Rosé: ‘What does freedom look like to me? Being anonymous’

Most pop stars start out as pop fans. Then, if they are determined, agile, pretty and lucky enough, they’ll get to become something like the stars they spent years studying and idolising. Rosé, one of the biggest pop stars in the world, never got to be a superfan. “See, that’s a big thing I don’t think I really got to experience,” she says.

The singer, born Roseanne Park to Korean immigrant parents in New Zealand, was raised in Melbourne, Australia, and never had any posters of pop stars on her bedroom walls. She never spammed an idol’s Weverse, never wrote homoerotic fanfic, or queued for hours outside a concert venue. She really only started to learn about music and music culture at 16, right before she was whisked away to a training boot camp in South Korea, undertaking a regime that resembled the assembly-line approaches of 1960s Motown and Brill Building-era pop in the US. Her friends and older sister had only just introduced her to K-pop before she left. “Then I flew to Korea and practised in a basement for four years.” She emerged from it a pop star.

Speaking during a break from a fitting in Seoul, Korea, Rosé displays all the behaviour you’d come to expect from her maeryeok (distinctive appeal). She smiles warmly, listens intently and forms little love hearts with her hands. She is one of the most instantly likable people I have ever spoken to. She’s wearing a relaxed white tee and dark navy hoodie, her hair falling into two braids with just the right amount of mess and tousle. She makes an effort to slouch against the nothing-coloured couch. Every girl in the world would think they’d die happy if they looked like this.

She coughs throughout our call, and even those are immaculate: three-beat hack-hack-hacks into her hoodie sleeve, dab-style, rounded off with a perfectly polite: “I apologise, I hope this isn’t annoying.” She’s in that last stage of a mild virus, following a week with her family (and Hank the dog), as well as a couple of surprise appearances with Coldplay at Goyang Stadium, the 40,000-capacity venue where she’ll perform with BLACKPINK in a couple of months for the opening night of their world tour. She’s hardly said a word this past week; she’s been on vocal rest. In-between silent games of Scrabble with her team, Rosé started learning sign language for the first time. “It’s really fun,” she tells me.

Her performances with Coldplay, a band who nowadays function like a nu-age, globalising engine of love and harmony, reenergised and inspired Rosé for the tour ahead. Between glam and stage appearances, she watched the show from the wings, seeing how fans reacted to each confetti blast and lighting change. “It gave me a whole new perspective on how it could feel to be a part of a crowd,” she says, an experience Rosé still feels bereft of.

Each of us [in BLACKPINK] has gone out and been inspired and learned so much about ourselves, and now we’re coming back to each other with good energy

BLACKPINK, the biggest girl group in the world, is the most consistent ensemble she’s ever been a part of. Their world tour will follow a year in which each of the four members released their own solo works, and tried to figure out who they were without the collective identity of the band. Each of them, but especially Rosé, used the opportunity to become more earnest in her presentation, trading BLACKPINK’s pyrotechnics and ruthless self-sufficiency for candlelit familiarity. The transition back to BLACKPINK, she says, was easier than anticipated.

After having her neck out as a solo artist and spending the past year promoting her album in the US, she’s now slipping back into muscle memory. “Each of us has gone out and been inspired and learned so much about ourselves, and now we’re coming back to each other with good energy,” she says. While she’s hung out with Jisoo, Jennie and Lisa throughout the year, it’s been several months since she’s seen the BLACKPINK behind-the-scenes staff, many of whom have been with the group since day one. Rosé had tears in her eyes during today’s fitting.

She opens her mouth a little and bites her tongue as I continue my line of BLACKPINK questions. She politely tolerates the first few, meeting them with vague responses – it’s approaching May and they’ve not yet begun rehearsal for the tour – before politely interjecting. “Sorry,” she says graciously, “I don’t think I should be the spokesperson as one quarter of the group.” A little disheartened, I scratch off some 25 BLACKPINK-related questions. Album? More tour dates? I’m afraid I can’t tell you.

Speaking for herself, Rosé says that all she does is work. “Lately, it’s been hard to – what’s that word in English? – detach myself and my life from my work.” She has decided to stop feeling apologetic about a lack of work-life balance. “I’ve always felt guilty for bringing work home but if you work until you sleep, I think that’s great. That means you love it. Even when I’m not working, my brain is.” She experiences no moment without purpose. Her life is a constant stream of potential material that she can later edit, condense, scrap, collate, and potentially turn into song.

