OPM icon Celeste Legaspi sparks online debate after praising SB19 while expressing reservations about BINI, leading Blooms to defend the nation’s girl group.
A festival slot, a TV debut, a Spotify feature, and a sold-out CD, all in one week. SB19 is building Japan deliberately, not just touring through it.
Four days. That’s how long it took SB19 to go from pop group to instrument of Philippine tourism policy. On July 26, the Department of Tourism named the five-member act as the country’s newest tourism ambassadors. Four days later, on July 30, they walked onto the Allianz Stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago and became the first homegrown Filipino act to ever play the festival. Two headlines, four days apart, and they’re not really two stories. They’re the same story, told first by the government and then by a hundred thousand people at Grant Park. The Set That Made It Real Whatever the DOT announcement meant on paper, Lollapalooza is the part that had to be earned in front of a crowd that had no obligation to care. SB19 — Pablo, Josh, Stell, Ken, and Justin — opened their hour-long set with “DAM,” moving straight into “GENTO,” the song that’s done more than any other to put P-pop on non-Filipino radars. They dropped a new single, “LAWLESS,” the same day, released as a standalone track rather …
