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(written December 10, 2023)
Let’s talk about fan chants.
I spent the first several weeks of my K-pop education watching official music videos and loading up my playlist. Eventually, I switched over to some live performance videos of the songs I really liked.
I knew I’d
hear teenage girls screaming. That’s a
given in every culture. Pent-up teen
girl hormones being violently shaken awake by hot guys dancing and singing is a
universal language of its own. I’ve
never been a screamer myself (being raised in a religious household really did
a number on me), but I get it. Instead
of screaming, my pent-up teenage hormones came out through tears. I cried at a lot of concerts like I’d just
witnessed a puppy getting run over by a monster truck on my birthday. That’s the intensity of being a teenage
girl. If scientists could figure out how
to harness the energy of all teenage girls all at once, it would make a nuclear
bomb look like a tealight candle, so I sincerely hope scientists never try to
do that. Just forget I even mentioned
it.
So the screaming was expected. The chanting, however, was not. This is a big thing among Korean K-pop audiences. At certain points in each song, the screaming teenage girls suddenly started chanting in unison. The chants were in rhythm to the songs, and somehow all of these girls knew what to chant and when to chant it. My first impression was that it sounded like the chanting American kids of my generation did to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer (REINDEER!)
Had a very shiny nose (LIKE A LIGHT BULB!)
It sounded exactly like that, except in Korean, and to actual Kpop songs at an actual concert. And all I could think was, how do all these fans know what to chant? Why are they doing this instead of just singing along and screaming and crying like normal insane teenage girls?
It got a bit jarring in a live performance video
by The Boyz. The song, one of my
absolute favorites, is called “Watch It,” and it’s a dance track with a dangerously
cool sexy vibe. It’s sultry. It’s steamy.
My favorite line is in the second verse, when one of the boyz croons,
“Hi, hello, my name is what you want it to.”
It’s the hottest moment in the song.
And the internet is very well aware.
So you would think that when this line comes up in the live performance, the teenage girls would either faint dead away and have to be airlifted out, or just self-combust in a haze of furry cat ears and lip gloss. But no.
They have a chant for that part. And it kind of kills the sexy vibe.
Here it is, and when you read it, imagine the first part being sung seductively by a steamy male voice, and the chant being screamed by 40,000 extremely high-pitched young girl voices:
Hi (Hi!!!!)
Hello (HELLO!!!!!)
My name is what you want it to…
The whole time, these boyz are bumping and grinding, in direct contrast to the cheerful-sounding chants coming from thousands of female voices. It feels a little uncomfortable, like Prince performing “Darling Nikki” at a quinceañera. I had to wonder what this chanting would sound like at a concert of any other musical genre.
Elton John (singing): Goodbye, yellow brick road …
Audience: ROAD!!!
Elton John (startled): What the bloody hell?
Audience: BLOODY
HELL!!!
Elton John:
That’s it. This is definitely my
retirement tour.
Audience (shaking thousands of those LED light
stick thingies): RETIRE!!!! WHOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
(Elton flees the stage.)
I did a lot of Googling about chanting at K-pop
concerts, and it turns out that most of the chants are written by the record
companies and posted online for fans to learn before going to the concerts:
Another thing I learned is that some Kpop fans
are definitely not chant fans. I found a
Reddit post entitled “Fan chants and cheers during songs ruin live
performances,” and while the majority of the 56 commenters disagreed, the few
who did agree summed up how I initially felt about it:
While I agreed with the detractors at first, I did have another thought. Teen girls have a bigger need than finding ways to channel their confusing feelings. They have a need to belong. If you’re a socially awkward teenage girl who loves The Boyz, and you muster up the courage to go out in public and stand among a crowd while watching your favorite boyz perform live, there must be something comforting about chanting in unison with thousands of other people around you and realizing that they know exactly how you feel. You’re not so alone anymore. You suddenly have thousands of new best friends who all speak the same fan chant language.
I also remembered something else. I mentioned earlier that I’ve never been a
screamer, but I’d forgotten that I once tried to be. It was at my very first concert, January 1983,
when I was thirteen years old. The
performer was Adam Ant, one of the sex symbols of the 80s British New Wave.
I was so excited. I went with my best friend Cheryl and two other girls from school. Cheryl’s mom was our chaperone, which is the only reason Mom and Dad let me go. Of course, Cheryl’s mom didn’t make the best chaperoning decisions, which is why she didn’t say anything when the merch I bought was the official Adam Ant Pure Sex jersey, pictured above. I wore it to school the next day, and when Mom found out afterwards, I legitimately thought she was going to have a coronary.
But my point, if I can go back and find it somewhere – yes, here it is – is this: On our way to the venue, I had not considered the fact that this would be a concert full of screaming girls. Then we got there, the lights went out, and the show started. Suddenly the Raleigh Civic Center erupted in a deafening, eardrum-shattering cacophany of hysteria that sounds a million times scarier when you’re actually in it instead of watching it on a YouTube K-pop performance video. And because I could only withdraw inside of myself to try to ward off the panic, I was suddenly awkward and wondering what was wrong with me for not feeling compelled to scream like everyone else.
So I decided to give it a shot. I took a deep breath and tried to scream.
I will now try to describe the sound that came out of me.
You know when you’re in the passenger seat of your friend’s car, and while she’s driving, she’s talking to you about some crazy thing her boyfriend did, and you have this bad feeling that she’s not really paying 100% attention to the road, and there’s a stop sign coming up, and you know she has to see it, but she’s not slowing down, and you involuntarily go “aaaaaauuuuuuaaaahhhhhhh…..” in what starts at a low volume but gradually gets louder than the sound of the car engine and your friend’s voice combined, and then your friend FINALLY hits the brakes and gets annoyed and tells you to chill because she totally saw the stop sign, and you’re not sure if she really did or not, but you can finally stop making that noise because your life is no longer flashing before your eyes?
That was the sound.
So forget what I wrote earlier. I wish there had been officially sanctioned cheers for the Adam Ant concert. I am so genuinely happy for today’s teenage Kpop fans that there are official fan chants, as well as an internet over which they can learn these chants and arrive at the show ready to truly connect with their fellow fans instead of trying to scream and sounding like a dying hairdryer.
But I’d like to offer a parting thought, maybe just a bit of advice, to the record companies writing official fan chants to “Watch It” by The Boyz and any other songs with mature themes. A lot of the audience members doing these chants are kids. Maybe write something a little more appropriate:
Hi (Hi!!!!)
Hello (I NEED AN ADULT!!!)
My name is what you want it to… (‘K THANKS BYE!!!)
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