How much do you know about K-pop? I ask not to gate-keep or even to educate, but to attempt to set the scene: When my wife and I found ourselves with a long layover in Seoul, South Korea in early April, we assumed that we knew enough about the phenomenon of Korean popular music to go see the girl group IVE perform its “Third Fan Concert” at the KSPO Dome, the capital city’s 15,000-capacity Olympic gymnastics arena.
We knew that K-pop wasn’t just Korean anymore, that it had become the country’s most notable cultural export, that K-pop stars were very popular. (Remember the actress who played Thai hotel employee Mook in season three of The White Lotus? That “newcomer” was Lisa, the K-pop idol of Blackpink fame who headlined this year’s Coachella as a solo act and is, by her White Lotus co-star Jason Isaacs‘ estimation, “more famous than Jesus and Elvis.”)
We knew that the music was increasingly conquering global charts. We were aware that K-pop hits featured English lyrics, sampled heavily from American music, and often incorporated English-language rap sections, giving Western audiences an easy entry point.
At the very least, we figured, we knew enough about seeing live music: Back in the States, that’s how we spend most of our time. As passionate fans of various artists, we’re often on the road following our favorites, catching concerts of all shapes and sizes around the country. As New York City residents, we’re always just a subway ride away from the biggest concerts by the biggest names in every genre at the World’s Most Famous Arena. As the editor-in-chief of this fine publication, I quite literally pay my rent by going to concerts and reporting on what I saw and heard. We know concerts. How different could this be?
A lot, it turned out: I’ve thought about that night every day since, and it’s taken me all summer to put the experience into words.
We went into our crash course in K-pop curiosity expecting to find familiarity amid the inevitable differences. We left feeling bewildered and fascinated and alien, like unwitting impostors on the verge of being outed. At every step along the way, our evening at IVE’s Third Fan Concert in Seoul was a jarring reminder of the world’s vastness—of just how much we didn’t know.
Table of Contents
1. GETTING IN
2. CONCOURSE OF CURIOSITY
3. HELL YEAH, K-POP!
4. POSING
5. SPIRALING
6. SURFACING
7. FEAR
8. GETTING OUT
9. FRIED CHICKEN & FAMILIAR FACES
1. GETTING IN
Did you know that K-pop concerts in Korea are designed to be difficult for foreigners to access?
After trying and failing to find the concert’s primary ticketing source online, we consulted a concierge at our hotel. She gasped with audible excitement when she heard that we were trying to go see IVE, pulled out her phone to show us which ticketing app to download, and seemed puzzled when it was mysteriously missing from the app stores on our American devices.
The two second-to-last-row tickets we eventually managed to buy on a Swedish secondary market website the day before the concert presented their own set of obstacles: The transaction confirmation noted that the physical tickets would be delivered to our hotel—an ideal situation, since the phone number I used to make an account was inactive in Korea—but the day came and went with no deliveries.
The morning of the show, on a hunch, I activated my American phone number. Screw it, I’ll eat the roaming charges. A text message from the local seller was waiting for me. He had reached out to let me know the he would have to meet us at the venue to pass off the tickets.
Okay, cool, so it’s a box office pickup situation? Not exactly—he already had the tickets, he explained, but he had to come wait in a line of thousands of people with us, show his Korean ID to verify that he was, indeed, Korean, get a little green “verified” sticker for each of the credit card-style plastic tickets, have the ID-checkers put one entry wristband on him and one on my wife while I waited out of sight, then discretely peel off his wristband with tweezers and place it on me.
As we finished the hand-off and joined yet another winding, eerily orderly queue leading into the arena, we joked that getting these tickets felt more like an act of espionage than a transaction with a ticket scalper. We had played wristband games and jumped through quasi-kosher hoops to “get in” countless times, but it had never felt so much like the powers that be were telling us, “This concert is not for you.”
Take that, powers that be, we thought as we flashed our wristbands, scanned our tickets, and entered the arena’s concourse. We’re going to the K-pop show.
[Photo: Andrew O’Brien – Exterior of KSPO Dome, 4/5/25]
2. CONCOURSE OF CURIOSITY
Certain things stood out right away as we filed inside.
There was no merchandise for sale in the arena, just tables where fans could synchronize “light sticks” which the production patched into throughout the show (Sold off-site but still everywhere in the crowd, pairs well with a Labubu). The concession stands were outposts of the same GS25 convenience store chain you see everywhere around Seoul (with big beers at convenience store prices!) but security sternly directed us back to the concourse when we tried to bring our reasonably priced arena drinks to our seats.
