BLACKPINK - WHISTLE (2016)

  • Members: Rosé (0:38; Australian; pronounced like Rosie), Lisa (0:50; Thai), Jennie (0:58; New Zealander), Jisoo (1:26; Korean)
  • BLACKPINK officially debuted August 8, 2016.
  • YG Entertainment has been teasing a new girl group for over four years, many times with these members.1 The name BLACKPINK wasn’t revealed until July 29, 2016, which are two colors that show significant contrast, symbolizing both beauty and talent.2
  • The effect at 0:26 and 1:57 is a glitch art technique called datamoshing. This is achieved by removing an I-frame in a compressed video and allowing the decoder to continue to write subsequent P-frames, which contain motion vectors. This artifacting continues until the next I-frame is reached.3
  • MV goofs
    • The Nintendo branding at 0:13 is blurred on the controller but remains visible on the PCB and subsequent scenes, e.g., 0:16 and 3:08.
    • At 0:16, the Dreamcast controller flashes the name of the song, despite no VMU being attached. Even if there were one, the Dreamcast VMU was monochromatic, and the display would have been upside down in that position.
    • At 0:36, they’re “playing” on a SNES (Japan/PAL version) with a Dreamcast controller, Atari 2600 controller, and unknown light gun. The one SNES controller they do have is plugged into the second player port.
    • Rosé lets go of the steering wheel at 3:02, but the wheel doesn’t tend to its initial position, despite the car circling sharply. (The car is being towed.4)
    • The members are constantly swapping seat positions during the car scenes.
  • See also “BOOMBAYAH”, which was released the same day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwmSjveL3Lc. Despite the music video for “BOOMBAYAH” having ~1 million more views than “WHISTLE” (as of 2016-08-12 11:30:00 KST), “WHISTLE” outperformed “BOOMBAYAH” on the aggregate music charts 3.5:1.
  • “BOOMBAYAH” set a new record for the most views for a debut K-pop girl group in 24 hours: ~3.3 million.5 This was previously held by Red Velvet’s “Happiness”.
  • Listen to SQUARE ONE on [Apple Music][apple], [Google Play Music][google], and [Spotify][spotify].

  1. http://ygunited.com/2016/08/08/blackpink-finally-debuts-four-years-preparation/ ↩︎

  2. http://www.soompi.com/2016/06/28/yg-reveals-new-girl-group-name-group-photos/ ↩︎

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_artifact ↩︎

  4. https://youtu.be/cxbZuoF3RuQ?t=2m5s ↩︎

  5. https://twitter.com/BLACKPINK_INTL/status/762993319240544256 [apple]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/id1141774013 [google]: https://play.google.com/music/m/Bxpycywxrfcn75tpg6sqk5bbgjq [spotify]: https://open.spotify.com/album/0zlJOlDdsJ6Y14GnPoYGD8 ↩︎