In the Los Angeles Convention Center on Saturday afternoon, tens of thousands of K-Pop fans mobbed their favourite artists in meet-and-greets, danced like crazy in choreography workshops and bonded over a music scene that’s largely been built on the joys of fandom. KCon, a yearly celebration of South Korean pop culture, was expected to draw nearly 130,000 people to downtown venues this past weekend.
But in one convention centre conference room, others were fully acknowledging that there is a darker, often less discussed side of the K-Pop lifestyle.
Last year, the singer Jonghyun of the K-Pop group SHINee took his own life at 27. It devastated a corner of the music industry that had never really addressed the personal toll on artists, especially given roots in a culture that values an intense work ethic and private resilience.
“We can chip away at the stigma that there’s something wrong with us,” said Dr Andrea Bishop-Marbury, a therapist who spoke on the Saturday panel K-Pop and Mental Health. “If we can deal with ulcers, we can deal with the idea that mental illness is illness... We have to have compassion for ourselves before we can improve.”
It may have been the first time many in the crowd had heard this kind of candour at a K-Pop fan convention. While KCon, founded in 2012 and now held annually in LA and New York, has long championed artist-to-guest interaction and behind-the-scenes peeks, this year’s event more overtly addressed realities beyond fandom. Today, with the genre firmly established globally, it felt right to begin asking some of these questions.
Over its six-year history, the festival has become the marquee US K-Pop event. It’s not only a one-stop shop for fans to see major K-pop acts that don’t often tour but also a place to illustrate the genre’s increasingly broad pop-culture reach. And to be sure, the vast majority of it was as upbeat and devotional as ever.
During the day on Saturday, giddy fans waited in snaking lines to meet headliners Ailee, Twice and Wanna One, all of whom performed later that night at Staples Center. They learned the intricate dances for hit singles like IN2IT’s SnapShot and Pentagon’s Shine. The weather was scalding, yet the mood was high.
But this year’s convention did begin to address some of the complex and often overlooked currents that get lost in all the fizzy fun of K-Pop.
Members of groups like Block B and the mega-popular BTS have begun to allude to the pressures of K-Pop stardom and the stresses of an industry that so tightly controls one’s public image and daily life. But after Jonghyun’s suicide, there’s a new urgency to these questions.
Even though the mental health panel was mostly a primer for young fans who might not have had these conversations at home, it was valuable to say aloud that life’s struggles can be addressed in this scene.
