Liveness, in 5 parts
It's December 2025, which feels like an impossibility, but this year is nearly over. We live in a period of immense darkness, and sorrow, and I am sending you all well-wishes for light.
It was a weird year for K-pop in my opinion, though I'll get more into that in my true End of Year newsletter, but it was, at least on paper, a good year for me personally amid all the absolute terror of the world around us: I achieved two out of my six personal goals for 2025, and still hope for those four to be my new goals for 2026. I traveled a lot. And, most importantly, I kept the day I have fallen into because journalism is hell. I'm now tech girlie, which is also hell, but that's just life in 2025.
Due to the state of 2025 in general, I did recently nope out to Seoul and Hiroshima. However, in line with the year's trends, what was meant to be a peaceful vacation spent at cute cafes working on a book idea instead turned into me running around Seoul to meet up with industry folks who wanted to reconnect and work together. This mostly meant long days of me explaining that I am, unfortunately, a tech girlie and no longer a full-time journalism girlie but a part-time one with far fewer opportunities than I once have."Have your global comms people not explained to you the state of music and entertainment journalism?" I found myself wondering more than once, but so it goes.
What I also found myself wondering was what it means to be a performer, and what it means to be live in 2025. I spent some of my time traveling with Jenna Gibson, with whom I had written a paper about liveness during the pandemic, "Entertainment and Equity in the Era of 'Ontact'", published in the academic work,
South Korean Popular Culture in the Global Context in 2022. The TLDR of that paper, though I hope many people read it, is that fans pretty much never saw digital concerts during the peak COVID-pandemic era as replacement for live concerts with crowds, even concerts they've seen streamed. The crowd, that is, is part of what makes liveness special.
Which is why I've been thinking a lot about what makes something live when one of the five concerts I went to over the two weeks of travel was in fact an homage to a dead man: I was invited to witness the apparent-revival of Deux, early K-pop progenitors, a popular duo active in the early 1990s, but with a career cut short after the tragic passing of member Kim Sung-jae on November 20, 1995. 30 years later, on November 27, 2025, nearly to the anniversary of his passing, his visage, and to a degree his voice, was reintroduced to the world in a new song called "Rise" via SK Telecom in collaboration with the company WA:ID. The music video was made via KLING, an AI video generator tool created by Chinese tech company Kuaishou. Deux's Lee Hyun Do wrote the song and performed alongside the AI voice rendition of Kim, with the support of Kim's mother.
Although I do in fact work in text-based AI day-to-day, I have a lot of mixed feelings about this production: how could an artist 30-years-ago agree or approve, or even fathom, the ability to mimic his voice and put it through auto generation of voice technology to create something new? It feels as uncanny valley as the Tupac hologram, but even more off-kilter because it supposes the idea that this would be what Kim sounded like if he could still sing. If you've ever seen a singer perform the same song twice, you know that no two renditions are the same because the human condition is constantly changing. As much as AI can emulate that, I very much had the gut reaction that this is a different musical sound than the human voice, as close to it as it mimics.
I also, and have since shared this with a few coworkers, am starting to wonder if we will need "opt out/in" organ-donor style laws for people to allow their rights, or not, to be used post-mortem. That said... I recognize not everyone supports AI. Please feel free to unsubscribe if you are uncomfortable reading my work because my day job is working in AI. I too, clearly, have many mixed feelings about this technology's utilization.
I constantly saw on my trip, and previously had heard, that AI is less stigmatized in Korea than in the US, and this felt like it was honed in a bit by how "Rise" was unveiled in tandem with the most human of performances: 1Million Dance Studio performed choreography to several Deux songs, both new and old. This hybridity of human art and AI integration felt perhaps like the most Korean element of the night: Korea has less apparent reluctance among consumers to AI to the point that it is ChatGPT's second-largest market, and Korean media companies and the entertainment industry have traditionally been early adopters of technology, so why not hybrid performances between humans and AI? There are obviously a lot of questions there, and it is something I'm going to be thinking about for a long time.
