‘SEVENTEEN World Tour [Be the Sun]’ REVIEW: Time’s role in building identity and community in music
‘SEVENTEEN World Tour [Be the Sun]’ REVIEW: Time’s role in building identity and community in music
In 2017, I found myself surrounded with friends who, all of a sudden, grew an obsession for various K-Pop groups. Admittedly, it somewhat came out of the blue — as we mostly spent the 2010s obsessing over a British-Irish boyband known as One Direction — which eventually went into hiatus by 2016. It was almost immediately that everyone started trading photocards and purchasing lightsticks for groups such as BTS, GOT7, EXO, and the one that always stood out to me: Seventeen.
I was honestly never too interested in K-Pop, but for some reason, Seventeen was always a group that fascinated me. I still remember the day my middle school friends made me listen to ‘VERY NICE’ for the first time which led to me streaming its music video on loop for months. It was my first time seeing pop, rap, and dance come together in such fashion, performed by thirteen boys who appeared to have spent their entire lives preparing for this moment.
Even with the emergence of more K-Pop groups and the rise in popularity of BTS in the West in recent years, my specific curiosity for Seventeen never went away — not enough for me to purchase tickets to watch them live in concert, but enough for me to get tickets to watch them in the cinema.
The SEVENTEEN World Tour [Be the Sun] concert movie gave me everything I was looking for – a nostalgic immersion into the world I used to be so curious about. Like any movie, it begins pitch black, until it fades in: corners of the stage illuminating, revealing silhouettes of the boys, hinting that this was a totally different group from what I remembered. This was no longer a young group just starting to make rounds on the world — it was a musical sensation that stayed at the top of their game nearly a decade later, allowing them to maintain such a loyal fanbase in the process.
As the stage lit, so did the caratbongs of everyone around me. Some looked brand new while some appeared to have aged from old storage boxes at home. I usually hate it when people bring out bright lights in cinemas, especially when their phones have their brightness on maximum and distract everyone watching the film, but God — the lightsticks just made it so theatrical. The gap between the cinema and the screen was then blurred and I was suddenly there, watching live in concert.
Honestly, I am not too familiar with their more recent discography, but they have covered so much from the classics to the new hits. It is evident that their style and choreography has changed over the years. It is not just a choreographed group performance with uniform wardrobe anymore; it is long-time friends just having fun on stage, embracing their own unique identities through their individual styles and fashion. So while they may not be the hottest K-Pop group at this point in their careers, they have definitely proved to be at the top of their game, even a decade after their original debut in 2015.
‘SEVENTEEN World Tour [Be the Sun]’ is now showing in SM Cinemas.
