I've become a K-Pop fan, but don't try to shame me about it because it won't work - I am not ashamed.
I dabbled slightly in K-Pop before the Quarantine started, but I didn't self-identify as a K-Pop fan. Now? Now things are different. Now I self-identify as ARMY, CARAT, MOA, ENGENE, and starting to even work into becoming STAY as well.
For those of you not up to speed on the K-Pop lingo, that was a list of band fandom names. BTS fans are ARMY, Seventeen fans are CARAT, Tomorrow x Together (TxT) fans are MOA, Enhypen fans are ENGENE, and Stray Kids fans are STAY.
I don't have a long history of being a devoted fan to many bands. I tend to chose my music by song and not by any sense of loyalty to an artist or group. Over the years, there have been a few exceptions - The Corrs, N'Sync, anything by Cirque du Soleil - but I never followed any of those artists to the degree that I've started following these K-Pop bands during Quarantine.
I listen to songs from these bands EVERY DAY. I watch videos of their performances, their interviews, their variety show appearances, and even episodes of their dedicated reality shows. I have a Spotify playlist full of nothing but the songs that I like enough that I want to stream them multiple times to help their ratings. I paid nearly $50 for a live stream pay per view online concert event. Folks.... this is new territory for me. I mean, I'm certainly no young teenage girl using the cute guys in her favorite band as her safe one sided first crush. Yes, I admit that most of the guys in the bands I follow are very visually appealing, but they're also on average 20-25 years younger than me!
So... what happened? How did I get here?
As I said before, I dabbled in K-Pop before the Quarantine. When it comes to music, I could be said to dabble in every genre out there. I am a music junkie and I don't discriminate - if a song is good, I'll listen to it. If a song has got a good enough bop to make me want to get up and dance, I'll listen to it and maybe even add it to my workout playlist to help me keep up my energy and motivation. The workout playlist is where most K-pop songs went that hit my radar before the Quarantine. K-pop and J-pop have a brightness and a positivity to the sound of their upbeat tracks that I don't find as often in English language pop. Keeping up my motivation while working out or walking is HARD for me and every little bit and every little trick to keep me going even 10 seconds longer is something that I need to use - and so, that's how I ended up with any k-pop in my music as permanent members of a playlist.
So - because I was at all aware of k-pop, BTS was a name I had heard of. When their track Boy With Luv came out, I listened with barely any interest - basically, just checking to see if it had what I needed to walk/work out to. Oh.... oh boy did it. That song is a BOP. Do I understand all the words? No. After all, I took Spanish in school as my second language. My knowledge of Korean is limited to food names.... and I mess up even those. Does it matter that I don't understand all the words? NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT!! I grew up with classical music as one of the main genres in the house and even though I don't speak Latin, Italian, or French - the choral and opera pieces in those languages have always been quite enjoyable. This is the same principle, just a different genre.
So.. Boy with Luv. It's a bop. I was listening to it more than I listened to other k-pop songs. It's a GOOD song... and it has just enough English in that I can sing along with parts of it. Then, BTS became big enough that they were performing this song of theirs that I liked on US talk shows that I actually watched - and so I saw the dance that goes with the song... and I liked it - and I wanted to see it again after the show was over... so I looked it up on YouTube (as you do).... and I found that BTS does choreography videos and well, if the dancing in Boy With Luv was so much fun, I wonder what the dancing is like in this other video of theirs........................ you see how this ends, I'm sure you do.
This though, is still all pre-quarantine. But it's important to understand that I've spent HOURS on YouTube in a rabbit hole of BTS dance videos - because this will play a part later.
Quarantine hits. I stay at home, I go about my life - nothing really changes all that much for me. (I have a work from home desk job). But even though I think that nothing has changed in my day to day routine, I have to deal with the fact that something big really has changed. As a season pass holder at Disneyland, I used to go to the Park almost every Tuesday. It was my happy place. I would go and do miles of walking punctuated by a ride here and there and get my dopamine hit for the week to keep my mood up and get myself out of the house and out into the sun. I didn't realize how much those weekly trips did for my mood and after two months of quarantine, I realize that I need to find a way to get myself a regular dopamine hit. With no real plan, I turn to random YouTube video suggestions to find something quick to watch to at least break up the boredom. BTS's Kinetic Manifesto is spit out at me by the algorithm as a suggestion based on my love of dance, my previous fall down the BTS dance rabbit hole, and just how HUGE that song and video were at the time. I watch it.... I love it. I watch it several more times in a row and I'm fascinated by the camera work, the choreography, the make up and costume choices.... and then I see there's a sort of behind the scenes making of video and I wonder if they'll talk about those creative choices that I'm so fascinated by. They don't - but what I get to see is BTS behind the music - the personalities of the seven young men and how they interact with each other.
