Archive for July, 2024
Where You Are: Searching For CNBLUE
The first time I went to Seoul in Spring 2016 Jung Yonghwa and CNBLUE were comfortably ensconced in the South Korean entertainment scene.
I ran across their images all over the place, and I heard their music everywhere, on sound systems in cafes and in the malls.
I even bought a cute little pair of socks with a cartoon Yonghwa on it.
The next time I went to Seoul, in June 2017, CNBLUE was still there, with Yonghwa’s smiling face looking down from a billboard overlooking the freeway from Seoul to Incheon airport, and on both a large video wall as well as a birthday billboard for Yonghwa in the Gangnam subway station that was covered with sticky notes from his adoring fans.
Like any popular South Korean celebrity, Yonghwa’s face adorned skincare ads, calendars, posters and other random merch all over the city.
CNBLUE were also models for the South Korean eyeglass manufacturer BIBIEM and their bespectacled faces were on billboards overlooking the Myeongdong area.
In Fall 2019 when I went to Seoul again, CNBLUE had enlisted in the military and their presence was a mere whisper, but I still saw various posters, calendars, and other stray paraphernalia sporting their likenesses at the street markets and Kpop shops.
At one store I managed to dig up a coffee mug with Yonghwa’s face on it in a mall somewhere in Dongdaemun.
My most recent trip to Seoul was in Fall 2023. After spending five days all over town I didn’t see any sign of CNBLUE’s presence on the city’s streets. CNBLUE debuted back in 2010 and thirteen years is truly an eternity in Kpop years, so it wasn’t that surprising to find that their images had been supplanted by merch featuring newer, younger groups. But I still felt a bit of melancholy seeing how they’d seemingly vanished from the public consciousness despite consistently releasing brilliant music throughout the years.
But late 2023 also marked a turning point for the band. Yonghwa dropped a new solo mini-album, Your City, in September of that year and instead of promoting on the usual Kpop music shows such as Inkigayo and Music Bank he instead got onto the campus music festival circuit. He played one, then two, then four and eventually six or seven different college festivals that fall, showcasing his superlative live performance chops to audiences outside of the usual Kpop listeners or CNBLUE fans.
Possibly due to the buzz around those shows, CNBLUE was invited to the Someday Christmas festival in December, their first music festival in South Korea after more than a decade of existence, and they also blew the roof off of that venue, playing the only encore out of sets by several different acts.
Earlier this summer they tore it up at the Peak Festival in Seoul and they’re scheduled for the Soundberry Festival, also in Seoul, upcoming later in July.
Yonghwa is one of the best and most versatile pop music composers in the world and he and CNBLUE have been popular for years in Japan and across Asia for their blistering live performances, but for some reason in South Korea they haven’t been able to fully shake their image as an idol band. By playing these indie and college music festivals they’re reinventing and reintroducing themselves to a South Korean audience who may have only thought of them as a Kpop group. CNBLUE is finally making the transition from being regarded as just a Kpop idol band to being recognized in South Korea as a legit live band and actual musical artists.
All of these recent shows in South Korea seem to have amped up CNBLUE’s and Yonghwa’s name recognition again in their home country. Recently a fan reported finding socks and other merch for sale once again with Yonghwa’s face on them in street markets in Seoul. Despite being a completely unscientific indicator of popularity or success, this somehow feels like a good omen to me.
beyondasiaphilia 
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