. I’m back.Better better better better. Have my money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money. Don’t act like you forgot. Don’t act like you forgot. Don’t act like you forgot. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Blah.Blah blah. Blah blah.Blah. Will it? Will it? Will it? Don’t act like you forgot my money.

David: Sure. Cool clip. Seeing them so young like that. But it’s wild to me that that is that existing career. Like the idea of. I want to call it a sweatshop or slave labor, but it’s unpaid. Like six years of hardcore drilling and training and like all these dance moves, all this singing, if you eat a cheeseburger, you’re out because you’re getting too fat, you can’t have a boyfriend. You got to stay on campus. It’s so intense, like it’s unbelievable that they would submit themselves to that or even that it’s legal potentially. But obviously the results speak for themselves.

Justin: Yeah. Although not everybody who goes into the training camp gets to join Blackpink. So it’s it’s crazy amount of dedication and work. The Koreans, they took the concept of like a boy group or a girl group like Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls or whatever, because that was, you know, manufactured by record labels back in the 90s. And that was intense as well. But they just took it to a whole other level of intensity.

David: Yeah, because we’ll talk about it much more throughout this video. But it’s like the best of all of those things, right. They’ve got the pop hits, the dance moves. They’ve got the beats. They’ve got everything there. It’s really like a factory producing this perfect vision of a pop star on pop music. Mhm.

Justin: It’s perfectly manufactured. Yeah. Yeah. What’s funny so far you’re coming off as way more of a blink than I am. Oh, and they have some very rabid, dedicated fans online. So it would be kind of ironic if this episode of Lexicon Lexicon Late Night goes viral. And then there’s all these people in the comments hating me and loving you for being a true blink. Praise Allah. All right, so we talked about the amount of work that they put in. But we’ve also talked about how, you know, this is a production company, right? So they’re not necessarily coming up with all this stuff themselves. They’re not coming up with the music or the lyrics. So that actually brings us to our first clip here. So we’re going to have a look at their producer okay. Roll the clip.

Clip: My head Rosie is a Korean girl that was raised in Australia and she stays here till like 6:00 Am just in the studio. Sometimes I’m like, wow, you’re still here.Can’t get you. Jisoo. Straight up Korean girl that grew up in Korea. She’s the unnie of the group. She’s the oldest. She does have that professional poker face. I’ve known Jisoo for, let’s say, a good six years. I’ve seen her cry once. She’s super smart, but a lot of people might think she’s book smart, but I would say she’s street smart.Lisa from Thailand. She’s always got that cool calm. It’s gonna be okay. We’re all good. Smile. But when it comes to certain moments. You know when the music starts. When it’s crunch time. She has this executioner killer instinct.Jenny- Born in Korea but moved to New Zealand. She’s super clear. Her opinions, her emotions. She’s a perfectionist.  All those different cultures in one pot. It’s just different how they walk, how they talk and how they dress, and the perfect balance, how they complement each other. It’s fascinating.

Justin: Yeah. So that’s their producer, Teddy. Still very much living the Covid life with his mask, but he’s kind of the brains behind the operation. You can see how each of them have their own personalities that all gel together perfectly. And he writes all the lyrics, and he produces the music. Yep. Um, I’m not even sure that’s accurate. It is accurate. The lyrics? Yeah.

David: He writes the lyrics, he produces the music. But I mean, I think people probably have a sense of where our cultural zeitgeist is. It’s South Park, it’s Eminem, it’s Dr. Dre. As per our previous episodes. But this guy is actually a good producer. Like, he produces beats that could have been from, you know, 50 Cent’s first album or. Right, right. It’s like he’s actually making good beats, throwbacks.

Justin: To like, in the club style. It’s like some Dr. Dre inspired stuff in there. Yeah.

David: So, like, it’s not your usual, like, we talk about Backstreet Boys and, uh, Spice Girls and Westlife and all this kind of stuff. The music was terrible. Like, it was such trash music. So it was manufactured and it was trash. I can kind of forgive the manufacturing of it when it’s actually a pretty good product.

Justin: And obviously there’s so much that goes beyond just the production, the music and the lyrics and their personalities. Their videos are always super creative. So there’s crazy set designs, crazy costumes. So there’s a whole team obviously behind them working to make them so successful. Exactly.

David: So one talented artist on their own can’t do all of those things. You have them as an influential thought leader, if you will, and they have this whole team behind them, as you said, which is helping them create that success in the same way. Actually, now I think about it that many of our clients actually use us in a similar way.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. So are Jennie, Lisa, Jisoo and Rosé. They’re like the C-suite of a company. And then Teddy, there is basically their David Norcross. He’s their chief marketing officer behind the scenes.

David: Right. Does that make you the choreographer or.