It's a game changer. Folks, these guys are FRIENDS. More than that, they're friends who really love each other. I fall down the rabbit hole of watching videos that fans have put together of nothing but moments of the band members interacting with each other. They hug, they jump on each other, they laugh, they tease and that was all great to see and made me smile.... but then I started seeing other things. Specifically, I started noticing how they interact with their member Suga. They approach him with more caution than they do the other members. They signal their desire for contact before they hug him, they announce their intentions before they push the camera into his face, they basically ask for permission to approach.... and he doesn't always give it. He says no - often. And when he does - THEY RESPECT THAT and turn away to do something else without making a big deal out it. As a lifelong introvert, seeing public figures not force their introverted peer to be public or contacted when he didn't want it was beyond amazing. They would make comments like "Suga doesn't want to be on camera right now." and "He's not in the mood, so we'll go over here." and would expect from the fans that everyone else would also accept this as acceptable and reasonable behavior. On camera, to millions of impressionable fans, these young men were showing by example how to respect boundaries and normalize altering your behavior to care for the different needs of your friends. Dopamine hit achieved.
There was a moment in their most recent online concert where member Jinmin was so moved by the experience of performing again after so long, and so overcome with emotion that when he was supposed to be giving his closing remarks, he began to cry instead. NONE of the members got awkward or embarrassed when he bent in half with the force of his tears. They closed ranks around him instead and touched his back and let him know they were there and comforted him. "Don't cry" one said to him, but then another member quickly corrected the statement with "No, he can cry. Go ahead and cry." and that moment still replays in my mind because when was the last time you saw 6 men surround their crying friend and give that crying friend permission and encouragement to feel their feelings and express them so openly?
These are the captured moments that had me watching videos day after day. It turned into a thing I did before bed - watch a few videos of the guys being good to each other, get my dopamine hit, go to sleep and have good dreams.
Well, it turns out when you watch enough of those videos that other related content gets recommended to you - Seventeen I found through their dancing (their synchronization and detail in choreography is mind blowing), TxT is on the same label as BTS and I found them through videos of BTS interacting with them, Enhypen was formed via a reality show sponsored by BTS's label that I got hooked on, and Stray Kids I found through a video of one of their members doing a dance cover of a BTS song. I've found other groups and artists through all of these methods as well - but these are the groups that have music I enjoy and who also have interaction between their members that give me the warm fuzzy dopamine hits.
Add to that BTS donating $1M to Black Lives Matter and their fans deciding (on their own without a request from the band) to try and match that donation, and doing so within 24hrs... and stories of Seventeen fans adopting zoo animals in the names of the band members and doing fundraising for suicide awareness as part of a way to support the new "Semicolon;" album (a semicolon tattoo is a symbol that the bearer could've chose to end their life but chose not to and is part of Project Semicolon's effort to change the stigma around suicide).... the good that they are inspiring through their behavior and their treatment of others makes me a fan of them as people.
This is how I became a fan. This is why - now tell me, is there something in there that I should be ashamed of? If someone teases me about how ridiculous they find me for being a 40+ year old fan of twenty something boy bands, should I cave to their opinion and blush and lower my head and be embarrassed about being a fan just because the person teasing me doesn't understand? Because I got news of you - that isn't gunna happen. The music makes me dance and feel wonderful feelings, the members make me smile. I won't let anyone shame me for finding something so pure and good that makes me feel this happy when the rest of our world today is so messed up.
You want to tease me about being a k-pop fan? You go right ahead. If that's what you need to do in order to feel superior and make yourself feel better about how much higher a cultural standard you have for yourself, than you do what you need to do. I, on the other hand, will continue to listen to my "peppy" music and watch my "silly" videos and sleep well with good dreams with hope kindled in my heart that this up and coming generation might finally have the courage to get right some of the things we've been getting wrong for so long.
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