Flashback Friday: GFriend - Me Gustas Tu | Girl, Get up. Girl, