The Continued Resurgence of Brave Girls
Promotional photo for QUEENDOM 2, courtesy of Mnet
Complacency can be a luxury.
One day Brave Girls will be the spoken of with the reverence given to legends. They will be commended for their perseverance to work for five years without recognition or pay until they broke records and made history with “Rollin’”.
That is still to come. History is still being written and today, Brave Girls have work to do. Minyoung, Yujeong, Eunji and Yuna, the four women who comprise Brave Girls, are on a mission to prove that their number 1 song, which reverse engineered its way to become the toast of Korea, was not a fluke.
For five years the goal for Brave Girls was simple: Score a hit song. But in the past year, the end goal became more like a moving target. With success and capability comes the constant legwork to top yourself. Now, the stakes are higher. It would be easy to rest on your laurels. That’s not Brave Girls’ aim.
This spring Brave Girls are competing on Mnet’s QUEENDOM 2, the competition show that crowns one idol group or soloist the title of Queen. The opportunity to compete on a show as high profile and career changing as this is one that wasn’t possible for the group just one year ago.
QUEENDOM 2 brings together six famous girl groups, all of whom I would categorize as mid-tier in popularity, to compete in massive two-hour-long episodes. In season 2, Brave Girls are competing against SISTAR’s Hyolyn, WJSN, LOONA, VIVIZ and Kep1er. Story arcs and narrative is a strong function of the show: winners and underdogs are almost instantly calculated by the first episode.
But misconceptions can be hard to break, and disparities are easy to notice. Reality reflects reality TV, or is it the reverse? On QUEENDOM 2, Brave Girls are continually underestimated by their competitors and undervalued by the voting audience. For three episodes, Brave Girls placed last in the competition, only saved once by LOONA’s sixth place loss because the members contracted COVID and couldn’t compete.
The losses have been demoralizing to Brave Girls. Minyoung, the group’s leader, feels especially fragile in confessionals. “The upsetting feelings will pile up and the girls will become discouraged,” she says solemnly. It’s hard, as a fan, to watch the group continually not receive the results they deserve, no matter how hard they try to push themselves. Perhaps the group’s biggest loss came in episode four when they performed Kep1er’s song “MVSK”. The group completely transformed the song into their quintessential “Brave sound”. It stands, next to Hyoloyn’s performance, as my favorite. Yet in the results session, Brave Girls and Kep1er were both in the bottom two. The girls shook their heads with tears in their eyes as Taeyeon, the show’s Grand Master, revealed the results. Sixth place went to Brave Girls.
In the confessional, Minyoung, the group’s leader with a powerful voice, cried softly. “I’m so happy that we got to do a custom-made performance just for us,” she said as tears rolled down her cheeks. “But when outcomes turn out this way, at the moment I get upset about it.” She lifted her tissue to her eyes to dab away the tears.
“I’m only human, you know?”
The Brave Girls story is built on perseverance.
Although the original Brave Girls lineup debuted in 2011, the current members debuted in 2016 with “Deepened.” “At the time, our concept was a bit of a breakthrough. We wore athleisure [clothes], tanned ourselves, and intensely filled in our eyebrows. Our CEO told us, ‘Hey, you guys are the best. This time, you’re really going to do well. Believe in me,’” Yujeong explained in 2021. “We came out so confidently but everyone looked at us confusedly. It felt like we were ahead of the time. Then ‘High Heels’ came out with a bright concept, but that didn’t do well either.”
Brave Girls performed at every music variety show that would have them, but after five years, the girls began to doubt if they would ever find success. “Our team is not young. I’m the second oldest and I’m 31 [in Korean age],” she continued. “Between the members, we said, ‘We can’t do this much longer. It’ll be better to end this quickly.’”
Money was a concern. Even though they were idols, the agency provided the girls with a dormitory and food, but they did not have enough of a wage to live decently. They knew a decision would need to be made soon about their future, so the group’s leader Minyoung decided to reach out to Brave Brothers and explain their situation.
