How K-Pop Saved My Life
and I became a Stay in 24 hours
Hyunjin of Stray Kids at Lollapalooza in Chicago
If you’d rather watch/listen to this blog, here’s the video on my YouTube channel!
I’ve always been interested in Asian pop culture.
Anime and manga have been part of my life since I was eight years old. The natural progression from that to visual kei, which is a glam rock/goth styled rock and metal type of Japanese music, was natural and easy. I’ve been listening to it for over twenty years now, which is crazy to think about. And I’ve been slowly teaching myself Japanese, along the way.
But this isn’t about Japanese media. This is a K-convo, not a J-convo. Around November of 2023, I was bitten by the K-Pop bug. I’d heard a few songs before, even had them on playlists in regular rotation, but since I didn’t know a lick of Korean, it had never really captured me the same way Japanese media had.
I was watching another author on youtube (Sarah Sutton, you should check her out!), and she was casually mentioning Stray Kids. I’m a music junkie, and I’m always down for something new, so I headed to check out some of their recent music videos and see what the fuss was about. The video for “Lalalala” had just dropped, and it’s got a LOT going on. And honestly… between the choreo, the costumes, and the catchy beat… It didn’t feel like the “pop” I was expecting, but I was definitely intrigued.
I grew up in the boyband era of ‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys, and their ilk, here in America. So this isn’t my first “cute guys who dance and sing” rodeo. However, I tend to hyperfixate. And twenty-four hours of a caffeine and dopamine fueled deep dive later, I’d learned an entire new lexicon regarding who your favorite member is (bias), who the youngest members of the group are (maknae), and was somehow deeply immersed in a subculture I’d only been vaguely aware of the day before. Every group has a name for their fans, and within 48 hours of learning about the existence of Stray Kids, I could proudly call myself a Stay.
More on my youth:
I grew up in the era of dance-based aerobic workouts. And after watching a music video a few times, I found I could halfway do some of the choreo, just for funsies. Being nearly forty, I’d fallen into the trap of “I’ve had two kids, I work too much to go to the gym, this is just how my body is now.” But bopping around the house for 10-15 minutes a day to music that was fun, and not worrying about how dorky or “cringe” it looked? I could manage that. Didn’t even feel like exercise. And that body movement has made such a drastic difference in my overall mood, and the shape of my body, that you won’t hear me complaining.
And about the music in general, you won’t find the vapid romantic lyrics you’d expect from the boybands of my heyday. Is there some romance? Sure. They’re appealing to teenaged girls as their primary audience. That’s par for the course. But when Stray Kids’ new mini album “ATE” dropped on July 19th, I sat there with my headphones on and listened to it in its entirety. Do I understand a lot of Korean? Not yet. I’m learning. Although why DuoLingo thinks I need to be able to talk about the fox’s cucumber is beyond me…
But as I listened to the album, the emotions they’re trying to convey are so easy to pick up on, even in the songs that don’t have very many English lyrics. They’re amazing at setting atmosphere. I laughed, and I cried more than once. But not because any of the songs are sad. It’s because of an element of hopefulness. Of pushing through difficult things and succeeding, despite roadblocks and obstacles doing their damnedest to knock you off course.
As a divorced single parent, living on the other side of the country from my family due to custody rules, I work myself into the ground to barely scrape by. It feels like everything is hopeless and meaningless. More often than I care to admit. But I carry on, because quitting isn’t an option when you’ve got two small humans looking up to you.
My kids asked me why I’ve been listening to K-Pop so much, since I’m typically a rock and metal girl. I realized that it’s because it’s new. It’s fresh, and it has no prior attachments to people from my past or things that have happened before. Good or bad. K-Pop feels like now, rather than the nostalgic reaching and grasping at a yesterday that I’ll never be able to hold in my hands again.
It feels like moving forward.
It feels like healing. It feels like taking my life back, as much as I can until my boys are both eighteen, and it feels… hopeful. It’s brought me inspiration for a new series of short novels I’m working on. It was the background soundtrack for the first thing I published this year (“Arctic Dreams”). But it’s also brought pleasure back into my life in a way I didn’t even realize I was missing it.
I feel like I can be a dork and dance with my kids. I can make silly jokes, even sometimes with clients at work that I’ve been seeing for a while. And I feel like I’ve found a community of sorts, through the fandom. When you live alone fifty percent of the time and have no interaction with other adults outside of work… Life gets lonely. Extremely isolated. And you don’t realize that you’re becoming a shut-in until it’s too late.
Society doesn’t make it easy for us to interact with other people unless we’ve got a drinking problem, lucked into a living situation that’s social, or work has a big enough crew that we can find a friend or three amongst the other workers. Otherwise… so many of us are alone that it’s terrifying.
Can I attribute my recent leaps in healing to other things? Sure. I’ll bet the unprecedented sunny as hell summer here in Washington is a big part of that. Drinking more water, getting more exercise, swimming at the pool, recently publishing my re-debut novel… But it started with K-pop. The levity and light that it’s brought into my life helps me keep pushing through the bullshit that tries to keep me stuck.
Long story long:
if you find something that you enjoy, don’t let anyone tell you that you’re too old, not enough whatever, blah blah blah. Hold on to that shiny, bright nugget with every ounce of strength you have. The world is dark and bleak enough that you deserve to bathe in the warmth of something that brings you joy.
On that note, I’ll leave you with some lyrics from “Runners,” the song on the new Stray Kids EP that made me bawl my eyes out the first time I heard it.
Deeper and deeper, I'm sinking, I'm drowning
One little trip and I know that I'll fall in
Deeper and deeper, I'm thinking, I'm crying
Too many thoughts in my head, gotta let it go
I'm chasing that light tonight
Another step on my tightrope
I know that I'll be alright
I won't stop running, I know that I'm becoming
GOAT, I'm stunning, let me show the world
I'm feeling edgy, watch me take it all
Come and try to push me off