Justin: Yeah. Well, I’m. Yeah. Okay, so we’re both. Teddy. All right. Because I’m writing a lot of the lyrics and producing a lot of the beats with the Hit Squad for our clients. Yeah, we’re just churning out hit after hit. Right. Check out the views on LinkedIn. We’ll back it up.

David: So absolutely, there is a correlation there or an equivalency between the pop music superstars of the day and the back end squad. And just like with the girls, you mentioned Blackpink, the whole team, they are talented, no doubt, and they’re brilliant. And we’re going to look at that in a moment. But there’s no success individually, and especially in the age of AI where things are changing so rapidly. You focus on your core. Outsource everything else to the experts at the back end. Let them handle that stuff for you.

Justin: Yeah. We talked about the same sort of lesson during the Dr. Dre episode. He knew where his strengths were, and he got other people to write the lyrics to, to do the actual music behind the production. Like, he’s not the one playing the keyboards. He’s got Scott Storch, he’s got Eminem writing a lot of the lyrics. Um, and so there’s definitely no shame in that. Like you, you’re the face, you’re your brand. You need to have your own unique tone of voice. But if you can have somebody helping you behind the scenes, producing content for you, as long as they know your tone of voice, they know what you’re supposed to sound like. Uh, they can create content for you. That’s on brand and on message. That’s definitely a way to succeed, just like Blackpink.

David: Exactly. So let’s say you’re a law firm, for example, right? You’re crushing it in the law room. In the law room. In the law room. In the law room. Top dog. No one’s stopping you in the law room at all. The chord. Chord.

Justin: The boardroom.

David: The court. Yeah. No one’s stopping you in the court. But if you’re spending all your time, then trying to also do marketing and write opinion pieces and manage videographers, that’s a waste of time for a CEO of a law firm. And the same is true of any firm, pretty much. Like, why would you want to focus on the things that are not core to your business? Like if Jenny was spending all of her time writing terrible lyrics and not practicing dancing, they wouldn’t be the same group. Same with Lisa. If she was just thinking about writing choruses instead of improving her singing skills, then they would fail.

Justin: Or her rapping skills?

David: Yes, she.

Justin: Does do both.

David: She is a dope rapper.

Justin: She she actually is pretty good. Snow cone. Chilly. Get it free. Like Willy in the jeans. Like Billie. You be poppin like a willy. Oh, that’s embarrassing that I know that.

David: It’s pretty much Tupac.

Justin: Yeah, yeah. It’s on par with all that being said. So they’ve got this team working behind the scenes to support them. They’re focusing on the things that they need to focus on to make the group successful. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not putting in a tremendous amount of work. Like we already spoke at the beginning about how they were basically in training camp for six years of boot camp in order to get even into the group to make their debut. But even then, even now, they’re still working really hard. So follow up to the training clip video that we showed earlier. Let’s have another look at this clip.

Clip: Ha! How do you like that, huh? You gonna like that? Da da da da da da da da. You like that? Bada bing bada boom boom boom. How do you like that? Ta da da da da da da da. Now look at you. Now look at me. Look at you. Now look at me. Look at you. Now look at me. How do you like that now? Look at you. Now look at me. Look at you now. Look at me. Look at you now look at me. How do you like that?

David: Justin, How do you like that?

Justin: Yeah, look at you. Now look at me. I like it just fine. All right? It’s nice to look at. It is nice to look at.

David: It’s nice to look at, but I think it’s. They’re not just the pretty face I obviously have the hours that they put in in that video there, it’s a three minute video. Whatever it is, there are hundreds of different moves to do and they have to be in sync perfectly like that. I could never do that. Just watching that gives me anxiety. You have to remember all of those moves in time, in correlation with everybody else.

Justin: And imagine you mess up the very last move. Yeah. Like oh Jenny again.

David: So they’ve really got talent. They’re not, they’re really they’re not just a manufactured group. They’ve actually got some real skills behind them. And I think the same is true with most of these K-pop bands. For the reasons that you mentioned, they’ve got that training camp. They’re just training every day. So they’re just military precision level kinds of dancing. It’s kind of them.

Justin: Should send videos of Blackpink dancing to North Korea just to intimidate them. Look at how organized we are. Can you do this?

David: Yeah, we can do this across the battlefield.

Justin: Yeah. Your parades have nothing on this level of precision. Mhm.

David: But obviously, Justin, you don’t just get there overnight. No.

Justin: You need to put in your 10,000 hours as it were.

David: 10,000 hours. Exactly. What is what is that 10,000 hours thing.

Justin: So this is, uh, from a Malcolm Gladwell book. Do you remember the title of that specific book? Outliers. Outliers, right. So to become a master at any craft, you really do need to put in 10,000 hours. You were talking about the Beatles earlier on, so they were playing in the same bar in Liverpool. In the same pub, right.

David: In Hamburg.

Justin: Germany. Yep. Oh, interesting. And they were just, like, doing three hour sets.