"After talking with the members, I sent our CEO a long message that's like a letter. I explained, 'we're getting older and are now in our thirties, but we don't have a career. And our bank accounts are continuing to face overdrafts,’” Minyoung recalled. “‘We still have lingering feelings for this work, but the members are thinking to each go our own separate ways. I think you need to make a decision.' All we could do was part-time jobs."
The group felt defeated. No matter how hard they tried or how much they performed, they never could find the success they needed to continue. But there was one comment that stuck with Yujeong and foreshadowed what was to come. “When we made a comeback last year, someone wrote, ‘Guys, don’t give up.’ There was no response [to our release] so that really touched me. I screenshot that and still have it saved. I cried a bit by myself in our dorm. I thought, ‘At least there’s one person who is still supporting us.'”
Then, in the first week of March 2021, a video was uploaded to YouTube. It was a compilation video of the “Rollin’” performances Brave Girls brought to South Korean troops. In every video, the audience of South Korean uniformed men lost their minds screaming the lyrics and cheering for the girls. Overlaid the girls' stages were comments from Korean social media praising the girls.
“Number 1 on the ‘South Korean Military Billboard Chart,'’” joked one person. “I learned this song from my seniors in the military and taught it to my juniors before I was discharged,” reminisced another. “Rollin’”, one commenter said, would unite the Koreas.
Almost instantly, to the girls’ shock, the video went viral. But Brave Girls were cautious. “That’s how low our self-esteem was. We just thought, ‘Nothing we do will work out, because nothing the four of us have done so far has worked out. Let’s not do this and just work normally,” Yujeong remembered.
But “Rollin’” sustained momentum. On March 14, 2021, Brave Girls stood on the winner’s stage at Inkigayo, for the first time in the top three. As the votes poured in and the girls were announced as the week’s winner, Eunji, Yuna and Yujeong covered their mouths in shock and began to cry. Minyoung looked the most taken aback. Almost reflexively she touched her mouth as her eyes widened. Slowly, she lifted her microphone to speak then threw her head back and gasped. Then she began to sob. On the encore stage, Yuna continued to cry with each girl filling in for lines when they weren’t choked up. Even now, I can’t watch the stage without shedding a few tears.
Minyoung recalled, “We couldn’t believe that a song that we released so long ago was suddenly back on the music charts. We were bewildered and didn’t know how to react.”
Eunji, the group’s lead dancer, agreed, “We never dreamed that ‘resurgence’ was a word that could apply to us. This song is four years old, but so many people showed it love that we ranked No. 1 on Bugs and entered Melon’s 24Hits.”
In the span of a month, Brave Girls went from a nugu girl group on the brink of disbandment to the nation’s top group. Then came the pressure to maintain it.
All eyes were on Bave Girls when they entered the room on QUEENDOM 2.
“Look,” a WJSN member said as Minyoung sat down. “She’s got a designer bag.”
The bag was not just a status symbol. Brave Brothers, the CEO and girls’roducer, promised the girls they would receive designer bags if they got a number one hit. In return, they were given Chanel designer bags which they unboxed in a YouTube video.
Brave Girls entered QUEENDOM 2 as underdogs. Though they had designer bags and a number one single, they did not have the resources or experiences of many of their peers. They had not toured; they had only performed at an award show the previous month; and only a year earlier they were on the brink of disbandment.
Brave Girls had expectations they wanted to work around. They were eager to prove to an international audience that they were more than the “Rollin’” girls. So, in the first episode, they boldly chose to perform “Chi Mat Ba Ram”, their single from last year’s “Summer Queens” EP, and only added “Rollin’” as a snippet at the end of the performance.
This deliberate action turned out to be a mistake though. The girls placed fifth overall, only one spot ahead of LOONA who were automatically placed sixth for not performing due to COVID. In the results portion of the episode, the girls looked grim but not surprised. This was familiar territory.
