이상은 (Lee Tzsche) at the Pentaport Rock Festival 2024

The last set the we watched on the last day of the festival was 이상은. Incidentally, her performance was the only one that moved me to tears! Usually I get choked up pretty easily. I was a bit surprised to realize on the last day that I hadn’t had an emotional reaction to any of the other performances. One reason for that might be that I am most familiar with 이상은 and have listened to her stuff more (and for longer) than I have the other bands. I saw her perform once before, but this was the first time seeing her do a full show of her own.

I think what was so moving about her show was that she is so incredibly humble and sincere. She seems totally unconcerned with trying to look cool or even with trying to impress anyone. I got the impression that more than anything she is concerned about her performance being genuine. I had sensed that a little when I saw her perform last year. She comes across as being rather modest and almost unsure of herself. I don’t think this has to do with a lack of confidence, however. I think it is because she really cares about making the performance special. It seems like she is concerned with being present and sensitive to the dynamics of the place, the audience, and everything else that would affect the performance. She must have sang all of these songs millions of times, and the audience has all heard them millions of times as well, but even so, she seems to resist just singing the songs and having her performance be just another time everyone in the audience hears whatever songs she plays. This is not to say that she is all experimental on stage or anything like that. I think it has more to do with her attitude than anything. At some point she mentioned that she is so grateful for all of her fans supporting her throughout the years; that she felt like she has come such a long way but that she still has so much growing to do. I think that sums it up pretty well. Even if you go and see her play and she sings all her familiar songs in a familiar way, she does so with so much heart and spirit that you feel included—like you are sharing those songs with her. It is hard to really pin down what made her show so intimate, but whatever made it that way made me tear up for nearly the whole performance.

She closed with 언젠가는—according to her, she pretty much always does. Even though I have heard the song a million times, it hit me a different way. The lyrics meant something new to me that time around, especially these lines (which I have translated here):

In our youth we forgot we were young,
When we were in love, love seemed so commonplace,
But looking back now
We really were young and in love

Of course, the original Korean lyrics are more interesting than my hasty Anglification. I really love the sentiment behind them, though, especially the nuance they have being worded the way they are in Korean. There is something kind of melancholy about looking back and feeling almost proud of your younger self for being so inexcusably young—for being so passionate and predisposed to loving. The realization being that “nothing gold can stay,” more-or-less; that living and loving is really all there is to it, and now that you have done more of both, you can do neither as freely and wholeheartedly as you could when you were so immersed in the novelty of experiencing love and life for the first time. That is my somewhat philosophical take on those lyrics. I am not sure why they hit me that way during that particular performance, but it felt good to have a nice little cry to conclude our weekend at the festival.

The only thing is, the notoriously-not-a-rock-band idol group started their set on the main stage right as 이상은 was in the middle of her final song. It really annoyed me that they wouldn’t wait just a few minutes for her to finish and that the festival grounds were setup this way in the first place. Under ordinary circumstances, having some other band come in with an energetic opening song like that could really kill your finale—especially if it was a heartfelt ballad. In that moment I felt like that overlap didn’t do any damage to 이상은’s performance, but rather it made this idol group feel even more out of place. In some way it kind of added to the dramatic effect of her finale, because the title of the song she sang, 언젠가는, means “someday,” and is a kind of farewell lament about time (depending on how you look at it). Having this idol group stomp all over her finale made it feel really ironic and almost kind of funny. I walked away wondering what she must have thought about it.