K-pop: willful ignorance required.

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(written December 13, 2023)

I have a new K-pop favorite.  They are the 7-member group called TAN.  They pronounce it T-A-N.  I love their song “Heartbeat.”  Here is a recent photo of this band.

I do not know their names, ages, nicknames, or who their leader is.  I do not know their Myers-Briggs personality types or zodiac signs.  I do not know when they debuted or made any comebacks.  I do not know who the maknae is.  I do not know what their official fan base is called or what the official fan chants are.  And for the first time since I fell down this K-pop rabbit hole, I have zero interest in finding out.  Trust me, it’s because I love this band.  It’s for the best.

I will not watch any interviews with them.  I will not watch them play with puppies for Buzzfeed or play Post it or Ghost It for Seventeen Magazine.  I will not read the fan comments below each video where some dedicated, devoted worshipper, God bless her passionate little heart,  has posted time stamps from the video with the name of each member so we can learn who’s who. 

I do not care if the fans hate the group’s record label.  I do not want to know how these guys work out, if they skip leg day, what their skincare routine is, if they like spicy food, or any opinion they have on any topic ever.

I will make it my 2024 New Year’s Resolution – nay, my mission in life – to not ever learn a single thing about this band.

And they should take that as a compliment.  I want it stated for the record that I am doing this so I can continue to enjoy their songs.  I ignore because I love.

It’s just too much.  There is too much information out there about all these groups.  When I was growing up, the internet hadn’t been invented yet. To this day, I can’t get my head around that.  I actually grew up before people had cell phones, cable TV, internet, and social media.  Streaming channels did not exist.  Personal computers and VCRs didn’t come along until I was in high school.  Now, as an adult, there are days when I actually wonder why I didn’t just die. 

Sorry.  I got off track there. 

But seriously, how did I live?  I had a driver’s license for almost a decade before I had a cell phone with GPS.  I was constantly getting lost.  I would write down directions on paper before I went anywhere and squint at them while I was driving.  I literally should be dead right now.  My corpse should be at the bottom of a ravine somewhere, with the directions to Myrtle Beach scribbled on a piece of paper pinned underneath me and the rusting shell of my car wedged among some boulders in the creek 50 more feet down.  I should have been featured on that missing persons show on the Investigation Discovery Channel the day it premiered.

OK.  I’m OK.  Really, I’m OK.  What the hell was I talking about?

Right.  These guys.

When I was growing up, there was no internet yet.  Which means that when I found artists I really liked by seeing them on The Donny and Marie Show, or Solid Gold, or when they were a special musical guest on Happy Days or The Love Boat, the only way I could learn about them was to go to the newsstand at the grocery store and pick up magazines with names like Tiger Beat or BOP or SuperTeen and read things like how I could win a date with one of them.  These were actual printed articles about how one of these artists, like Leif Garrett, Rick Springfield, or Shaun Cassidy, could wind up going on a date with little ten year-old me from Waynesboro, Virginia.  These magazines were not helpful is what I’m saying.

Except for the posters.  All the magazines had posters that I would tape to my wall.  I did read the articles, but the “fun facts” about the artists were dubious, even to an innocent teenybopper like me.  I would read sentences written by actual adults that said Andy Gibb was lonely sometimes, but he was looking for a girl just like me.  In reality, Andy Gibb was married to his high school sweetheart back in Australia.  Those magazines LIED to me.

Things are very different today.  I felt myself spiral when Jungkook from BTS did a Weverse Live from his apartment and gave us a detailed rundown of all his dog Bam’s health problems.  The teen magazines of my youth wouldn’t even tell me that Andy Gibb was married, and forty years later, I’m watching Bam the Doberman poop in the middle of Jungkook’s luxury condo in the middle of Seoul.  I’m too embarrassed to be on camera for Zoom meetings at work unless I’ve vaccumed that day.

Just from bored web browsing during my lunch hours at work, I know that Monsta X was formed on a reality survival show, which seems like a bizarre way to put a band together.  Was this the same kind of survival reality show we have in the States?  Actual wilderness survival shows?  How do the judges determine the winners?  If seven of you don’t get eaten by wolves, you get to be in a K-pop group? 

I also know that Junho from 2pm holds the record for breaking the biggest number of chopsticks with his butt.  

I want to pour bleach on my brain to erase the YouTube video proving this. 

Some of the random tidbits I know just frustrate me.  The name of the fan group for The Boyz is just The B (which has a rather negative meaning in English), but one of the names they considered was The Fanz.  How perfect would that have been?  I could have been a part of The Fanz, but instead I get called The B.  I still love The Boyz, but now I want to punch them in the face. 

My brain is now full of information I have no business knowing, like the blood types of the group Seventeen.  I mean, I don’t have them memorized, but I know that if I’m ever in a serious car accident, and the paramedics are insane people who believe I can only receive a blood donation from a K-pop idol, they can Google which band member’s blood type is compatible with mine while I bleed out on the highway. 

Enough.  At some point, I have to say enough. 

In fact, I see this as an interesting challenge.  A K-pop social experiment.  Objectively, I know it’s possible to enjoy a band’s music and videos without knowing a single thing about them.  But with the barrage of information on the internet, which is the very tool I need to even hear their music and see their videos in the first place, is it even possible to avoid learning anything about them?  Is it possible to be willfully 100% ignorant about a band I love?  I mean, I did not plan on knowing that a human being could break chopsticks with his ass, but here we are. 

So, TAN, you are my experiment. 

Thank you for your great song, “Heartbeat.”  Thank you for any other songs I find by you that I also love.  I will put them on my playlist and powerwalk happily around the neighborhood to them.  I will dance to them while cleaning my apartment.  I will sing along while running errands.  You are talented and fun.

Now go away.  And if you see any of The Boyz on your way out, please tell them The B wants to see them in her office.    

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Fan chants: Carefully rehearsed spontaneous fun

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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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