Big Love to K-Pop

Over the past 7 months Rachel and I have been involuntarily bombarded with a style of music known as K-pop. As our good friend Tyler Stokes put it,

"Every storefront. Every restaurant. Every car. About three different songs."

K-pop is Korean popular music, which I know we've mentioned here before, and it is extremely (and I mean extremely) catchy stuff. So much so that although we hardly know any of the words, the artist, or even the general meaning of a song, we seem to always have the melody of the "it" K-pop song swimming around in our heads.

The "it" songs change often and seemingly disappear after a few weeks of unimaginable popularity, bestowed upon them pretty much overnight. But these songs will forever be part of the soundtrack of our lives here in SoKo and last Saturday night we were able to see some of these moment defining tracks performed LIVE!

We attended the 6th "Asia is One" song festival held at World Cup Stadium in Seoul. http://www.asf.kofice.or.kr/l_eng/index.phpw.asf.kofice.or.kr/l_eng/index.php

The best part of the concert was that it was free! We arrived at the stadium, free tickets in hand, and ridiculously excited. As they opened the gates, we saw a sea of people literally booking it up the stairs to get a good spot! We didn't run, but had a good laugh at all the people who were shooting past us left and right, doing an almost choreographed dance of dodging in and out of other fans to be the first in line.

The concert featured extremely popular Korean bands (2NE1, Big Bang, Super Junior, Girls Generation, etc) as well as other big names in countries such as China, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Ukraine. Headlining was the Korean boy band "Big Bang." Boy and Girl bands are what's hot here - every Korean performance was by a girl or boy band. One of the boy bands Super Junior (the one that happens to sing MY favorite K-pop song) is the largest boy band in the world with 13 members. I was so excited to see them play "Sorry Sorry" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqMq82S7OVQ) that I could hardly contain myself. When they came onstage to perform I KNEW they had to play it - it was their biggest hit! My hopes died though after they left the stage w/out uttering a single "sorry." I was heartbroken.

I tried to still enjoy the performance by "Big Bang" but it just wasn't the same. I was preparing to leave World Cup Stadium, my first and maybe only K-pop concert ever, without hearing my favorite song when we heard the announcer say "one more song" in English. My train of thought went something like this: "Could it be? No...it is probably an encore by Big Bang...but maybe? Don't get your hopes up! Who else would they bring back out though? Surely they will give the audience what we want..." and then BANG - fireworks shoot up from onstage and I hear the bold beats of the beginning of "Sorry Sorry" and I lose it. I give in to the middle school girl inside of me and scream my head off for this silly boy band. I sing along to all the words (well...the English words I know and the sounds I make that sound like the Korean words, haha). It was truly an awesome moment.

All in all it was one of my favorite experiences so far. Rach and I both loved being able to be at a concert with so many different countries represented and although the style was mostly pop, there was actually quite a variety of musical styles as well. I won't soon forget the catchy choruses of these songs, and I know that they will forever remind me of my time here. Thank you K-pop for making Korea that much more fun.