![]() Every great friend group strikes upon something like magic, some strange alchemy that makes you all your weirdest, funniest, most brilliant selves. Whether SHINee or my high school friends, every great friend group feels bound by that common fate. ![]() “We’re a family, a community of common fate,” Jonghyun said. What he meant, he clarified later, was that those circumstances made their friendships more special. When asked about SHINee’s relationships on a talk show once, Jonghyun caused a small stir by saying that the members were simply brought together by SM Entertainment to work, in his too-honest way. Our friend Anisa would make some wildly inappropriate joke, egged on by others like Carol or Aya, and the rest of us would fall over in helpless laughter. We’d disrupt our classes and get kicked out of neighborhood parks for our antics. The absolute chaos of their friendships felt so much like ours: our wit and our earnesty, the way we cared for each other and teased each other in the same breath. How better to while away the never-ending days of high school than with friends who love the same things as you do, with the same bright, teenage fervor? We spoke of our idols with such fierce affection that we might as well have been talking about each other. night, my hours lost to meme compilations, my texts inexplicable to anyone else except my friends. I had to be eased in slowly, then hurtled headfirst into the ah, f*ck of a 2 a.m. As years went on, I watched in confusion as my friends started spamming the chat with pictures of people I didn’t recognize, with frenzied captions like “ look at him!!!!!! my SON!!!!!!!!!!!!!.” But I couldn’t understand K-pop until I was in it. Or maybe it was just our ringleader Aya, who started our group chat in 2014 to get us into her various obsessions. I think we found kinship in our shared strangeness, which translated into our too-loud sense of humor and our disenchantment with suburban life. Half of us had grown up in different cities, and we were all arts and humanities kids tired of our hyper-competitive STEM peers. ![]() Before we used terms like queer or people of color, in high school we’d all felt like the odd ones out. There were other things that brought us together, too. Our families all frequented the Korean grocery stores, and our favorite tofu houses in Convoy always projected early to mid-2000s K-pop music videos onto their back walls. In the Asian American suburbs of southern California, K-pop was the soundtrack to our coming of age. ![]() As the rest of my friends disappeared into their old comforts, I loaded up the tracklist and hesitantly pressed play.īefore K-pop’s unprecedented ascent into global pop culture in these last few years, it was just something else that my friends and I had in common. So I don’t know what else I was searching for this past summer, if not nostalgia, when I opened SHINee’s album Story of Light (2018). With Jonghyun’s absence, it was impossible for SHINee’s music now to be anything like the songs we used to love. K-pop no longer felt like something my friends and I could easily share. Back then, SHINee’s main vocalist Kim Jonghyun had suddenly passed away. I’d stopped listening to SHINee in late 2017, after 1of1’s release.
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