“I just wanna be your dog.”

SYMBOL, n. Something that is supposed to typify or stand for something else. 

Many symbols are mere "survivals"—things which having no longer any utility continue to exist because we have inherited the tendency to make them; as funereal urns carved on memorial monuments. They were once real urns holding the ashes of the dead. We cannot stop making them, but we can give them a name that conceals our helplessness. 

- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Over the last few months I’ve attended three idol concerts here in the United States—Japanese boy group Psychic Fever (which I wrote about here), K-Pop solo artist Taemin (on his Ephemeral Gaze tour), and K-Pop solo artist Onew (on his Onew the Live: Connection tour). Both Taemin and Onew are members of the second generation K-Pop group SHINee, from S.M. Entertainment, although neither man is currently under S.M. Entertainment as a solo artist.

I’ve seen a fair number of  idol concerts over the past fifteen years, concerts in North America, Europe, Japan, and Korea and I thought I’d become familiar with the traditions, the feel of the crowds in different countries. Because of my dislike for how audiences in Western countries were trending, a few years ago I told myself that I’d stop going to idol concerts here. Even pre-pandemic, I’d grown frustrated with the decreasing standards of audience behavior—believe me, you do not forget the fear in Cha Eun-Woo’s eyes as a horde of shrieking women surges forward around you, by all appearances ready to tear him limb from limb and devour him whole. 

But since I hadn’t had the chance to go to Asia in the past few years, I’d decided to give Psychic Fever a chance and the audience at that concert felt like the audiences at American K-Pop concerts I remembered from a decade ago. Fans were invested in the music and were certainly enthusiastic but it was a fun atmosphere, not a creepy one. We danced, sung along, and participated where appropriate. It was an absolute blast. I thought to myself, maybe I was wrong. 

And then I saw Taemin. The audience there was closer to the audiences that made me swear off American concerts from idols. I could feel the audience swinging towards chaos a couple of times but Taemin pulled us back from the brink with a steely resolve and a very firm hand. There were also more fans from Asia at this concert, which helped things. I didn’t regret going. I had a good time. Taemin is an incredible performer—although it was rather unnerving to be handed “freebies” by American fan accounts, who, when I checked their handles, were BTS fans who’d had me blocked, presumably for opinions like the one I’m sharing here.

So, with a naive optimism, I had hoped the audience for Onew would be more like the Psychic Fever audience, reminiscent of the old second generation K-Pop audiences, or, at worst, Onew would be able to swing the audience back under control like Taemin.

On my first trip to Japan I attended a Kyary Pamyu Pamyu concert in Tokyo. I think I’ve spoken about this before on my podcast but it was a shocking and extremely humbling experience. I thought I’d understood what I was going into. Not only had I already seen Kyary in New York City but I’d been attending concerts of all sorts at that point for almost two decades, from grungy basement shows to pop arenas. I was a concert veteran! Right? Wrong. I knew nothing. I remember standing like a deer in the headlights next to two teenage boys who could do all of Kyary’s fan choreographies perfectly… in the middle of a sea of people who all understood the rules of idol engagement. This would happen to me a few more times in Japan before I picked up the flow of things and could participate as expected. 

But I had never felt that sense of dislocation in an audience in America until last month. 

When I returned home from seeing Onew I joked to a friend that K-Pop audiences needed to start doing land acknowledgements, the cold comfort of the colonized: “We sit in unceded seats; formerly occupied by first, second, and early third generation K-Pop stans. We honor and respect the traditional knowledge of the VIPs, Shawols, Hottests, Sones, Blackjacks, and others long forgotten.” 

I knew things had changed, especially since the pandemic, but I hadn’t realized the extent to which the old American K-Pop audiences had almost completely vanished until that concert.

As Hybe née BigHit Entertainment and their fans have taken over English-speaking fan spaces online over the past few years, so too have their fans taken over concert audiences. And the most obvious sign of this is the barking that has become inescapable in American K-Pop concerts. American K-Pop audiences have begun barking at everyone from Aespa to Stray Kids.

