Confessions of a K-рор Star

For ROSÉ, writing her debut solo album was a form of therapy.

- E. ALEX JUNG

The 2020 Netflix documentary Blackpink: Light Up the Sky introduces Rosé stealing time after-hours, strumming a guitar on the floor. "Sometimes I actually miss my trainee days because back then, we were surrounded by music all the time," she says. "But these days, we've got a lot of work, so I actually have to make time for this." The implication is that these nighttime jam sessions provided some personal relief at odds with the activities of Blackpink, the brash, world-touring, hip-hop-heavy girl group she belongs to. While her onstage persona, Rosé-real name Roseanne Park-has superhero swagger, her own musical tendencies flicker around private moments like this.

Rosé, 28, was born in Auckland and moved to Melbourne when she was 8. At 15, she went to Sydney for an open-call audition for YG-the Korean entertainment company that created BigBang and 2NE1-and came in first out of 700 hopefuls after multiple audition rounds, including one in which she performed an acousticguitar cover of Jason Mraz's "I Won't Give Up." She went to K-pop boot camp in Seoul for four years before Blackpink debuted in 2016, when she was 19. She learned to parent herself in a notoriously tough environment. "I'm a chameleon at this point," she says of her adaptability to different cultural milieus.