Seoul and beyond: a K-pop pilgrimage

My first visit to Seoul was in 1988 as a newspaper reporter covering the state visit of the late Philippine president Corazon Aquino.

The city was dominated by kinetic new structures built for the Summer Olympics it had just hosted. The two colorful wings of the World Peace Gate adumbrated the proverbial dove of peace.

At the Olympic Park, big screens still played highlights from the event, like the pop group Koreana singing a translated version of Giorgio Moroder’s uplifting song, “Hand in Hand”.

Between then and my second visit to the capital city three decades later, South Korea has become a global cultural force that’s impossible to miss.

In the Philippines, Korean movies and TV shows are now as ubiquitous as those from Hollywood. But my personal favorite would have to be Korean pop music.

Back in 2011, I was watching cable TV when I stumbled upon KBS Music Bank and heard what sounded like a very brooding but stylish dancing tune with a mysterious refrain in English: “Fiction, fiction…” While the refrain appealed to the littérateur in me, it also helped that the boy band singing it was executing a fancy dance step that was a cross between hillbilly and flamenco. Fans called it the “penguin dance”. I was hooked.

Fast forward to 2016 and members of that boy band, Beast, leave their entertainment agency to form their own and regroup as Highlight the following year. It was around that time that I found myself back in South Korea with my friends.

I could barely recognize Seoul that summer. Seoul had become even more cosmopolitan, as shown by the trendy Dongdaemun Design Plaza, familiar to me since it is where K-pop acts would do flash concerts for the “Run To You” segments of Dingo Radio.

We were driven to visit Hanok Village and the medieval palaces not to acquaint ourselves with Korean history, but to bask in the surroundings that determined the incidents in television series such as Sungkyunkwan Scandal and Empress Ki

On a Saturday night, stylish Korean youth gathered in the streets to perform the sexy choreography of dance tunes by 4Minute, Apink, T-ara, Exid and Got7. Shops peddling cosmetics were filled with tourists and locals, drawn as much by the legendary potency of Korean skincare products as by the pretty K-pop idols who endorsed them.

Ancient Seoul continued to throb at Hanok Village and the medieval palaces of Gyeongbokgung and Changgyeonggung. But I must confess we were driven to visit them not out of a need to acquaint ourselves with Korean history and the romance of the past, but to bask vicariously in the surroundings that determined the characters and incidents in television series such as Sungkyunkwan Scandal, Jewel in the Palace and Empress Ki.

However, it was 325km from Seoul, in the seaside town of Busan, where my K-pop pilgrimage reached its summit. Under the pretext of visiting a food fair, my friends took me to the Busan Exhibition and Convention Center. But it was really to surprise me with tickets to a Highlight concert.

Undaunted by the crowds, we bought “Smiley” light sticks – the identity card of any Highlight fan. We thought they had malfunctioned before curtain time since we couldn’t light them up before, but at exactly 5pm, thousands of light sticks in the concert hall lit up in synchrony with the first notes of the opening song, “Can You Feel It?”.

It turned out they were electronically controlled so that the concert proceeded with classic Korean precision, and when the five members of Highlight descended like gods from an elevated ramp to the stage, we joined along with the familiar fan chant: “Hi-Light-Teu!”