She blurred the line between work and self permanently with last year’s full-length solo release Rosie, an album hinged on romantic weaknesses and dependencies, which showed she might be just as fixated on love as she is on her own career. On it, she traded BLACKPINK’s ideals of hyperachievement for emotional unravelling, insecurity, obsession and neediness. “Tell me lies like ‘we’re OK’, promise ‘til your face turns purple,” she sang on “not the same”. The lyrics were gestural and easy to identify with, in a way that made it feel like collective processing alongside one of the planet’s biggest pop stars. Having mastered singing and dancing, Rosie was her opportunity to master vulnerability. “That was the biggest gift I got to walk away with,” she says. “I feel like I’ve since learned to sit with myself and accept it and be comfortable with it. I’m really, really happy about that, and I think it’s a tool that I picked up on myself. I love it.”

Rosie performed with all the astronomical numbers we’ve come to expect of a K-pop act, but more surprisingly, it ended up in both middle England and America, largely thanks to the ubiquitous and unavoidable “APT”. During a time when every other pop star is promising to “bring the fun back to pop”, “APT” genuinely delivered the whole year 6 disco. With its optimally distinct hook – ap-uh-tuh-puh-tuh – and powerful jocularity, “APT” became fodder for prime-time Radio 2 playlists and TK Maxx in-store music. The little sister of the family isn’t the only one familiar with Rosé any more. Now, the grandma, mum, auntie and baby – especially the baby – are in on it too.

Lately, it’s been hard to – what’s that word in English? – detach myself and my life from my work

Rosie, which sanded down the usual excesses of K-pop, was a seamless integration into mainstream pop. Bang Si-hyuk, the chairman of Hybe, BTS’s agency, remarked at a US pop culture conference last year that “for K-pop to gain more fans in the global music market, it needs to be consumed more lightly as part of pop music, requiring expansion in both form and content”. Rosie made good on that promise, and ultimately propelled Rosé’s success outside of Korea. Her record-breaking album became the most successful of all time for an artist of K-pop origin in America. It topped the Billboard charts, and is now well on its way to reaching six billion streams. Before the end of the year, Rosé applied to terminate her copyright trust with Korea Music Copyright Association, conceivably to keep expanding her global reach.

With a little distance from the rollout of her solo debut, Rosé reflects back on Rosie only according to her own internal metrics. “Whenever I do anything, I always ask, ‘Have I done everything that I wanted to? Is there anything else I could have done?’” With this one, says Rosé, “I couldn’t have done the slightest bit more”. She put her “heart, soul, and more” into it.

That fierce work ethic most likely comes from her mother. “I’ve seen her pour her heart out into absolutely everything she does,” she says, “whether that’s taking care of me or her painting.” As a child, Rosé would watch while her mum painstakingly applied paint to her canvas, blotting the space with just the right amount of movement, texture, hue, and shade. “Growing up, it was amazing watching her work.”

At home, her parents spoke almost exclusively in Korean. It wasn’t until she was three, when she started kindergarten in Auckland, New Zealand, that she began speaking English. She grasped the language instinctively, rolling and rounding out her Rs – a rare feature of the Korean language, whose consonants are softened. Now, the two different languages form their own distinctive texture and gravity in her throat. The Korean softer and lighter; the English denser and reedier. They each inspire totally different characters. After living in the US for the past year, she says her voice has completely changed. “Lately someone asked me, ‘How do you speak in Korean?’ And I started speaking and it was a whole different person with a whole different personality.” She’s thinking of learning another language, most likely more Japanese than she already speaks: “Maybe if I learned that even more I would have a whole different personality there as well.”

Beyond the linguistic differences, I’m curious to know how Rosé squares typically American values of vulnerability with Korean values of inseong gyoyuk (humility and loyalty), but she gives cautiously diplomatic answers, politely dismissing the idea of cultural difference in favour of a universal narrative. “We’re all human, and I think the same things trigger and heal emotions,” she says.

