Rosé on leaving school to become a K-pop trainee: “Nobody understood”
Rosé of BLACKPINK has described her decision to leave school in Australia to train to become a K-pop idol in South Korea as “terrifying”.
The Australian-Korean singer spoke about her decision to drop out of school in 2012 to join YG Entertainment at the age of 15, in an upcoming interview with Vogue Australia. Elsewhere in the feature, she also opened up about her eventual rise to international fame with girl group BLACKPINK.
“I decided to drop out of school and all my teachers and friends were like, ‘What?! Why are you leaving!?’ Nobody knew what K-pop was, so nobody understood where I was going,” she told the publication. “It was terrifying.”
Rosé is set to grace the cover of the magazine’s upcoming issue, which hits newsstands on April 8. The singer will be the first-ever K-pop act to appear on the cover of Vogue Australia, and the first cover star of Asian descent since Awkwafina in December 2020.
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The singer made her solo debut earlier this month, on March 12, with the single album ‘R’. In a glowing four-star review, NME’s Rhian Daly called the two-song release a “no-frills testament that proves a powerful voice and good songwriting don’t need to be big or ostentatious to shine”.
‘R’ was released alongside a video for the title track ‘On The Ground’, which helped the BLACKPINK member set the record for the most YouTube views in 24 hours by a solo K-pop artist. The clip garnered 41.6million views on its first day, breaking the decade-long record that PSY set back in 2012 with ‘Gangnam Style’.
Last week, Rosé revealed to Rolling Stone that she felt “intimidated” when she met her BLACKPINK groupmates for the first time. “I was the new one, I was like the newbie,” she said. “I walked in and there was just like a bunch of girls, like quite a lot of them in a room, and I remember just feeling so intimidated.”