DBSGuardians Angels: [NEWS] 101121 Benny Luo’s Review: JYJ Showcase in LA

Sunday, November 21, 2010

[NEWS] 101121 Benny Luo’s Review: JYJ Showcase in LA

Because of some awesome friends, I had the pleasure of getting invited to the JYJ showcase in Los Angeles on Friday night. In all honesty, I had absolutely NO IDEA who this group was. So basically, this group is made up of Yoochun, Jaejoong, and Junsu use to be a part of a bigger group in Korea named DBSK. DBSK was extremely popular internationally during the early 2000’s and they actually hold the record for having the largest fan club in the world. As time went on, a part of this group branched off and formed JYJ this year. After hearing countless positive views about this group from a lot of my friends, I decided to go to the concert and see if JYJ lived up to its hype.

I got into my car and drove from Orange County to Los Angeles around 5pm. A what was suppose to be a 1 hour drive went up to 2.5 hours because of the bad traffic I ran into getting there. I finally arrived around 7:30pm, parked my car, and went to the front of the line to look for my friends to get my ticket to get in. I was expecting to just get a ticket for the night and sit down to enjoy the show, the lucky me, I got this instead

Unfortunately, even then, I still wasn’t really THAT excited at all because I still had no idea who JYJ was! I mainly just stared walking around trying scope out the arena. The venue that the concert was held in was actually in the Galen Center at the University of Southern California. I was an overall nice area and thought the show was very well set up. I then met up with my friend Arden Cho backstage and she informed me that JYJ was cutting the show from a 4 hour show to a 1 hour show. This is because the original concert was not a free event, however, due to work visa issues, the group could not profit of their performance. But as a kind gesture, JYJ still decided to hold a shorter show for free. After waiting in my seat for a little bit, Arden and Shane came out and gave a show a kick start. Just from hearing the crowd cheer, I could already tell that this group had an EXTREMELY loyal fan base. In all honesty, since a lot of the marketing for this show was done last minute, the venue did not hit capacity. But even then, the loud cheers of the audience hurt my ears. I could already sense that these guys were the real deal.

The show finally started with the 3 group members being elevated to the stage, and they performed their first song of the night. At this point, I am going to include a few clips I found on YouTube regarding the performance:

Here is the Full Q & A Video for those of you interested in getting to know them:

I was definitely blown away by their performance! These guys definitely are very good singing live and are definitely not like a lot of mainstream artists today who lip-sync a majority of their songs live. Another good thing to note is that one of the guys was suffering from a sickness and yet he still performed. I had the pleasure of seeing these guys backstage and got to meet Yoochun. He is incredibly nice and down to earth and even took the time to thank every single one of the staff/dancers with the rest of the group. What really blows me away is how this group can achieve so much and maintain such a loyal fan base. I am definitely a fan after hearing them perform and will probably purchase their newest album “Beginning“.

They really didn’t have any time to meet up with fans or mingle around with us because they had to rush to catch a flight at 12am. So in light of that, I shall leave you this last picture of one of them waving goodbye (For more pictures, go to my pics page on my twitter profile HERE).