With her American publicist and member of her Korean team listening in, she generally sounds a little clipped. She is understandably nervous to speak on the record. “Words are forever,” she explains. I ask whether she has any Grammy aspirations, given the success of the album. “I mean, that would be…” she looks around her, pauses, then regathers herself. “OK, I want to answer this,” she says, holding her knees. She goes again, the talkshow voice switched on: “That would be incredible. But I think if it means more to my community, it’d be special. That’s the first thing that I want, and whatever awards or celebration comes after it, that would feel extra-rewarding.” It’s a perfect pageant answer, but I suspect a sincere one all the same.

If you work until you sleep that’s great. That means you love it. Even when I’m not working, my brain is.

I ask a few more seemingly innocuous questions, but she can’t answer them. Like, does she have a favourite One Direction member? “I do,” she says, “But I know this is going to make headlines so I want to be careful. It’ll cause too much drama.” I think to myself ‘Zayn?’, then leave it at that. I also ask whether she’ll continue spending time in Korea or head out to the States, and she can’t really answer that either. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I should be telling people my whereabouts,” she says, glumly. “See, these are the things I have to think about, it’s wild.”

We talk about food for a moment instead; Rosé’s comfort territory. While she used to eat almost exclusively Asian food, Korean mainly, lately she’s eaten anything she’s been given. She just had her first In-N-Out cheeseburger after watching Jennie’s set at Coachella. “I just swallowed that right up, it was amazing.”

Now that she’s a celebrity who could have almost anything she wanted – a cheeseburger, say – I wonder whether she ever misses the feeling of craving. “See, it’s interesting because I might be able to get a burger when I need burgers. But I think it creates a lot of things I can’t have besides that.” Like what? “Like not having to be terrified of small things. Like not having to be the annoying person in the room full of my friends who is paranoid about something when I want to be very nonchalant and chill, but I have to be careful about everything. And even if I’m not doing anything wrong, I have to think, ‘What if this makes people think that I’m doing something wrong?’ And not always having the fear of being misunderstood. Like freedom.” And what does freedom look like to you? She looks around – “What does freedom look like to me?” – and answers, “Freedom means being anonymous.”

In the past, Rosé went to such great lengths to recreate anonymity that she once hired a team to age her up 60 or so years, fitting her in wrinkly prosthetics and a grey wig. She went out on the streets in this get-up, hoping to feel what it would be like to not be seen. Of course, she felt more paranoid than ever. The thought that people would see right through the disguise, know instinctively that this was Rosé dressed up as an old woman, never left her. The paranoia of a spy on a world mission. “It was really, really intense,” she says, “I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.”

I ask if she’d ever consider acting as a way to slip out of herself for a moment and become someone else. “Wow, yes, I think that would be incredible in that sense,” she says. The question makes her think of the time she was hired to speak at a corporate event in Europe. She got up on stage, said, “Hello, I’m Rosie,” delivered a few lines, then faced one of her biggest fears: getting off the stage, walking from one side of the hall to another; walking through a crowd. “I was so anxious because usually when I walk through a big crowd of people I have to understand that people are going to recognise me and look at me.” But when she had to walk through the crowd of European businesspeople, no one seemed to notice. It was heaven. “I was jumping up and down after,” she says. “So, yes, I would love to act, because I’ll get to feel what it’s like to be anonymous.”

She scrunches her lips a little, looks to her side. For now, she’s still peering out from the wings, trying to guess how it feels to be anonymous; a fan among a crowd.

Hair LEE SEON-YEONG, make-up WON JUNGYO at BIT&BOOT, nails PARK EUNKYUNG, set design IBBY NJOYA at NEW SCHOOL REPRESENTS, prop stylist KIM SOJUNG, photographic assistants YANG HAYOUNG, KIM YOUJIN, KIM YOUNGWOO, hair assistant LEE SEUNGYEON, set design assistants SEO JIWOO, LEE EUNSU, florist LEE SOHYUN, lighting and digital operator SHIN YOUNGJAE, production KELLY SUH at A PRJECT, production coordinator INDIGO CHOI, production assistants KIM GITAE, LIM JAEWOO, post-production TOUCH DIGITAL, special thanks SAM ROSS and PHOEBE SHARDLOW at NEW SCHOOL REPRESENTS