I said this many times in the KPop thread. IU is the biggest deal within the country of South Korea. BTS has the international audience, but she ties them, and maybe even beats them, domestically. It helps that she didn’t have to take a break in her career for military service.
Last night, for the first time ever, IU had a concert in the US and in “New York” (New Jersey). She filled the Prudential Center, where the NJ Devils play hockey.
Tickets were a shitshow. I tried to buy them immediately, but more people were in the queue than there were seats in the arena. Of course, the next day, it turns out most of the people buying tickets were resellers. There was plenty of availability for months and months, right up until the day of the show. I managed to get some reasonable tickets day-of, because someone with a luxury box was selling them off. If I hadn’t seen those tickets, I probably wouldn’t have gone. Looks like the scalpers won that game of chicken. I never saw the prices go down, and the tickets did eventually get sold.
I had previously seen an IU concert in the movie theater. That was the previous concert series, The Golden Hour. I may have posted about it before. The main thing is that she filled the entire Olympic Stadium, and had insane production values. Riding around in a hot air balloon, drone formation displaying her logo over Seoul, etc.
This tour is the HEREH tour. They started out calling it the H.E.R. tour, but change the name? I don’t know what the meaning is? Maybe It’s HER and then HER backwards like a mirror? But also HERE mirrored as well? Maybe H.E.R.E.H. stands for something?
It was really a great show. Well worth the price that I paid, but maybe not worth the price that some other people paid. A lot of things were the same as other KPop concerts, but a lot of significant differences as well.
Like is the trend among other pop singers, IU sometimes has a backing vocal track to fill in. She doesn’t sing every line of every song. But she does sing a much greater percentage of the songs than I’ve seen others do. She also has her live vocals much more forward in the mix, so you can tell. And on a lot of the songs, especially ones without dancing, she’s just all live without a track.
Another difference, which I knew already, is that she brings a live band with real instruments. There are still some songs, and parts of songs, that are played from a track, but not that much. Those musicians were really going wild back there at times.
She brought her entire army of backup dancers from Korea. I recognized a lot of them. Especially that one guy who has been there for a long time. Usually when it comes to KPop backup dancers it’s usually the women who catch my eye, but with IU’s dancers I’m always watching the dudes. They are just leaving it all on the stage.
For one of her songs, Holssi, she has a part where children come to dance. I saw this video of it at the Seoul performance of this tour.
I was curious if she would really bring a bunch of Korean children on a US tour to dance one part on a song. She didn’t. But she did somehow get a team of New York kids to do it. I’m going to guess she got kids in all the other tour stops as well. Dang, that’s really putting in the work. Also, IU didn’t come in from the sky in New Jersey. She just came out from under the stage.
At other KPop shows they play lots of videos, which they call VCR for likely archaic reasons. These are to fill the time and keep fans occupied while they change costumes. IU did not play nearly as many videos as others. And when she changed, she changed FAST. She was off the stage and back in no time. At times she spent a bit too much time talking to the audience, but it didn’t cut into performance time since she was off-stage rarely and briefly.
Also of note, the first time she was off stage, she had a child come out and do a little bit of theater. That was a lot better than video. She said the child actress was also from the local area.
There were two times in the show where IU had props as part of her performance. She gave these props away to fans she saw. There was also some kind of giveaway at the door as a gift to the fans. I don’t know what was in it, because we didn’t get one. They were only for the standard tickets, and we had luxury box tickets. That’s fine. Probably something that would just sit in a drawer. I’m just curious.
One final huge thing IU did is she put subtitles on the screen. All her lyrics were up there, like a karaoke machine. Not only that, but the fanchants were included in those live subtitles with pink outlines. It seems so obvious in retrospect, but yeah, why haven’t they all been doing this?
If you get the chance to see IU, it’s worth it if the price isn’t out of control. I’m always reminded of this video from much earlier in her career. Her philosophy is that if you are her fan, she’s going to make it worth your while. Pretty much the exact opposite of me where I tell people not to listen to my podcast. Well, all these years later that’s still her philosophy. She tries to sing more songs, give gifts, provide high production value, actually sing, never phone it in. It’s absolutely a winning formula to becoming a legendary entertainer.
