Thoughts After Attending a BTS Concert

“I want to dance like Gene Kelly,

Dress like Elton John,

Give those kids who get me

A star to wish upon.

Tell the world I’m ready

To write their favourite song,

So folks who never met me

Will miss me when I’m gone.”

Felix Hagan and the Family, ‘Gene Kelly’, Attention Seeker (2017)

So some friends and I went to see BTS at Wembley Stadium last weekend. If you haven’t heard of BTS,¹ well, I’m not altogether surprised, because they’ve only recently broken into the western music charts in a big way; for years, Korean pop music was a rather strange and niche thing to be interested in, and now all of a sudden K-pop bands are selling out stadia in Europe and America. BTS is the most famous one, a seven-person boy band who have broken all sorts of records for going where no K-pop band has gone before.² My housemates and I discovered them nearly three years ago now; our friendship was kind of consolidated by weekly sessions of laughing our way through the K-pop chart together.³ I say laughing – well, we do laugh, at the nonsensical English and dodgy popular culture references and easily misheard lyrics and general weirdness that K-pop is so often strewn with, but we genuinely love it too. Liking something both ironically and non-ironically at once is somehow not difficult at all. We laugh, but also we’re moved by the music, also we marvel at the skill and hard work that goes into those dance videos, also we look up English translations of the lyrics and find that they resonate with us. And BTS is the best, on all counts.

 

Yes, they had a giant bouncy castle on stage for one of the songs. Yes, it was amazing even from up in the cheap seats.

So we formed a pact that if BTS ever came to the UK, we’d go and see them. The pact was formed at a time when it seemed as if they never would, or at least not for years and years, but then suddenly K-pop blew up in the west and it turned out they were going to be playing in London. To our great distress, we failed to acqire tickets for that first gig, but then we succeeded the second time round. And so last weekend’s concert felt like the culmination of something that had begun in our lounge when we first moved in together. It was a brilliant time, it really was.

And everybody else in the stadium seemed to think so too, judging by their hyperactively enthusiastic responses to absolutely everything that happened. I should add that your stereotypical BTS fan is a lovestruck teenage girl, and it’s a stereotype with very good grounds too. A BBC review put it like this:

They sang at the top of their voices, even during the Korean sections, and started Mexican waves with their “Army bombs” – Bluetooth connected light sticks that created cascades of colour across the stadium. Oh, and they screamed. They screamed at the dancing. They screamed at the fireworks. They screamed when Jin held up a rose. They screamed at RM grabbing his crotch. They screamed at every, single smouldering look to the camera. Even V’s pet dog Yeontan got a scream of approval when he popped up in a video interlude. Never has the phrase “Wembley, make some noise,” been more redundant.⁴

I could push that jazz even further, to be honest. They screamed whenever any of the band members so much as turned round. They screamed before the concert began when some stagehand made his way across the platform to check something. They screamed at absolutely everything BTS said, which actually made it blooming difficult to hear and understand any of it, especially when it was in Korean and only translated afterwards. And my oh my, you should have heard the screams when Jungkook casually executed a dance move in such a way that his shirt lifted to reveal a momentary glimpse of bare skin. (I say casually; the way the camera zoomed in at this stage confirmed exactly how rehearsed the thing was, not that you couldn’t have guessed already.)

My friends and I laughed at that too. That’s how you know you’ve made it, we said to one another, when a stadium filled with thousands of people will scream at the top of their lungs upon sighting the briefest glimpse of your midriff. It’s all very weird, isn’t it, the way someone can be so fiercely beloved by thousands of foreigners he’s never actually met. It’s so weirdly one-sided; he doesn’t know them, but they feel as if they know him.

 

This one gives you a decent impression of the size of the crowd. I don’t like taking lots of pictures at concerts because it gets in the way of enjoying the moment, but I thought it was worth getting a few.

There was another point in the concert, after BTS had disappeared backstage for a quick break, when the audience was encouraged by words projected onto the big stageside screens to the surprise them when they re-emerged by launching into the chorus of their song ‘Young Forever’ (lyrics were helpfully provided for those of us not committed enough to have learnt them by heart in advance). It appeared to be a genuine surprise; several of the band members broke down in tears. And my friends and I pondered that: what must it be like, we said to one another, when a stadium filled with thousands of people sings a song you composed back at you? What must it be like for the things you pour your heart and soul into creating to be so widely known and dearly loved?

Is that how you know you’ve made it? When you’re admired and adored by ginormous crowds? When they devote themselves to knowing you and your work in a way you’ll never be able to reciprocate? When the things you pour your heart and soul into creating have captured the hearts and souls of randomers all over the world? Indeed, isn’t that kind of what we hope to achieve when we create things – to give the kids who get us a star to wish upon, as it were?⁵ To reach out into the chaos and make our statement about how we see the world so that anyone with whom that statement resonates might know that she’s not alone, that she’s understood?

But of course, she shouldn’t be looking merely to other human beings to tell her that, should she?

I don’t mean to disparage the feeling of valuing art produced by other humans and resonating with the statements you understand it to make, but it’s obvious how easily that jazz turns into an idol. In discourse about K-pop, ‘idol’ is actually used as a synonym for ‘singer’, which is perhaps more telling than it necessarily intends to be. Whether we’re creating art or consuming it, we’re all trying to reach across the divide and find souls like our own, who are moved by what we are, who value the same things and tell the same stories – and there’s nothing wrong with that, but if it’s there that we fundamentally hope to be understood, then we’re placing godlike expectations on things other than God.

God was the one who made your weird little brain. He understands how you think and what moves you. He wrote the whole of your personality. He discerns your thoughts from afar and is acquainted with all your ways. He knew everything you were going to be before you were anything at all. He gets you. And it’s kind of very one-sided, because this knowledge of his is lofty, too high for you to attain to, his thoughts too many to number, but all the while no secret of your inmost heart is hidden from him.⁶ Worship an idol, even one that resonates with you profoundly, and you’ll know it far better than it ever knows you; worship God and you’ll find that he knows you completely, even as you strive to know him in his vast, unknowable infinity better and better.

How do you know you’ve made it? Not when you’re known and loved by a stadium filled with thousands of people you’ve never met who adore the things you create, but when you’re known and loved by a singular infinite God who adores the things he creates. He gets you; he knows and loves you, and what’s more, he calls you to know and love him. Now there’s something worth pouring your heart and soul into.

Footnotes

¹ Then you might like to check out a few of their excellent music videos to give you a flavour: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5hrGMysD_Gv_KbOrsvLNWUSSjyBLGGZa. Try starting with ‘Fire’; that was the first one I saw and I was pretty much sold from there.

² Look, a nice list: https://kpop.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_records_set_and_broken_by_BTS.

³ We like the Kville one, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHWfAuT1j7bTLXTIBcY_l6w, although it’s got irritatingly lengthy of late.

⁴ Here’s the full review: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-48487862.

⁵ Not K-pop or remotely like it, but the way Felix Hagan and the Family phrased that really resonated with what I wanted to say today. They’re a great band, check them out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHAWibZmUnU.

⁶ I’m sure you recognise my riffing on Psalm 139 there: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ps+139&version=ESVUK.