Perhaps because I'm a live music lover first and foremost, and then a recently-pivoted tech girlie, I felt intrigued but watched the entire thing from a bit of a standoffish perspective. The dancers were invigorating, but the music and music video ultimately landed, to me, as a celebration of bringing back the dead to zombified lifelike performance. It feels like a technological triumph, but a sterile homage. Life and art are precious because they are finite and limited.
Monia Ali
It honestly feels like attempting to keep a singer unwittingly "alive" through AI recreation of their voice is like zombifying their artistic spirit in an egoistic demand on their memory. We've all seen zombie movies where people are brought back to life wrong, and I couldn't help but thinking of that.
And, of course, the question has to be, where is the end to this? SHINee, when they released "Poet | Artist" this year, were very clear that they used Jonghyun's voice from a demo he recorded as a songwriter, rather than use AI, as if it was an affront to his memory. I cannot imagine the pain if someone were to try this with him, Goo Hara, or Moonbin, or Sulli, who have become stand-ins of this generation about how Korea and K-pop handle the dearly departed pop stars.
This was in contrast to the four other shows I saw. I honestly remain slightly in-awe of myself because I managed to spend the two weeks not only seeing concerts that I absolutely adored and felt like they spotlighted some of the best solo talent around, plus a very entertaining fanmeet. But the surprise comes from the fact that each show had a wildly different scale, audience, and style. It felt – and I truly don't want to dismiss all the immense love and respect poured into "Rise" to see someone they miss back– like a showcase of what it means to be experiencing and living art through musical liveness. Each felt profound to me, in their own way.
For the first performance, I got to experience ticketing in Korea for the first time in a decade: I had missed the period to buy tickets, but luckily some returned tickets (take note, Ticketmaster!!!) became available, and I was able to see Yerin Baek live during her encore show. It was a multi-night show in the round in a Seongsu warehouse space, and felt very intimate in a way things rarely feel in South Korea when it comes to many of its top acts.
Baek had previously performed her Flash and Core album show at Incheon's Inspire Arena, a venue with a capacity of around 15,000, but we danced the night away in a crowd of a few hundred at the aptly named wanna see you dance. Namuwiki states that over the four nights there were 4,000 in attendance, so I guess we were more like a crowd of 1,000 that night, a crowd predominantly of what felt like college-age and post-grads (and me!) effusively humming and moving along to Baek's hauntingly witty tunes. There were no phones allowed until the encore, we just were there to enjoy, move, and simply exist amid music for two hours before going back out into the cold. Baek, backed by a live band and a dancer crew, effused joy and a sense of preciousness towards her craft as she poured her heart into the liveness.
"Personally, I am so excited for my future self, to change, grow, and be fulfilled together," she wrote in a post after the final show. "After time accumulates, I look forward to seeing how mature we[/I] will be, and meeting many folks full of life." (Thank you, Areum Jeong, for helping me with the translation. Read her upcoming book!)
As I read her post, I was struck by how integral growth is to performance, and existence. These two things, because they are both finite and limited, go hand-in-hand, and are more beautiful because of them.
For the second performance, I flew to Hiroshima. That city has left me feeling and thinking about a lot of heavy things, including how we as humanity choose to respond to villainy, but I went there to watch Yuta of NCT's solo show, Persona. Part of a larger tour, his Hiroshima stop was in a theater, and I can 100% for sure I have never headbanged before in a classical theater-like setting.
Having been to a few other concerts in Japan before, but always at Tokyo Dome , I didn't really know what to expect from a smaller crowd, but I had always experienced a pretty straightforward concert experience in those shows, where I felt like the odd-American-out for wanting to dance and cheer along. I don't know if it's Hiroshima's music culture, Yuta's music, or simply just the crowd that night, but the audience was as much part of the show as was Yuta and his band, as the best concert crowds are. As he powered through his set, the audience acted energetically as the supporting act. The energy radiating humans felt nearly tactile, like it was as part of the performance as the sounds, lights, and imagery.
