Things You Gotta Do: Go to a KPop Concert

Ok, this is kind of a hybrid "Things You Gotta Do" and "KPop Slam" post, but bear with me.

Not that kind of bear!

So, if you don't know by now, KPop fans are some of the absolute girliest, girl-tastic, grily girl girls in the WORLD.

Find a boy... I DARE YOU!

As I have said before, learning to love the sugar-coated, chocolate-dipped, cotton candy cloud-riding unicorn that is KPop makes your life in Korea EXCEPTIONALLY more tolerable. You get excited when a make-up store blasts your favorite KPop band. It helps you appreciate the Korean popular culture more and gives you intense insight into just why Koreans are completely and hopelessly obsessed with plastic surgery (ok, I guess I know what my next blog post is going to be). You can giggle at the ladies with their sex-driven aegyo, and drool over the sexiest men to ever grace the Korean gene pool.

It's totally true... I don't know why you're looking at me like that...

So when my friends and I heard that there was a KPop festival going down at Incheon's Olympic Stadium (Incheon is an island off the coast of Seoul, it's where Seoul's real airport is and it's reachable by Seoul's subway system). and that the tickets were a whopping 50 cents for foreigners we were SO THERE!

My friend C also taught at an all girls high school last year. The two of us and the Kimchi Queen also lived in the same neighborhood. Our routine was to get together after school and bitch about KPop videos, gush of KPop men, and sing the songs in our terrible, broken Korean.

SOY UN DORITO!

C and I also have a habit of imbibing too much soju (wait... that's a thing?) and reenacting our favorite music videos infront of people, often in very public places. When she and I heard that SHINee was going to be at this concert, we just about crapped our pants with excitement.

C and I love them because they are, hands down, the best dancers in KPop

I really can't imagine why KQ likes them.

The festival was a pretty big thing. There were 18 groups performing. Among them were huge names like IU, BAP, Infinite, SHINee, BoA, 4Minute, and KARA as well as some new-ish groups and some solo artists. The crowd was decent. There was a huge VIP section on the ground of the stadium, where us foreigners were firmly situated. I am pretty sure that they only made the tickets so cheap for us because they wanted to show footage of a big pile of westerners in order to convince the rest of the world that the Korean Wave is actually a thing (Oh, well, there's another thing I need to post about, damn it's been a long time).

One of the best parts of the concert was the fact that SeungHyun was with me. SeungHyun does not typically listen to KPop, but he appreciates it. And, let me tell you, he REALLY got into some of the performers. He was doing a lot of the dance moves to IU and knew most of the words to many of the more famous songs. However, nothing he did could match the amount of freaking out C and I did once SHINee hit the stage. We know almost all of the dance to their song "Sherlock" and I'm shocked that we didn't just jump up and do it with them. We screamed our favorite lines at each other and were so shocked that their dancing is just as amazing live as it was in the video.

Visual Approximation

The girls in the crowd were adequately young, girly, and swooning over their favorite groups. They all had the stereotypical Korean fan signs (black background with neon letters, laminated, I really don't know how they make those posters so damn well) and the stereotypical "I'm going to die if he looks at me" look in their eyes. At one point, during BoA's performance (solo female singer), one of the members of SHINee got on stage and was sexually abused by her pretty thoroughly. I'm positive at least one girl in the crowd fainted.

The only downside to this concert was that it was being taped for SBS MTV. This meant that it was super staged, super timed, and super short. None of the performers got to really show off their personality or their playfulness. The well known groups only did two songs (EVEN SHINEE ONLY DID TWO, I WAS READY TO RIOT!!!) and the lesser known groups did one song. I don't think I got the full KPop experience. I'm planning on going to the Busan Fireworks Festival and, hopefully, storming the stage at the Big Bang and PSY concert happening the night before the Fireworks. Yes, that's right, I might be seeing Big Bang...

I might see Big Bang...

The only KPop band I am a 100% legitimate fan of.

Which means that I'll be "close" to T.O.P. ...

... those...

... eyebrows...

NOT FOR LONG YOU WON'T BE!!!

And PSY!!!

I assure you, if I get tickets to this concert, I will be horsey-ing allll the way to Busan

So a visual of this concert is perfectly summed up in this:

Seungri of Big Bang doing the Gangnam Style

And the entire concert I will look like this:

Visual Approximation

IT. MUST. HAPPEN!