We sat down on a circular bench in the concourse—We’ll call it the degenerate donut, we laughed—and sipped while we surveyed the crowd.
First glance: There actually seem to be people of all ages and genders here.
Second glance: Nevermind, it definitely skews young and female. We might be the only people who bought beers. Looks like we’re the only Westerners, too.
Third glance: Where are all these little girls’ parents? A security guard just checked that kid’s ticket and sent her to the other side of the arena. Neither of them seemed fazed…
There was no time for a fourth glance. Patrons’ paces quickened toward the stands as showtime approached. We had to get to our seats. But we did just buy these beers…
Never have I felt more out of place than I did as an American in my 30s standing in the degenerate donut in the concourse of the K-pop show in Seoul, chugging a tall boy, and coming to terms with the fact that this arena was filled with small girls. Bottoms up, I guess…
3. HELL YEAH, K-POP!
Soon after we climbed to our seats, the little girl to our left welcomed us to the row with a packet of tiny gummy bears and homemade IVE stickers. She and my wife did their best to exchange pleasantries through the language barrier: How many IVE concerts have you been to? … 2? Wow! Which girl is your favorite? … Jang Won-young? Cool! … Me? Uh, I don’t have a favorite yet!
[Photos: Andrew O’Brien – A young IVE fan in our row gives us homemade stickers, 4/5/25]
As the house lights came down and as the six members of IVE emerged (alongside a crew of backup dancers), the room erupted in shrieks (via the children in the audience, ecstatic yet consistently seated throughout the night), colors (via the aforementioned light sticks), and pyrotechnics (via the colossal rig that stretched across the stage and into the crowd). Bass drums rumbled over apocalyptic animated visuals, lasers, and flamethrowers. The girls gyrated through an intricately choreographed hip-hop dance segment, then moved into 2025 single “REBEL HEART”, a supremely catchy composite of “big” pop sonics, climactic drops, and quotable English lyrics, all set to a stage production that would put most Western pop shows to shame.
Hell yeah, K-pop, we thought. We might be IVE’s newest fans.
Then, things… changed.
4. POSING
Concerts come in many shapes and sizes, but a certain order of operations is inevitable: The “first song,” for example, is followed by the “second song,” and so on. This was not the case at IVE’s Third Fan Concert in Seoul.
When the opening “REBEL HEART” was finished, the six members of IVE—Rei, An Yu-jin, Jang Won-young, Leeseo, Gaeul, and Liz—walked to the central stage for some introductions, then sauntered back to a Girl Scout-themed talk show set that had appeared on the main stage. They did not perform another song for more than half an hour.
Instead, the six stars spent those thirty-plus music-less minutes onstage (*checks notes*): waving, chatting with each other, leading the crowd through a Girl Scout-style “IVE Scout Oath,” giggling, making peace signs with their fingers, trying on glasses with cartoon wings on them, giggling some more, posing for the cameras, and teaching the audience about the six “IVE Scout Tests”—Wisdom, Self Care, Strength, Survival Skills, Challenge, and Leadership.
The crowd got more excited as the long song drought went on. My growing confusion followed a similar curve. Without the songs, there were no English phrases to repeat or glossy melodies to grasp onto. This was just… talking. In Korean. In a dark room. For a really long time.
As the supposed concert went on, the IVE girls made their way out to the central stage one at a time, pointed at various nondescript spots in the crowd, and struck a series of cute poses—peace-sign-pointing-at-cheek was a big one—as an on-screen stopwatch counted up from zero. Okay, what the hell is going on?
My wife was able to piece that part together eventually. They were playing a game: Each girl has to scan the crowd and find the various cameras pointed at her. When she finds one, she points at it, poses, and looks for the next one. Fastest overall time wins.
The young girls in the seats were overjoyed—light stick in one hand, phone in the other, relentlessly capturing shaky footage through their screams.
I was… yeah, still confused. All I saw while I waited, perplexed, for IVE’s second song was six K-pop stars standing, pointing, and posing for various durations before accepting hysterical applause from thousands of fans. What exactly did we sign up for here?
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5. SPIRALING
I pulled out my ticket and tried to search for clues. “IVE Scout,” it read in big yellow letters. That theme certainly matched what we’d seen so far. Then, I saw the billing I had glossed over before: The Third Fan Concert. Wait, “fan concert…” Is that a specific thing?
I thumbed a question into my phone: “Is there a difference between a K-Pop ‘fan concert’ and a regular concert?”
