Girls' Generation turned years of trainee grind into a K-pop landmark
Before Girls' Generation ever stepped on stage, one member had sat through about 200 auditions and another had trained for five years, left for a rival agency and been recruited back. Their 2009 single Gee then held the top spot on a major Korean chart show for nine straight weeks.
The group was assembled by SM Entertainment through a slow trainee system. Jessica and her sister were spotted in a shopping mall in 2000; Hyoyeon danced her way in at an open audition that same year; Seohyun, the youngest, was approached on the subway and auditioned singing children's songs. Taeyeon, later the leader, won a company singing contest in 2004, while Tiffany came through a casting call in Los Angeles. Sunny, first a trainee in 1998, returned in 2007 on a colleague's recommendation as the final addition.
They debuted on August 5, 2007, with Into the New World, but the breakthrough came with the Gee EP in January 2009. Its title track dominated the music show Music Bank for a record run that only Psy's Gangnam Style beat in 2012, and it became the best-selling Korean single of 2009. Tour tickets for the Seoul shows sold out in three minutes. The 2010 album Oh! made them the only female act to win the Golden Disc award for album of the year.
Japan was the next target. Their Japanese version of Gee became the first single by a foreign girl group to crack the Oricon top three since 1980, and their first Japanese album topped the chart, sold half a million copies in a month and in time reached a million shipped, a first for any girl group from outside Japan. Their first arena tour there drew 140,000 people.
The name translates as generation of girls, and because it is built from Chinese roots it sounds similar in Japanese and Mandarin. Fans shorten it to SNSD or SoShi. The line-up dropped from nine to eight when Jessica left in September 2014. Billboard called them the top K-pop girl group of the decade in 2017, and after a five-year break for solo work they returned with Forever 1 in 2022. At home they carry the nickname the Nation's Girl Group.
Source: Girls' Generation
