In Scenester, we spotlight the coolest shows, parties, and events in the City and beyond. It's like you're there, but you don't even have to get dressed. Want us to stop by? Contact Joshua at joshua@gazetteer.co.
If you ever listen to me about anything, please listen to me about this: You — yes, you — should go to a K-pop concert.
You’ve got plenty to choose from; almost every Korean pop group that tours in North America makes its way to the greater San Francisco Bay Area, where they play venues of all sizes, from the 960-seat Palace of Fine Arts Theatre to the nearly 20,000 capacity Oakland Arena. They are outrageously fun, for all ages and demographics.
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of seeing cult-favorite girl group Artms play The Warfield. It was an absolute treat, and I think everyone deserves to have some of that delight in their lives.
I showed up at 5:30 p.m. for a 7 p.m. show. A healthy line had already formed on Market Street, taking up half of a city block. It wasn’t even a sold-out show. I overheard a nearby ticket scanner estimate that only 800 seats (just over a third of the Warfield’s 2,000-ish capacity) had been sold. But this is part of the ritual of K-pop fandom. They show up early, no matter the crowd size, even when the seats are pre-assigned.
Doors opened at 6. One-by-one, the fanbase paraded in, dressed in angel wings and white shirt-black tie get-ups, punishing heat be damned.
ARTMS Moonshot 샌프란시스코 공연이 끝났어요! 🌉
— Official ARTMS (@official_artms) September 4, 2024
마음은 아직도 OURII 여러분과 함께 공연장에 있어요. 🥺
우리 다음에도 멋진 시간 보내요. 꼭이요. 🫶
ARTMS Moonshot San Francisco is over! 🌉
Our hearts still remain in the theater with our OURII. 🥺
We'll have a great time next time,… pic.twitter.com/afBM8MbKwT
A quick tl;dr on Artms: The five-piece group, comprised of HeeJin, HaSeul, Choerry, Kim Lip, and JinSoul, were all previously members of twelve-member girl group sensation Loona, which put out some of the more critically-acclaimed K-pop of the past decade. There was a stretch of time where the phrase “Stan Loona” was a meme on certain corners of the internet. Grimes made a cameo on a fantastic Loona song called “love4eva,” prompting a pre-Twitter-ownership Elon Musk to tweet about his Loona fandom.
But the band imploded last year in a bad-vibes fest that resulted in the members filing injunctions against their label. The singers splintered off onto different labels as part of different acts, all with loyal, overlapping fanbases. Artms is one of those splinter groups.
The fans present at the Warfield on Tuesday evening were committed; there’s really no such thing as a casual Artms or Loona fan. A line stretched out from the merch table deep in the venue as soon as the doors opened. There was rarely, if ever, a line for booze.
A group of fans waiting for the show to start spent a half-hour rehearsing the choreography to single “Virtual Angel” at the front of the theater, as if they were the ones performing that evening. Others were running around the premises, looking to swap photo cards to get pictures of their biases, slang for favorite members. One person in the front-and-center recorded the entire show, right down to the interludes that serve as costume changes for the girls.
When the show began, more than two-thirds of the crowd held up lightsticks (retail price $70 for an official Artms stick at the merch counter). Everyone from bro-y dudes in snapbacks and baggy jeans to young women in frilly dresses were there, cheering and whooping and barking along.
Part of the reason to go to a K-pop concert is the sociological survey of these obsessive pop music stans. But the best K-pop groups also put on a hell of a show. Over two hours, Artms went through nearly twenty songs, three costume changes, and at least a half-dozen different elaborate choreographies for singles old and new, including “Stylish” and “Flower Rhythm,” all while singing live pretty dang well and performing fan service in a second language.
While most of the performance was focused on the intricate song-and-dance of it all, one member, HeeJin, played guitar live, both during her solo songs and an absurdly fun cover of Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend.”
“I’m the rockstar HeeJin,” she joked aloud in English, before saying that she slept for 14 hours when they landed in San Francisco. “She’s so cute!” the girl standing next to me exclaimed to her friend in response. “I love her!”
The band, as is custom, spent a lot of their time on stage engaging in gratitude, humility, and a lot of aegyo, a kind of over-the-top cutesiness popular with K-pop performers of all genders. HaSeul expressed surprise that anyone in the crowd knew the group’s deep cuts. When fan-favorite “Je Ne Sais Quoi” came on, the girls marveled that the crowd started singing along as soon as the first note hit. The girls ended the night with an impromptu meowing contest between themselves, triggered by a fan meowing during a group fan photo.
When it comes to the sheer spectacle of it all — from the fans to the artists themselves — K-pop is a tough act to beat. You really gotta see it for yourself.