An AI search summary spat out an answer: “Yes, there are key differences between a K-pop fan concert (fancon) and a regular K-pop concert. A fancon combines elements of a fan meeting and a concert, featuring both performances and interactive segments like games, Q&A sessions, and lucky draws. … Artists typically perform fewer songs in a fancon than in a full concert.” Oh…
I guess I knew less about K-pop than I thought. What else am I missing?
I hated being on my phone in the middle of our Korean cultural immersion exercise, but I couldn’t put it down. The songs came eventually, but by the time they did, I was already spiraling into the sinister workings of the K-pop industrial complex.
As the IVE girls began to rattle off their carefully formulated electro-pop singles, I read about how K-pop songs are intentionally written using elements of existing Western pop hits to make them feel familiar to listeners. (Take IVE’s “After LIKE”, which easily wedges itself in your psyche by borrowing the entire string interlude from Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”.)
I thought about how these songs’ lyrics, which drift haphazardly between Korean and English (often within a given line), ensure that no one really understands what they’re singing—not the Korean kids sounding out words they’ve only ever read on TikTok; not the Western listeners whose sing-alongs turn the Korean lines into English mondegreens. I considered how K-pop is transparent about sacrificing deeper meaning in the name of mass appeal (Take IVE’s “Kitsch”, a club-hop banger so eager to please that it throws its bilingual weight behind a fringe English word that most English-speakers don’t use.)
As the six stars showed off their label-dictated personas—This one is totally the Regina George, my wife observed. That girl is the fun one, I think—I learned about the rigorous, years-long “trainee” system through which record labels and artist management companies engineer new idols and assemble them into groups (often via reality TV competitions, as with IVE’s An Yu-jin and Jang Won-young).
I thought about how that sort of makes IVE less like a “band” and more like a Marvel Avengers movie, and whether or not that was kind of lame, even if the results were entertaining. I guess Wu-Tang Clan made it work…
Then, I learned about the widespread opposition to K-pop trainee deals, often referred to as “slave contracts,” which require young idols to pay their management agencies back for the cost of their mandatory training, eliminating both their career autonomy and their profit share for years on end. I scrolled through stories about dubious morality clauses and allegations of management companies requiring trainees to get plastic surgery.
As the lab-grown sextet split into trios to cover, in turn, contemporary global hits “Magic Girl” (via fellow K-Pop girl group Orange Caramel) and “Levitating” (by British hitmaker Dua Lipa), I wondered whether it was actually all that different back home in the U.S. Maybe we had a little more “art” mixed in with our “commerce,” I supposed, but we’re all drinking the same cocktail.
Then, I thought… Shit, I’ve been on my phone for a really long time. By the time I surfaced from my K-pop doom-scroll, IVE was leaving the stage.
6. SURFACING
“N-core, N-core!” an arena full of Korean schoolgirls chanted as they waited for the encore, innocently butchering the French word’s pronunciation.
I recognized the elated atmosphere in the building—that shimmer in the air that says, “Something remarkable just happened in front of our eyes.” You could see it on the faces in the crowd. You could hear it in their howls. The same show that had perplexed me for two hours solid had made their dreams come true. These girls had just witnessed something special.
I guess that’s how “special” goes, I thought. Context is crucial: For me, an unfamiliar foreigner with minimal knowledge of the K-pop universe, this night had been a strange mix of fits and starts, misconception and disorientation. For the rest of the audience—true fans of IVE—it was a rare peek behind the larger-than-life stars’ manicured facades, a chance to share air and space with the humans behind the idols. These girls had come to chase that feeling, and IVE had delivered.
And yet…
7. FEAR
“N-core, N-core!” As the arena hummed in anticipation of the big finale, a thought I had buried early on in our K-pop ordeal finally muscled its way to the surface: This concert is not for you.
We had taken it as a challenge when we couldn’t access tickets, when we had to do the wristband dance with a scalper to get in the door. Now, those deterrents seemed more like fair warnings. We had successfully infiltrated something designed to be inaccessible to us, and learned the confusing way that there was good reason behind those designs. We thought we were going to see a band play a concert, but we were stumbling blind into the molten core of a world we had rarely considered.
We have to get out of here, we both seemed to think at once.
The members of IVE were paired off now, riding wooden rail carts around the perimeter of the arena under moving spotlights, singing their bubblegum gratitude tune, “Thank U”, and—mercifully—pulling the crowd’s focus away from the aisle that led to the exits. This may be our opening.
