BLACKPINK‘s Jennie Kim suffered burnout after taking on the rap responsibilities in the group.
The 27-year-old singer revealed she was unhappy with her role in the group and struggled with the responsibility of being the rapper.
During a conversation on Dua Lipa’s ‘At Your Service’ podcast, Dua asked her: “I know one of the reasons you became a rapper is because you spoke English, so you got assigned the rap parts and you’ve obviously really grown into that rap role in BLACKPINK, it’s something that the fans love you for. What comes over you when you do the second verse rap in DDU-DU DDU-DU? You know, it’s like it’s like watching you become an entirely different person!”
Jennie replied: “I’ve never really said this anywhere, but I’ve wanted to. After our debut, we did like six songs where I would just rap like, seriously rap and along the way, I kind of got confused because I came to see that there’s a big side of me inside that loves to sing, but I actually never had the chance to really explore that as a trainee because I got told that I should be a rapper, you know?
“So there was a phase where I would hate to rap. I was like, ‘This isn’t me like, this isn’t the journey that I envisioned in my head like, I don’t think I’m a rapper.’ So there was definitely a burnout.”
Jennie also revealed that getting in to the group was a lot of hard work.
She said: “I’ve actually never really broken down how I did it. But the people who knew the importance of keeping their own identity and character within the training system are the people that are in the group right now – a lot of people got lost on the way because we were so focused to satisfy the people that we were working with, but we weren’t sure who we were doing it for, and how it can identify us in the future. Because it’s literally years of training, it’s not just a couple of hours. So you get really drawn into the lifestyle that they put us in.”