“I really want to go back to this day for one day.”
Streaming a V LIVE in May last year he titled “CARAT Who Wants To See Me Sing, Come,” SEUNGKWAN of SEVENTEEN reminisced about his first year of middle school, back in 2010. He was awash in memories as he played a stream of hits from the year, like Secret’s “Magic,” 2NE1’s “CLAP YOUR HANDS,” 4MINUTE’s “I My Me Mine,” and MBLAQ’s “Y.” “I want to go back for a day and tell my middle school friend, ‘I’m going to be a singer in five years.’ Then, they would be like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I am saying weird things again.” From September, he started to reminisce about 2000s K-pop regularly through his V LIVE series called We Remember K-pop. When Weverse Magazine asked him about it, SEUNGKWAN brought up some stories from his childhood. In his freshman year of middle school, SEUNGKWAN was “a fan, and a regular person who liked idols so much that I knew all of them before becoming a singer.” Now, in 2021, SEUNGKWAN is a member of the popular boy band SEVENTEEN and also Professor Boo, host of We Remember K-pop, a series popular not only with SEVENTEEN’s fandom, CARAT, but also other groups’ fanbases as well. The two broadcasts of We Remember K-pop that took place on September 8 and October 28 had over 3.63 million and 3.09 million real-time viewers, respectively. The future that he couldn’t imagine as a middle schooler has come true. Today, as Professor Boo, he keeps people informed about the K-pop from back in those days, and has become a pivotal point around which people who share memories from the same time can revolve.

“I couldn’t even imagine becoming an idol, to be honest,” SEUNGKWAN, who lived on Jeju Island as a teen and had few opportunities to access music, said. “They don’t hold too many entertainment auditions on Jeju Island, so I wasn’t really connected.” He would go home on time to catch music shows and listen to the songs, and see the rare event or performance when it was held in Jeju. Always a lover of singing, he had an opportunity to be casted once a video of him singing the Big Mama song “Yeon” was uploaded to YouTube, and after a lot of practice, he became a star. SEUNGKWAN spends a lot of time on We Remember K-pop confessing to his long history of affection. He got up on a chair to demonstrate part of the performance for “TRIED TO WALK” by B1A4, and can even remember small details from the songs he fell in love with, showing off the stare from the intro to “FICTION” by BEAST (now Highlight) and the camerawork in “Shock” by shaking the camera himself. After he became a trainee, SEUNGKWAN dived so deep into K-pop that he could recite in detail which songs were written by which artists, all in the name of getting to know K-pop properly. “If I could’ve listened to these songs as freely as I do now, I never would’ve remembered them this well. I love music, but because I was a student it was hard coming across music if I didn’t actively seek it out. I think that’s the reason the memories of those times keep popping up in my head.”

And all at once, the boy who loved, studied and sang K-pop has become Professor Boo and is now spreading that love. During We Remember K-pop, he asked viewers to “please call me a professor instead of stagnant water,” calling out the nicknames he was seeing in the live comments. “Stagnant water” is a slang term in Korean that refers to someone who is highly skilled in a given area, but the phrase also sometimes carries a negative connotation, as when it’s used to suggest someone who becomes stuck in their ways and refuses to accept changing trends. By leaning into a professional-sounding nickname like Professor, which acknowledges his love and understanding of K-pop from over a decade ago, SEUNGKWAN shows how summoning music from that time to the present isn’t intended as a reversal or lampooning of change, but rather a show of respect for shared memories. “I wasn’t trying to shed new light on anything,” SEUNGKWAN said. “It might come across like I’m making a critique of other people’s songs when I talk about them, so I’m always cautious.” Although Professor Boo discusses songwriters like Sweetune, MonoTree, and Iggy Youngbae in detail, he isn’t there to give professional musical insight. He awakens memories of karaoke that anyone who was a teen would have as he explains Yesung’s part in SUPER JUNIOR’s “It’s You,” and intertwines his song explanations with memories of his trainee days that CARAT might be curious about. “I wanted to do it in an amusing way unique to me,” he said. “Rather than explaining songs like, ‘The chord changes to G minor, with the modulation providing variation,’ I thought it would be more fun to express it like, ‘This sounds dreamy—like a song that would have a music video shot at Hakdong intersection.’ ”

