IU in DC fanacc

[hyojungss]

IU — HEREH world tour in Washington D.C. ♡

Monday, July 22nd, 2024

PLANNING

i was super excited when iu announced her world tour in january and there were a few feasible dates for me. and arlene is a huge iu fan but there were no dates in her area, so we decided to plan to go together in dc! tickets went on sale in early march during work hours and it was not really going to be convenient for both of us to 100% focus on ticketing. i asked kaia (queen of ticketing) if she’d be able to help out! we were just aiming for whatever the best seats available would be... and we didn’t know what the demand would be like.

arlene and i both log on after 12:00PM and the queue is already like 14000 people long. we both don’t see any seats available when we finally get in... kaia logs on at some point and after we’ve both given up just keeps refreshing until she gets two floor seats. the goat for real!!

look at how insane this is... that’s the 4th row from the stage. at $604.20, this is the most i have ever paid for a single night concert by far. i saved a lot on other expenses which justified it for me, and it was such an unbelievably surreal experience for arlene and i to see iu in front of our own eyes instead of via the screen. she is so pretty and a delight!!! i am just a casual uaena but she was one of the first idols i ever followed since back in 2013 via her acting, so it feels very very special to have had this opportunity and to be able to see songs from almost all her eras since then.

EXPERIENCE

overall i had such an amazing time and the concert and no complaints... i got to go with a few friends and everything was perfect! i also kept myself very spoiler free for this concert and it really paid off!! i expected a lot of title songs but just did not know what her concert staples were at all... getting hit with jam jam on song 2 was crazy to me!! i did not dare to dream of it... there were some trade-offs, like i was so happy we got coin and so surprised that lilac was not in the setlist, but it doesn’t bother me because it feels like we got so many good songs anyway ^___^ when you have a discography that strong it’s very hard to disappoint people, i think

SETLIST (setlist.fm)

Part 1: Hypnotic

1. Holssi

2. Jam Jam ☆

3. Ah puh

4. BBIBBI

5. Obliviate

Part 2: Energetic

6. Celebrity

7. Blueming

8. eight

9. Coin ☆

10. I stan U

Part 3: Romantic

11. Havana

12. Meaning of You

13. strawberry moon (acoustic ver.)

14. Through the Night

Part 4: Ecstatic

15. Shopper

16. Above the Time

17. YOU&I

18. Love wins all

Encore: Heroic

19. Shh..

20. Twenty-three ☆

21. Holssi (rock ver.)

En-encore

22. Windflower

23. Hold My Hand

24. Knees

25. Palette ☆

i noted my favorite songs which is actually less than i thought experiencing it, but i think it’s because i went out of the concert wanting to listen to some of those songs a lot more... holssi/shopper were more fun in person, obliviate and havana were throwbacks, and eight.... this is that phenomenon where when the iu coming of age song comes out at first i don’t understand it and then when i get to the titular age I Get It. the one i have actually been listening to the past few days is “well... (rock ver)” which was not at all in the setlist, but i heard it a few times while listening to her discography in prep for the concert and remembered jieqiong’s masked singer performance of it T___T “i believe you, ‘cause i’m in love with you...”

i also didn’t know about the two encores LOL i knew the setlist was 25 songs from accidentally seeing a tweet, but she did keep me guessing because of how many times she said “this is really the last song”. it’s amazing that she could keep doing long concerts as a soloist even on the international leg of her tour... it was about a 3 hour concert, which is longer than most group concerts. and it flew by too... nothing felt dragged out at all. side note she had some interesting act transitions (child actor theater performance at first, vcrs later - the 23 - 32 vcr was the best!! but also the wedding veil + vcr at the end of love wins all was insane...)

i think this (below) is either when she tripped or when the platform did not go up like it was supposed to 😭 she looked genuinely surprised

the team did such a good job of putting the concert together in a considerate way for the fans... perhaps some things are only possible because she’s a solo artist but the fact that the floor tickets were foldout chairs with cushions and not general admission hell was the best possible option for me. secondly, there were subtitles on the screen with hangul and romanization for almost every song!! and purple font for the fanchant portions of the lyrics!!!!! i have never seen anything so accessible for international fans....

kpop groups could learn a lot from this. actually i felt it was very clear from the sing-along portions of the concert that a significant portion of the fans were korean speakers (at least in my section). however this could also be because those who are not fluent in korean were able to read the lyrics on the screen!! i would venture to say that there was probably just a higher proportion of koreans than the average kpop concert because not just the lyrics, but knowing the melodies of meaning of you and through the night...

the other incredible aspect of the concert was the song requests. what on earth!! imagine having to be ready to sing any song in your discography on any given night (and ditto for her band). windflower being her 2009 ost that i did not know. and hold my hand being her resurgent ost that i did know! i did wish she had sang secret garden like was on one person’s sign... but the people behind me screaming for knees won and rightfully so. what a beautiful song about grief... i did not really know this song until svt jww :_(

on top of all that, iu spoke a LOT of english and played up the whole ‘i’m learning american slang’ bit which was so cute.... i read this thread which has a little discussion on iu’s dimensionality, popularity and appeal but i think beyond her obvious talents as a singer-songwriter, she’s just perfect at all the fanservice skills. look at this subtly philosophical question to a 5 year old.

looking at some media from her other tour stops, i was also really surprised that her outfits are completely different night-to-night. and because of those shoutouts to audience members and giveaways you know that she is creating unique experiences for each stop when you know she is big enough that she doesn’t have to... this is her talking about driving to dc instead of flying because of that crowdstrike outage on the prior friday :_)

and also the freebies were so cute... thank you iu’s mom ♥