One of the best things about Japanese concerts, and also a bit infuriating in 2025, is that there are no phones allowed. I honestly thought I was going to get kicked out because I took a picture of the concert logo on a dark screen before the show even began. This means no long-term storage of visuals to refer to when it comes to the concert. As someone with Aphantasia, I have literally no vivid memory to refer to. I remember the feelings, the energy, but cannot recall them. This means that all I have is that moment, and the emotional memory of being roused by a theaterful of people there to enjoy music and liveness. This can emotion cannot be recreated be facsimiles.
The third performance was Deux x 1Million Dance, which I discussed above.
The fourth performance, was a fanmeeting for Jungwoo, also of NCT, ahead of of his enlistment to fulfill South Korea's mandatory draft service. I actually only stayed the first hour, due to Sabbath beginning extremely early in the winter, and got to witness a total of two songs and some banter, so I have less to say about the actual musicality.
This was more of a live variety show than anything else, a farewell between performance fans, and emotion radiated between immense levity and wistfulness in acknowledgement that there is a time coming where the fans and the object of their fervor cannot meet. This is an end. For now. A pause, a promise of revitalization and return to form in the future.
It was that that timebound element that made it all the sweeter that there was the possibility to meet that day, in a boiling hot, crowded venue. Jungwoo's song before enlistment was released that day, and fittingly named "Sugar". It's not meant necessarily to refer to the sweet feeling of fleeting serendipity that was in the air that day, but it feels like it lends itself to it.
The fifth and final performance was practically an answer to the so-long farewell-ness of Jungwoo's fanmeet: Woodz, freshly returned to civilian life, held his first concert since blowing up with "Drowning" while he was in the military. Now one of South Korea's biggest soloists, he held a preview concert, unveiling new tracks from a forthcoming album, while reinvigorating and updating his old ones to meet where he, and his audience, are at in 2025. There was a sense of euphoria, and even party-like festivity, in the air ahead of Woodz taking to the stage, as fans anticipated witnessing this star return to form, now in his rockstar-meets-superstar era.
Woodz' performance and music was all-at-once grandiose and intimate: he would perform on a stage surrounded by his band – always visible, even when sunk into the stage floor – and his dancers, and screens: there were screens across every single aspect of the stage, used to set the scene and simultaneously broadcast it. There were even multiple ones the side of the stage so that the people standing on the floor, a bit below stage visibility levels, could see everything; I've never seen this before, and hope others take note.
This was a show to be heard as much as it was seen, and clearly a lot of care had been put into the staging of it all: it was obviously a commercial success, but first and foremost it was an artistic one, and even, in a way I wouldn't usually describe a concert, a friendly one. Woodz, like many performers, talked to the crowd, but it felt like he really listened: he was unveiling new songs live long before releasing an album, something uncommon South Korea, and after each few new songs, he'd ask the crowd which was their favorite. He was clearly taking notes, and I saw a few articles after the fact also keeping track of fan favorites. Will those live-audience faves be the hits? Will he rethink the reaction, and go back into the studio and tweak? This was a conversation, a dialogue, that brought the crowd into the creative space, reveling in the creative process' back-and-forth.
Back in New York now, I'm back to my regularly scheduled one, maybe two, concerts a week. Some months I don't even see a single show, thought that's fairly rare. I went to see Key of SHINee last week, and will have a thinking on that forthcoming. I will keep seeing artists as they are with us, and thinking about what it means to be an active participant in a moment of music.
Thank you for reading, and happy holidays and/or happy new year, depending on how you celebrate! I'm very behind on editing and writing, due to the tragedies of this weekend, so am not rereading this for the third time as I usually do. If there are any typos, or thoughts you'd like clarity on, please leave a comment.
And please, above all, stay safe.