When the girls lost again after revamping “MVSk”, they seemed bewildered. Nothing was working again.
“Were we really that bad?” Yujeong asked, perplexed.
It wasn’t until the third round that the girls began to find a redemption arc. Vindication came in the form of Hyolyn, the soloist with lungs that could shatter glass and a quiet confidence that was both admirable and enviable. She chose Minyoung to work with her on the collaboration stage for vocalists. Minyoung, overcome with emotion, knew this was her group’s chance. Hyolyn was on a roll: She had won the previous two episodes. The crown was hers for the taking.
“My confidence is very low right now, to be honest,” Minyoung said. She had only recently recovered from COVID and the effects still ravaged her voice. Her usually pristine, sharp instrument was instead fragile. “But with my condition being fragile as well, the pressure feels much harder.”
“I think your issue is more of a psychological issue,” Hyolyn told her. She had to believe she would do great, Hyolyn reminded her. “You have to be brazen.” But Hyolyn wanted to support Minyoung, too. As women in their thirties who also happened to be leaders of their groups, they shared an understanding of the burdens a leader could carry. Hyolyn chose “To My Youth” as the song they would perform. She asked Minyoung to reach deep inside of herself to find the emotions she carried for years when the group struggled.
The lyrics first lines are powerful and reflect the pressures Hyolyn and Minyoung felt, not only as leaders, but as young idols
At some point, I used to wish I would disappear from this world
The whole world seemed so dark and I cried every night
Will I feel better if I just disappeared?
I was so afraid of everyone’s eyes on me
“I’m the type who struggles to open up about my problems,” Minyoung confided in Hyolyn. “I have a responsibility in my group, and roles I have to fulfill.” She had to be strong for her members, especially in the darkest moments.
“In the past, I never told my members I was having a hard time, not even once” Hyolyn empathized. “My members never saw me cry. I felt my members would break down if they saw weakness. So I endured until the very end.”
Minyoung nodded. “Out of responsibility.” she said.
“I think that’s the weight the leader has to carry,” Hyolyn observed. “The only time I can show it is when I sing.”
Brave Girls are no stranger to adversity. But I was so moved by 33, the group name Hyolyn and Minyoung chose. Here, two leaders came together and shared their vulnerabilities. But Hyolyn’s encouragement is everything I wish Brave Girls could hear. She told Minyoung, both with the song choice and with her decision to work with her, “You are seen. I value your talent.” This was affirming not just to Minyoung, but Brave Girls as a whole. And as a narrative arc? There couldn’t be better TV.
And finally, Brave GIrls placed second for the ballad portion. When Eunji paired with LOONA for the dance portion of the round for “Desire”, a song that no one - except Eunji - wanted, they scored first place. Doubt them all you want but never count Brave Girls out, I found myself thinking.
They were back in the competition.
Brave Girls’ last comeback was “Thank You” on March 14. It was meant to be a celebratory song before they headed to QUEENDOM 2, so it felt a bit meta: It’s a single only Brave Girls could release within the context they existed as a group. The last year had been a whirlwind for the girls, but they knew this wasn’t sheer luck. Now more than one person believed in them.
“I wanna say thank you/ A million times wouldn’t be enough,” they sing in the chorus. “I’m feeling your love/ Stay with me by my side.” QUEENDOM 2 has not been an easy experience, but as Minyoung reflected with Hyolyn, Brave Girls have never had an easy go of things.
After all, the key to their success is in their name: They’re brave.
SOURCES:
"I had unloaded my luggage from the dormitory..." Brave Girls' Yoojung's 'Rollin' running in reverse
Brave Girls Shares Their Thoughts On Sudden Chart Resurgence Of Their Song “Rollin'”
QUEENDOM episodes 1 - 6
Brave Girls unbox the promised Chanel bags given by Brave Brothers for getting #1