There has been some attempt to tie the practice to the woofing that was part of the old Arsenio Hall show; and it’s true that the average audience member at the Onew concert--and indeed at many of these K-Pop concerts--certainly could be old enough to remember Arsenio and the dog pound as well as at sporting events in certain markets. However, considering almost all of these stans are as wildly ignorant of sports as they are about music history, there’s absolutely no evidence that this is where the practice among contemporary K-Pop fans originated and far more evidence that it originated with this and then spread via cross-contamination to other acts who share fans with the current crop of K-Pop stans: 

[Insert they’re the same picture meme.]

Now, new American K-Pop stans coming in think it’s just part of being a K-Pop stan, along with tracking Spotify metrics, spamming hate messages on Weverse, and bickering with other stans on X over whose favorite did the Worst Racism (spoiler alert: it’s all of them). The new crop of stans almost seems to take pride in ignoring the fan manners of previous generations.

What seems like a dumb fan practice via online video can be really unsettling in person. In the theater venue where I saw Onew perform, it seemed to unnerve and intimidate him. Rather than the cheers and singing along he would have been used to—what the audience at the Psychic Fever concert had done—the barking drowned out his words and stopped him from speaking. Sure, he played along and by the end of the tour had tried to get in front of the behavior and attempted to control it but all that signifies is that Onew is a stone cold professional on stage, attempting to give audiences what they want.

While audiences in other parts of the world will sing along with the lyrics or put the effort into memorizing the fan call and response chants and lightstick choreography, we, in America, now woof like dogs. It’s humiliating, as a fan, to be associated with this. Are we not human beings? Are we all that online-poisoned now that the furries and alpha/omega porn enthusiasts have been completely let off the leash in public?  

I love Onew’s voice and his songs and before attending the concert I would have been glad to see a review in a “mainstream” outlet—here is a K-Pop idol who can really sing!!—but after attending, I’m glad it passed with no notice outside of stan communities. It would have been humiliating for an outsider to have witnessed this. 

The Popcast just covered comedian and podcaster Theo Von, a topic outside my area of expertise, but what I really appreciated about Jon’s reporting is that he went to a live performance and felt the atmosphere in the theater. We may think clips on X or TikTok or videos of whole sets on YouTube are accurate measures of what a concert is like. Reader, they are not. 

The woofing does not feel lighthearted and fun when you are in the middle of it. It feels intimidating. In theory, the parasocial element baked into idol-stan relationships should encourage audiences to engage with the performer(s) on stage with empathy, meeting them on their own terms rather than demanding they dance to your tune. When artists come from Asia to perform here, shouldn’t they be treated as guests and made welcome? I just kept thinking: Onew traveled thousands of miles to sing for us, only to be greeted with barking. The man specializes in lovely ballads perfect for the theater-sized venues. We weren’t listening. If I was him, I wouldn’t want to come back.

There were other issues with the concert—the translator was not great and caused some confusion with the audience in places; and the audience response to the finale/encore was also bungled with many fans not bothering to raise their banners or even knowing to raise the banners. It was a mess. 

I will say that I’m sure the sky-rocketing price of tickets doesn’t help things. When tickets are priced well into the hundreds, if not thousands, then a fan may feel entitled to do whatever she wants. After all, she paid for the experience. If K-Pop companies want to charge an arm and leg for VIP experiences and make bank off of American audiences, I suppose the price the artist must pay is getting barked at by rowdy wine moms. 

The audience for Onew reminded me quite a bit of the one I saw for New Kids on the Block, a very large overlapping audience demographic who feels entitled to treat the men on stage as if they are clowns dancing for our amusement.

Am I an old lady yelling at clouds? Sure, okay. I’ll accept that the old ways must pass to the new; the American audiences at K-Pop concerts have been completely taken over by stans brought in and on-boarded to Hybe’s very loose standards of conduct. K-Pop stans here now behave identically to the Swifties, Harrys, Directioners, etc. etc. rather than to K-Pop stans of a decade ago. All we old heads can do is mourn what was and try to find concerts—like Psychic Fever—-that have yet to experience a woofening. 

Now that the dog has left the bottle, I don’t think there’s any going back. Woof woof.