Be the Sun Tour
The Seventeen Concert (And a Bit on Fangirl Culture)
This post is the last of three posts I’m writing about live music. You can read the first one here and the second one here. Thank you for reading <3
I’ve always had an obsessive personality. My first fandom was probably High School Musical and the Disney Channel Universe circa 2005 to 2011 (young me did, in fact, analyze this video for proof that Joe Jonas and Taylor Swift were dating).
From then on, I discovered Tumblr and cycled through countless fandoms, including but not limited to: The Hunger Games (Team Peeta, but also Finnick supremacy), Teen Wolf (Justice for Kira), and Glee (Faberry…). Some may say that being a Gleek is one of my defining personality traits to this day.
This obsessive personality peaked with One Direction from the years 2012 to 2016. I was a Liam girl (unfortunate). I literally sat through all of 1D Day, a seven-hour long livestream held to promote their third album, Midnight Memories. I was there for all the lore, and honestly, still am.
This is all to say, me becoming a K-pop stan should not have come as a surprise to anyone.
I’ve been making my way through Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It by Kaitlyn Tiffany, which is a look into fandom culture and its larger influence on the internet through the scope of the One Direction fandom. I’m not finished with it yet, but from what I’ve read so far, I have felt very Seen. Bands come and go, but fangirls are forever.
I’ve questioned why I fell into K-pop, especially after I told myself that there will never be another group I’ll be as invested in as One Direction (and in many ways, there won’t be). When I entered college, I really felt like I left fan culture behind. Sure, I still liked things, but I wasn’t a fangirl anymore. I gave away much of my memorabilia during the minimalism era of the late 2010s. I deleted my Tumblr and stan Twitter.
But after leaving college, I realized that during those four years, the thing I kept searching for but couldn’t quite find was community. Despite all the clubs and extracurricular activities I involved myself in, I don’t think I was ever truly able to immerse myself in a space where I felt completely open and comfortable. When the pandemic hit less than a year after graduating, this absence in my life became more apparent.
What makes K-pop the perfect subject for those who lean towards obsession is that it’s basically non-stop. It’s the norm for a group to release multiple albums or singles in a year, referred to as a ‘comeback.’ A purchase of an album doesn’t just come with a CD, but also a photobook, photocard, postcard, sticker sheet, and in some cases, a fragrance card and a highlighter. The same album has different versions of all these inclusions, regardless if it matches the subject of the song. There are services that fans subscribe to to receive text messages from their favorite idols. There is a bustling trading-and-selling community for K-pop-related goods.
To sum it up…it’s a lot! It’s a capitalist money-making machine and it sucks you in. And where did I find myself in fall of 2020, with too much time on my hands? Being sucked in.
For all the good fandoms can bring, there’s also a lot of toxicity, witnessed both in my Directioner and K-popper days. People are always arguing! Companies only see us as dollar signs! Idols don’t really know us and we don’t really know them, but many are convinced otherwise! I’ve never seen the phrase ‘you need to touch grass’ thrown around more, hypocritically in many cases.
But despite it all, I still find myself drawn to being a fan. As Tiffany’s book points out, “Though the criticism of fangirls is that they become tragically selfless and one-track-minded, the evidence available everywhere I look is that they become self-aware and creatively free.” And there has never been greater evidence of that than attending a K-pop concert.
I saw my favorite K-pop group, Seventeen, perform twice this year on their “Be the Sun” tour. I oddly felt very anxious before the first show, brimming with adrenaline, but also this nervous energy, like I needed to live in this moment because I never knew when I would see this group again.
This self-imposed pressure meant I also felt the pressure to be a fan, in all senses of the word. My friend and I lamented for months about concert outfits, before we decided to recreate looks inspired by their songs (she did “HOT,” I did “GAM3 BO1” and “_WORLD”). We made a sign with a fandom inside joke, in the hopes of getting noticed by the jumbotron (we were snubbed). My other friend and I handed out freebies—free fanmade items (photocards, keychains, rings, etc.)—before the show started.
And the truly cool thing about all this? A lot of other fans were doing the same thing. People recorded Tik Toks of themselves dancing to Seventeen songs in their concert outfits. Fans organized special events at cafés (called ‘cupsleeves’) to celebrate the group’s first U.S. tour since 2019. I received some of the coolest fanmade merch—ticket stubs, decals, and my favorite, a Seventeen Metrocard, an homage to the venue city. Fans dedicated all this time, work, and creativity into these things with the awareness that, at the end of the day, this was all just for a show.
Throughout this live music writing series, I’ve romanticized live music experiences because I think they’re worth romanticizing. To realize that this is the only time you’ll be able to see this artist perform these songs in this current moment of your life. In a chapter of Tiffany’s book dissecting what it means for fangirls to scream, really scream, at concerts, she writes, “We knew that our lives would not be fantasies, except for the fact that they were right now. When we shrieked, it was at the knowledge that the moment would end.”
I know obsessions come and go. Things run their course, both the obsessing and the obsession itself. When I saw Seventeen live, this was a thought that floated through my mind; after all, it’s not my first time stanning a group.
So I danced, cried, and screamed. I lost my voice and stayed up too late debriefing with friends, riding out that post-concert high together. It’s all a reminder that this is fun. It’s fun to go all out, to have friends who’ll match that energy, and to be in a fanbase that welcomes it too.
During the encore of a Seventeen concert, there’s an agreement between Seventeen and their fans, Carats, to participate in something called “Never Ending Aju Nice.” Like the name suggests, a portion of the song, “Very/Aju Nice,” is repeated a minimum of five times.
When the members take their final bows and leave the stage and you think the show’s over? Nope! Suddenly, the stage lights are flashing back on and they’re running back out, launching into the chorus yet again. As a Carat, your duty is to sing and jump along (they’ll literally call you out if you don’t).
It’s honestly a bit bizarre describing it, because it is a bizarre tradition. That’s, like, ten minutes of the same song.
But those who get it, get it, and indulge in it. Because you might as well.
Some recs:
My favorites: GAM3 BO1, Left & Right, Wave, _WORLD, Snap Shoot
Songs I cried to: Our Dawn is Hotter Than Day, Rock With You
Songs I let out the most visceral scream to when they started: 2 MINUS 1
Vernon of Seventeen’s Solo Mixtape, “Black Eye” (drops 12/23!)
This concludes my live music series of 2022! Thank you for reading. Talking about stan culture has never been more cathartic. Read the first post about Monumentour, the co-headlining Fall Out Boy & Paramore concert, here, and the second post about Lorde here.
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