David: Six hour sets.

Justin: Six hours.

David: Every night.

Justin: Every night. Seven days a week. Um, so that by the time they actually got famous, people go, oh, these guys came out of nowhere. No, they put in the hours behind the scenes. And it’s the same with Blackpink. Now I’m equating Blackpink to the Beatles.

David: There we go. Yeah. So for the Beatles, they were performing the pop hits of the day, but they also had to fill up all those hours so they’d be writing their own songs, they’d be playing together, they’d be riffing together. So when they actually made it big, they’d already mastered the craft. And the same is true with any kind of business skill that you want to learn. If you’re a content writer and you’ve been doing it for a year, you’re not a good content writer yet. Nobody could master the craft. It needs 10,000 hours. And I think what again, the ethics of it. Maybe dubious, but these K-pop groups, they really do put in those hours. Probably 100,000 hours. Yeah.

Justin: I think, uh, if you’re a business leader, you’ve definitely already put in those hours. You’ve you’ve gotten to the point where you are for you for a reason, which means you have genuine expertise that other people don’t have and that your audience will want to hear for sure.

David: Definitely when it comes to thought leadership, but also like there’s new skills coming out, right? So like the understanding of robotics and ChatGPT, it’s probably not worth investing 10,000 hours into those things. Like if you’re a CEO, you’ve already put your hours in. Just focus on doing that thing really well.

Justin: And then get somebody else to put in the 10,000 hours on ChatGPT.

David: Exactly, exactly. Um, but I think it’s a great lesson. When I read that book, it really stood out as what Steve Jobs is in there. Bill Gates is there. The Beatles are in there. So I can remember. But each of them had.

Justin: Three athletes as well, right?

David: Yeah. And it was obviously a core skill. They had. They had ability, but they also had opportunity. So Bill Gates was in one of the few schools in America that had a computer. And then the third and most important thing was perseverance. So even though they had a natural ability, they kept going. They kept putting the hours in. They didn’t just presume they were good enough. So to really succeed. To really become a master. It’s the sweat as much as anything else that has to go into it.

Justin: Uh, yeah. So stay tuned for episode 10,000 of Lexicon Late Night.

David: Only 9992 to go. Yeah, 91 to go. Yeah.

Justin: Exactly. Um, so they’ve put in the hours. They’ve got a great team behind them. Um, why didn’t they just stay in Korea? Um, they’re obviously massive there. How did they break into America and to the global audience?

David: That’s a great question. So I think a lot of these bands that when they’re formed, they’ve got international audiences in mind. Yeah, obviously, uh, Rose grew up in Australia.

Justin: New Zealand, I think.

David: I think Jenny was in New Zealand for, for a while. All right. Lisa.

Justin: He’s the real blink.

David: Um, but then all of these other groups have got all these mixed people, and there’s all sorts of stuff going on.

Justin: Lisa is a crazy one because she’s from Buriram, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it’s just north of Thailand, like a country girl. Mhm. And the fact that she won some contests that let her go into the boot camp to begin with. Hey, here’s your prize. Six years of military training.

David: In a country where you don’t speak the language.

Justin: Yeah. So she learned how to speak Korean. She’s rapping in English and Korean. She’s an amazingly talented dancer. There’s no, uh, no surprise why she’s so popular.

David: Absolutely. Yeah, but these groups, obviously, there’s a big plan in place, from the production to the videos to the dancing to the lyrics. And. But they’re not just thinking in terms of being K-pop. They’re thinking about just global pop. Yeah. So let’s have a look at some of the ways that they’re reaching out into other countries. Right.

Justin: So I mean, we’ve got plenty of clips that we could show. They’ve collaborated with Lady Gaga, all of my favorites here Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Selena Gomez with Ice cream. I was rapping Lisa’s parts earlier, so I can’t deny that I like that song. Um, and then there’s some interesting other stuff they’ve been doing, like so they all each have their own solo careers to some extent. Uh, Jenny and Lisa definitely being the more popular ones.

David: I think. Jisoo’s flower thing.

Justin: Started. Oh yeah, she does have the. Yeah, yeah. And then does Rosé have a solo career as well? Yeah. So they’re branching out. It’s kind of like the Wu-Tang approach, right? Where you got the Wu-Tang clan and the RZA had this mastermind thing of like, okay, so our first album is the group, but then we go with the solo albums. We make ODB a star in his own right. We make Method Man a star in his own right. So that’s how we take over the hip hop world. That’s exactly what Blackpink is doing.

David: We’re building credibility now with that. That’s good, that’s good. Sure, that’s good for the homies. Sure.

Justin: And then there’s this song here with DJ snake, Ozuna, Megan Thee Stallion and of course, Lisa from Blackpink. So that’s pretty interesting because it’s spanning three continents. It’s like truly global music. Dj snake is a French producer. Slash DJ Ozuna is from Puerto Rico, Megan Thee Stallion obviously from America, and then Lisa from Thailand. Slash Korea.