He has a love for everything that’s gone by that made his teen years happy. When SEUNGKWAN first began his trip down K-pop memory lane on V LIVE last May, he remarked, “When I think about it now, I think I liked all songs. There are no songs that I didn’t like.” He was part of Wonderful, the Wonder Girls fanbase, but said on V LIVE he spent his teenage years keeping up with “Pledis, of course … Woollim, Cube, STARSHIP, and the three big majors too—YG, JYP and SM—and also for U-KISS’s NH Media.” He even knew that the lyrics to the chorus in “Way to Go” by Girls’ Generation, Wonder Girls’ rival, change the third time around, and on an episode of MMTG last June, when their song “Kissing You” was playing, SEUNGKWAN showed his love for Sunny’s part by calling himself “Kwanny.” “Even now, if someone wants to check out the songs from back then, they look them up on the charts by date and by position. I didn’t like how the songs were left up to just competition or performance.” The music industry operates under the system of judging songs according to their popularity and sales figures. However, despite being a part of the industry, SEUNGKWAN loves and respects all its artists and their music. In We Remember K-pop, he also introduced songs by relatively lesser-known artists like Piggy Dolls and AJ. “When I tell them about some song, there’s lots of fans who recognize it, but there’s also people who don’t and can listen to it for the first time and say, ‘Oh, this is good!’ I think that’s good enough. Of course, I hope people will listen to it, but I think it’s meaningful even just to remember about that time.” Not everyone from any one particular era will be remembered. But for people like SEUNGKWAN, remembering things they had once forgotten about remains a precious experience.

For his April edition of We Remember K-pop, SEUNGKWAN kicked things off with Brave Girls’ “Rollin’,” which made had headlines as it reentered the charts. “I wanted to congratulate them,” he said while hosting. “As a person in the same industry, I'm very happy for them.” SEUNGKWAN said he “felt very touched,” and cheered them on by adding, “They are working hard now. I want to tell them, ‘Keep it up!’ ” Beneath his words were deep empathy and an understanding of the sweat and tears that go unseen behind the artists’ elaborate performances. “I had no idea before I debuted how hard this job would be. If I were still a regular, everyday person, I don’t think I would’ve been able to love all these songs this much. But working at the same time as them, I want to comfort and root for all the singers who’re working hard and giving it their all.” In a way, We Remember K-pop is like SEUNGKWAN’s K-pop answer to La La Land: As a young man who loved every song and dreamed of being in the spotlight ever since he was young, and as an artist aware of the weight of the dark experiences hidden outside that spotlight, he sings songs from the time with love and dedication for all the entertainment that time has passed over and for all the people who longed to perform but were forgotten.

With his arrival, Professor Boo helps people remember the feeling of the past and acknowledge the importance of the present that it has led to. The wish “to go back to this day for one day” that listening to his favorite music sparked in SEUNGKWAN cannot come true, but his heartfelt singing and dancing in his V LIVE evoked memories in those people who miss those days, and someone might even find the strength to get through their day thanks to SEUNGKWAN’s memories. The artist brought up “the power of memories” several times during his interview with Weverse Magazine. “The dictionary definition of ‘youth’ may be the time when you’re young, but I don’t want to think of youth as being made of just the part of your life when you’re young,” SEUNGKWAN said toward the end of the interview. “If you look back at today later on, you can call it youth too, and you can call that later time youth as well when you’re even older. I just want to keep living my life like this, keeping my memories alive. And I want to be able to make everyone feel that way.” As time goes by, We Remember K-pop—Professor Boo’s La La Land—will become a memory itself. And when that time comes, someone out there might think of what SEUNGKWAN had to say about what he had to give to others: “I believe in the power of memories. I’m so grateful I can wear a smile now while I talk about the hard times back then.”