We quickly grabbed our jackets and descended the stands. But rather than an escape route, what met us at the bottom of the aisle was a security guard holding a sign: “Movement is restricted. Return to seat.” Of course, the concourse is blocked, we realized. Where did we think those carts were rolling?
We looked back up the arena steps toward our seats in the second-to-last row and tried to calculate how many thousands of eyes would lock onto us if we hiked back up. No, we’ve come too far…
We couldn’t push forward, we couldn’t go back, and the orbiting idols were heading right toward us.
We were somewhere in the arena’s lower bowl when the panic began to take hold: My wife and I, the two most obvious posers in the crowd at the IVE Fan Concert in Seoul, were standing in a spotlight in the center of thousands of seated young superfans—two strange, foreign deer caught in the brightest of K-pop headlights.
8. GETTING OUT
Even when our spotlight had moved along and the path to the exits was clear, our failed attempt to slip out casually wasn’t finished.
As we passed through the arena’s outer doors and into the damp evening air, I pictured the open spaces of the Olympic Park waiting for us beyond them—a respite from the thousands of curious eyes on us inside—but what we found was something else entirely: a dense crowd of people at least a thousand strong, standing in the spitting rain, facing the arena, patiently waiting for… something.
Were these more fans waiting for a glimpse of the IVE girls at the stage door? Was the show about to move from the rail carts to the exit concourse where we’re standing? At this point, no explanation seemed too far-fetched.
A kind security guard soon set us straight: No, not fans—parents, their eyes locked on the doors we just walked through, waiting to pick up their children when the show let out.
[Photo: Meara O’Brien – Parents wait to pick up their children outside KSPO Dome, 4/5/25]
9. FRIED CHICKEN & FAMILIAR FACES
The throngs of unsupervised local kids who filled the arena—who struck out on their own, expanded their horizons, and shared air with their heroes—would land in safe hands at the end of their great adventure. My wife and I, still halfway across the world from home, once again found ourselves on the streets of an unfamiliar city. After our evening of fear and posing at the K-pop show, part of me wished there was someone waiting in that crowd to collect us, too. When the world reminds you of its vastness, nothing brings you back home like a familiar face.
We waded through the dads, made it to the metro, and hopped a train back toward Gangnam. We only had a few hours left in Seoul, and we still had to check Korean fried chicken off our layover bucket list.
We picked a chicken restaurant at random (they’re everywhere), took a seat in a corner booth, and exhaled. Our K-pop experience had been overwhelming, our feelings on it positive but complicated. Neither of us knew what to say.
We had never experienced anything like that in our lives. Although, now that you mention it, superfans give us homemade stickers at concerts all the time.
We had never been so confused by what a group had done onstage. But, I mean, what would that girl sitting next to us have thought if she saw a certain band we like play a vacuum cleaner or deliver an onstage cosmology seminar or spend several minutes at the end of a show spouting rhythmic nonsense with no instruments?
We had never seen a crowd go so crazy for something so subdued—all while staying seated! That said, we have seen fields full of grown adults transfixed by a musician recalling an off-hand anecdote or riffing on an inside joke under a spotlight. Seated or standing, here or there, the feeling of being present as something spontaneous transpires is undeniably impactful.
Then, IVE’s 2025 hit “ATTITUDE” came on the radio at the restaurant. Pretty cool we just got to see them perform this, I said. It really is a great song.
While our experience at the IVE concert had showed us how much we didn’t know about K-pop, IVE was now, surely, something we did know. It’s the group we saw that one time in Seoul. (Remember that? Crazy.)
My wife hit me with her best IVE “peace-sign-pointing-at-cheek” pose as the song played. A now-familiar face at the end of a great adventure.
IVE – “ATTITUDE” (Official Music Video)
Below, check out the setlist and a selection of photos and videos from IVE SCOUT: 2025 IVE Fan Concert at KSPO Dome in Seoul, South Korea from April 5th, 2025.
Setlist: IVE | IVE SCOUT: 2025 IVE Fan Concert | KSPO Dome | Seoul, South Korea | April 5, 2025
Set: REBEL HEART, I AM, ELEVEN, Magic Girl (Orange Caramel cover) [1], Levitating (Dua Lipa cover) [2], TKO [3], WAVE, Kitsch, LOVE DIVE, After LIKE, ATTITUDE
Encore: Thank U [3], NOT YOUR GIRL
Notes: [1] (Gaeul, Yujin and Rei); [2] (Wonyoung, Liz and Leeseo); [3] Live debut
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