David: Yeah, I think one of the things that it’s really quite obvious from the Blackpink songs is that while most of it might be in Korean, the chorus is usually in English, which, I mean, when you think about most pop songs, you don’t really remember the lyrics. You remember the chorus. Yeah, no.

Justin: No no no, it’s a shut down. Exactly.

David: Can you think of the lyrics to It Wasn’t Me by Shaggy? Any lyrics apart from the words? It wasn’t me. Yeah, but that’s.

Justin: Mainly because Shaggy is incomprehensible. This is not making it into.

David: Most, most pop songs. I like that though. Like you. You just remember the chorus. The rest of it just threw.

Justin: Away sort of background music and then the catchy hook. Exactly.

David: So what they’ve mastered is the incredible, catchy hook, and in English it’s global, which allows them to be on the radio all over the world because the production is good too. And then obviously, as you mentioned, they’re doing good outreach too. So they’re partnering with other performers. They’re appearing on their tracks and vice versa, breaking into new markets. I mean, it’s really a very smart business play.

Justin: It is. Yeah. So like start out nationally, take over your own country and then conquer the world.

David: Yeah, exactly. Just with, uh, with sound bites, basically.

Justin: Right. So what is the lesson here for business leaders?

David: That’s a great question, Justin. So the same lessons are essentially true with business people. Um, so we’re in the marketing sphere. Um, we reach out to clients, friends, partners, enemies, even sometimes even people within our own industry to partner up, whether it’s researching together, uh, being on podcasts like this together, speaking at events together does a benefit to just positioning yourself as a helpful guide from business owners perspective. You don’t have to always be competing with everybody like we’re. We’re all trying to achieve the same goal, which is to ultimately position ourselves as good and helpful to the same target audience. So even though Dua Lipa and Jennie might have the same target audience, they can still collaborate. There’s enough room for everybody.

Justin: Yes, collaboration. It definitely shows that you’re willing to rise above your, you know, narrow aims of purely making money, which is obviously why anybody is in business to begin with. But ultimately you can succeed even more if you show that you’re willing to collaborate with others in order to help your potential customers and your existing customers.

David: Plus, it can be fun sometimes to get out of your comfort zone. And even if you’re in an area that you’re not usually in, it can still be fun. Like for us as a company during the pandemic, I appeared on a Beers with Peers podcast that was live streamed on clubhouse for like the two weeks that was around.

Justin: Hey, I forgot about the clubhouse.

David: I was with Poe in the studio recently on a salacious spicy podcast.

Justin: Yeah, that was very spicy.

David: Um, but it’s all good, right? Just, uh, just like with Blackpink, be with other people that are influential. Enjoy your time with them. If business comes from it, great. If not, you’re building collaborations, partnerships, and as long as you’re motivated by being helpful and being a good guide, you can’t go wrong.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. All dialog is positive.

David: Indubitably.

Justin: All right, so to recap here, lessons for business leaders from Blackpink. Number one, no shame in having a team behind you. Uh, you need a lot of people. You may be the face of your brand, but you need a lot of people working behind the scenes. So you need ghostwriters. You need video producers. You need set designers. You need people making your beats. Um, you basically, you need a team behind you in order to succeed, right? No shame in having a ghostwriter. That’s less than one. That wasn’t very concise. Lesson two put in the work. Put in the 10,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell would approve of Blackpink. And lesson number three. Collaborate. Branch out. Take advantage of outreach opportunities. Work with other people to help your audience.

David: That’s a LinkedIn clip right there. So to wrap it up, then great lessons, I guess. No one’s gonna watch the end bit if anyone’s sticking around. Fair enough, but Blackpink might be breaking up, I believe, as we record this.

Justin: Yeah, we actually maybe should have covered this in the intro in preparation for this episode. I did a little bit of research, and apparently Jisoo let slip to some reporters that it seems like they’re all going to agree to the terms of their next contract. So it seems like they won’t actually be breaking up.

David: But the phenomenon will continue.

Justin: Yes, because it would have been funny to release this episode right as they’re breaking up, it’s like we completely missed the wave. It would have been.

David: On brand, though. It would have been like we only speak about people who are either dead or, like, way out of date. Yeah, yeah.

Justin: So I don’t know if we’re going to do another episode about a pop group anytime soon. We probably will eventually, but I think next time let’s go heavy on the intellectual stuff. Let’s find somebody really smart.

David: Albert Einstein.

Justin: Albert Einstein. It’s got a great brand. Iconic.

David: Solid Mc.

Justin: Mhm. Mc squared.

David: All right. Thank you for reading. If you’ve stayed around this long and uh go blinks.

Justin: Go Blinks. Look at you. Now look at me. Hit you with that.