Berlin is Awesome, Exhibit B: A-ha and ATEEZ

Basically, what I’m arguing here is that if you live in Berlin, the world comes to you. Within the space of less than a week, I saw two bands from far-flung shores–one from Korea and one from the 1980s–at a stadium less than a mile from my house. And the second concert I didn’t even know about until I saw the poster for it at the first. I think it’s safe to say that if you spend a month in high season in Berlin, you will have missed more events than you will experience in your lifetime: festivals of all sorts, gallery openings, museum exhibits, theater, protests, dance performances, markets, pop-up dinners, lectures, DJs, concerts of course….

I didn’t get any pictures at the ATEEZ concert, so sorry about that, but we were kind of in the nose-bleeds, so I couldn’t have gotten any shots you can’t find online. You should look at those shots, though: it was cool to see 20,000 fans holding lightsticks (OK, only about 5,000 of them had lightsticks); even neater when Yunho pretended to kick a soccer ball off the stage to start a front-to-back crowd wave–it looked like bioluminescence rippling in water.

I’m not sure what more to say about the ATEEZ concert. I think if I analyze it in depth, I’ll bore everybody including myself. To sum up: The experience confirmed what I’ve been suspecting about K-pop, which is that ironically the farther away you are from K-pop idols, the closer you feel to them. It’s clearly designed that way. I’d have to think harder about why and how before I had anything more intelligent to say about it. But it feels a bit like looking at a distant star: it’s brightest when you’re not focusing on it; when you look right at it, it disappears. That’s very much how the concert felt to me. (Which doesn’t mean those boys didn’t sing their hearts out and put on a great show, no small feat given that they’ve been on the road off and on for 3 months now in like 6 different countries. They’re extraordinarily talented and extremely hard-working.)

The A-ha show on the other hand…. Well, it’s impossible for any band to compete with A-ha, on whom I imprinted like a baby duck at the age of 14. Morten Harket is now 62, folks! He obviously does pilates, though, or drinks green juice or sacrifices baby seals to Viking gods because he still looks fab. And his voice, all 8 octaves of it or whatever, is still aces. I had better seats for this show because the competition for tickets was…not as fierce as for ATEEZ, let’s say. And the whole floor in front of the stage that had been standing room only before before was now all chairs. Ha ha, old people…. Anyway, the show was fantastic: A-ha sang through the entirety of Hunting High & Low, their first (and most famous) album, plus some singles from other albums. I don’t think I had fully appreciated the extent to which their keyboardist, Magne “Mags” Furuholmen, really defines the sound of the band. But really what I loved the most was getting to sing along. I’ve sung harmony to that whole album in the car on road trips for decades: getting to sing it with them in the same room made me so very happy. And I really felt again the sense of opportunity that their music always inspired in me as a teenager–that the world was a big, beautiful adventure, and I was going to get a chance to experience it someday. Writing that now, it dawns on me that this is what drew me in the beginning to ATEEZ, too, that same sense of adventure. Like they sing in “Wonderland” (translated using the Internet):

The island the map draws us to

Is everyone’s dream and fear

Spread your wings, start the dream

Forever a child like Peter [Pan]

I hope that all comes true for them. Walking back from the A-ha show to my apartment, it struck me that for the most part, it’s come true for me. I feel really blessed and lucky to be where I am right now, doing what I’m doing with the family and friends God’s given me. It’s good to be living in Berlin.