A Rough Timeline of Block B’s time with Stardom
I’m a fan who’s been with them since before debut. This post may act as a reminder for some of you fellow BBCs, it may also be one which opens your eyes, and it can be entirely new knowledge from some of you.
It’s basically to remind and let some of you know how Stardom has always been a shitty ass company. I’ll make a seperate post on Cho PD and how he won us fans over and practically cheated both us and the boys.
Here we go.
I’m not sure when they fuse happened or if its been like this from the start but when Block B were trainees and when Block B debuted, they were under Brand New Stardom, which was a shared company between what is now Brand New Music and Stardom. It was sometime in August(?) If I’m not wrong that the 2 decided to split into what they are now cause clearly theres a lot of disagreements between both parties and hey, look at who’s better at managing now ~BNM~
Cho PD has always had a bad rep in the industry despite being recognised as the godfather of rap in korea. This heavily affected Block B during their time with Stardom.
During their first performance in Inkigayo, Block B fans couldn’t even enter the venue to support them, and Block B’s performance wasn’t even aired. Most of Block B’s stages were cut to 2 minutes while B1A4 which debuted during the same time period as them and were from a new company could perform full songs and even do follow-up promotions. You can’t compare struggle to current time where there’s more than double the number of groups.
Quite often Block B’s songs would be banned for no reason. Even when they’d make changes to their lyrics, the song would get banned anyway. And in the case of their song “ Did you or did you not? ” they were banned under assumption that the song was sex related when what it implied was a girl was cheating.
Things only started to brighten up for BLock B because, luckily, MTV was on their side and was infact quite biased to them, giving them as much airtime as possible which led them to gaining more fans.
It was during Nanlina did Block B finally get some recognition as the song was loved by the public but then came the dreaded Thailand issue. While BBCs sent in messages to Block B and the company to issue an apology for the incident, no action was taken. Instead an article blew up, misleading the context of the video (where most people still would disagree and say they said wrong), also leading to Nichkhun and his 2PM friends almost destroying Block B’s career.
ONLY THEN did Stardom want to issue and apology, after all the damage is made, after scars were left on the members.
Why didn’t they issue it earlier? It’s been said that it’s highly suspected that Stardom may have wanted to use the issue as noise media but it exploded in their faces.
With this scandal, Stardom lost a big number of their staff as well as their trainees. Infact the staff that left were the ones who knew how to do things. So yes, sadly, Stardom was better before. And so, they hired new staff? and guess what? That didn’t exactly work out very well for them.
Soon after, Zico is announced to be diagnosed with vocal nodules. Fucking joke. Boy went missing for months while other idols who go through the same condition show up after a month and at least make appearances. In Zico’s case he practically dissapears. All signed goods didn’t include his signature anymore. The rest of the members are forced to promote as they are.
What most people don’t realise is that Zico had actually left the group during that time. Many bought into the statement that he was sick. Reality was, he wasn’t being paid for his work, the whole of Block B wasn’t being paid, Stardom refused to and he made an exit. The time period when Block B was performing was to test the waters without him and allow fans to be more used to not having him around.
Sounds familiar? Seogoong. Stated as sick. Dissapeared for the longest time, more excuses were brought up and next thing we knew, he’s been moved to UnderDogg. Long time period with performances excluding him was most likely to have fans become used to his absence.
Back to Zico. Block B had the upperhand in their situation. They had some recognition, and Zico in general was already making a name for himself. Stardom also knew very well that without Zico, things would be difficult and he himself knew it. With that, Zico actually came back and this was when Stardom made half of the payment required to Block B. If you line-up the timelines right, it is exactly then that Kyung started to wear his face mask. Boy finally got funds to do work on his biggest complex.
If you still don’t believe Zico left, Stardom made it seem that he was too sick to do anything, yet he was spotted meeting friends and hanging out with Mino. He also started gaining weight, probably because he was finally allowed to eat like a normal person and not an idol. Do you guys know of the song from Block B “ Close My Eyes” ? It was basically a sign showing he was leaving. We all know very well that Block B songs contain a lot of parts for Zico alone, reason mainly being that he produces their music, is a perfectionist and is the type to be like “ if you can’t do it, i’ll do it ”. When it came to this track, he had the shortest part ever? and it was very strange. ** Correction : Track was produced by Kyung, not Zico. That doesn’t change what’s been stated below.
Not credible enough to be used as proof?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RxzPp5Wio8 During Block B’s Blockbuster Comeback Showcase, before it started, Stardom made a huge booboo :) When they played Close Your Eyes, all of Zico’s parts were replaced by P.O. both the intro and his rap.
Zico could’ve stayed out of the group. When he left he already had things set for him but he came back to bail out the boys. Infact, it was said that NLLMB was going to be his last time with Block B but the boys made the decision to take action upon the company.
I’m going to make a cut in here about EvoL. A group that was originally meant to be a female Block B but they took their words back after debut #ok Clearly all of Stardom’s funds came from Block B and so they decided to fund EvoL using that. Remember Get Up? The ridiculously short-ass comeback song which had everyone in confusion. What I suspect is that they originally wanted to have an EvoL comeback with a bang, an MV for both an intro song and their title track but Block B dropped a bomb on Stardom, causing Stardom to not have the funds to use on EvoL thus having them only having 3 tracks an MV for their - what was originally their intro track. Either that or they had no choice but make an MV for Get Up. And so, EvoL practically dissappeared into the dungeon afterwards.
Back to Block B.
During the lawsuit mess, we managed to find out how Block B’s parents were made to use their money to help fund the boys when it was the company’s job to do so.
Eventually Block B managed to be done with Stardom’s ass and once they were under 7Seasons, wow, within the first mnth they were doing better than their entire career in Stardom.
This was back then. Sad to say that Stardom has become way way way way way worse now and EvoL is still a victim, ToppDogg is a victim and Stardom still has the damn nerve to have plans to debut new groups.
Fucking bye.
Originally I was one of those who first found out about new Stardom trainees, I’d be digging up whatever info I could of them, so I followed EvoL pretty religiously and I even followed the TD boys predebut up from when Hansol was first on twitter till when Jiho appeared., but as soon as all the Stardom shit happened, I dropped TD during predebut cause I didn’t want to get into any other messes. But heck I came back and boy do I regret it.
I probably missed out some points from this post but I’ll probably reblog when I need to add on anything else.
Till then. Ta.
Also I apologise for typos/missing words. I can’t be arsed to proof read cause I am tired and frustrated.
PS. Please understand why ToppDogg and EvoL fans are mad with Mino. It’s not so much “ omg he dissed my idols! ” but more like he made an arsey statement about something that he of all people would know better about since 1) He was once under Stardom, 2) He was once a nugu in BoM 3) He keeps in contact with Block B members so he knows VERY WELL what went down in Stardom after he left. If you think I’m an anti, you’re silly cause I’ve been rooting for Mino since 2011. Boy is bitter with Stardom but :(
