The Punk Defiance of 2NE1

2NE1 debuted in 2009 and faced sexist comments about their appearance. Today, the group stands as a symbol of empowerment and autonomy .

2NE1 at Coachella; Sandra Park’s Instagram

Fifteen years ago today, 2NE1 broke into K-Pop as a renegade kind of girl group. Led by the brash CL (born Lee Chaelin), Dara (born Sandra Park), Minzy and Park Bom, the women became a blueprint for girl groups to be wild, outspoken, and defiantly themselves.

Their time as a group was unfortunately short, clocking in at just seven years, but 2NE1’s impact has reverberated far beyond 2016 when their contracts officially ended at YG Entertainment. At their height, tracks like “I’m The Best” still sound as fresh today as in 2011 when it was released. The four women of 2NE1 made being punk in K-Pop cool. Their brash, ballsy music flipped a middle finger at the conventional good girl roles many girl groups portrayed. Where Girls Generation were seen as ideal older sisters, 2NE1 were defiant badasses. 

2NE1 normalized the bawdiness that groups like BLACKPINK or XG would later claim as their own. They made music that packed a punch and that left little room for subservience. This was unusual, particularly in K-Pop, where girls were often molded into wholesome images. Yet often when I watched 2NE1’s videos, I didn’t see a group made for the male gaze, but rather one that proclaimed the group’s autonomy. 

On their single “I Don’t Care”, which became the best selling single of 2009 on several South Korean networks, the girls dump a playboy who’s done them dirty. “All those girlfriends you call ‘friends’/ Don’t think of me the same way as them, I won’t let it ride,” they warn. This kind of track wasn’t unusual for 2NE1: The group thrived when they were confrontational.  

“I wouldn’t say we’re trendsetters, we just like to do something new,” CL told Complex Magazine in 2013. “Because it’s not fun when you’re doing something that’s already done. And telling people about it is also what gets us excited.” 

In interviews, the women were firm that they considered 2NE1 to be a mixture of genres. They might have been grounded in hip-hop, but their music could also be gritty and highly theatrical. It helped that the girls considered fashion an artform. “I just love art as a whole,” CL said in the same interview. Perhaps this is what also set them apart from other groups: Like labelmates BIGBANG, 2NE1 saw themselves as real artists. 

Yet, perhaps because the group was so oppositional to standard girl groups, they received a harsh amount of sexism and verbal abuse. “People, netizens were critiquing the fact that, you know, we were not the prettiest group,” Minzy told Billboard in 2018. 

CL once alleged that even YG’s own CEO Yang Hyun-sik called them “really ugly” on multiple occasions. For Minzy, the loneliness and depression hit her the hardest at the height of 2NE1’s fame.  “Life felt like just a stage,” she said in the same interview. “I didn’t know what my life was about; I wasn’t sure if life was better as a performer or if life would be better just alone.” She admitted that multiple times she had suicidal thoughts. 

“We were the ‘ugly group.’ I didn’t know how to process that, I held that in. It was tough. [As a group], we pretended it was not a big deal and tried to forget about it, but you can’t forget about it — it’s tough,” Minzy continued in the same interview. “I was trying to keep up with the other girls in the group in terms of maturity, but when you’re up against these girl groups who look like models and you’re doing something different — cool, but different — you deal in a different way.”

2NE1 lay dormant for six years following their disbandment in 2016. Minzy and CL both alleged that they found out about the group’s end through media reports. “I was at a Thanksgiving dinner and my phone blew up,” CL told AP Entertainment. “That was very heartbreaking for me.

K-Pop has undergone a number of changes since 2NE1 were at their height. YG Entertainment debuted BLACKPINK in 2015, and the group became a global icon of the Hallyu Wave when it finally crashed into the West. But groups were also beginning to experiment in ways that 2NE1 was once criticized for: XG, for example, is a well-studied girl group who even performed their own mashup of “I Am The Best” with “TGIF (Thank God I’m Fly)” at KCON, while girl groups like (G)I-DLE have critiqued gender roles and patriarchy in music. None of this would have been possible without 2NE1.

In the years since 2NE1’s disbandment, their legacy has grown to resemble revered legends. For many fans, known as Blackjacks, their time was cut all too short. In 2022, CL, who has enjoyed some success in North America as a soloist, was tapped to perform at the 88Rising set at Coachella. The set would include several rising stars in the Asian music scene, including Japanese superstar Hikaru Utada, as a way to highlight the amount of underappreciated Asian musicians. 

The members had kept in touch throughout the years, meeting at least once a year for dinners, but their performance was confirmed only one month prior to the festival. Everyone, CL told Billboard, was sworn to secrecy. “I was like, “You guys can’t tell; don’t tell your mom!” I don’t think Dara told her company,” she laughed in an interview with Billboard. 

When it came to deciding on a song, “I Am The Best” was “a no-brainer” for the group. There is perhaps no better song that encapsulates the energy and legacy of 2NE1 than this one. It’s not just high-energy but empowering, too. Revisiting it nearly ten years later, the group proved that even in the early 2010s, K-Pop was on to something fresher and more cutting edge than Western media assumed. 

For their performance, Minzy cut her hair off and Dara, who’s hair is longer than it was in 2011, styled it into a tall mohawk. Both women decided to pay homage to the looks they pioneered in 2011. The girls were styled by Alexander Wang, an intentional choice, CL said, to use an Asian designer. 

For many Blackjacks the Coachella performance symbolized what could be a new beginning. Many groups have won the trademark for their name recently, including INFINITE and GOT7. NINEMUSES, another girl group that was unfairly disparaged, even announced plans to record together again. Seeing the four women on stage together, older, wiser and more fiercely in control of their image, was emotional for me. But it was also revolutionary. It afforded the women the opportunity to continue their story on their own terms; to turn the page and remind fans that they are not done yet. 

“We left without explanation,” CL said in a vlog about the performance. “It matters to get together with our own will and meet them. We all follow our own path in different ways. We work at different agencies now, and we’re not in the same palace as we were in the beginning.”

After the show, the girls chose to not attend afterparties. Instead, they went back to their rental to play 2NE1’s music and dance together. This moment was theirs alone to share, and it was one that they thought was inconceivable only a few years prior. It was important, CL would later say, to be together as family. 

“We were just jamming to our songs, celebrating 2NE1 as a group and the whole team that made this happen,” CL said. “So we took it in a very intimate way to end a very, very meaningful day for us.”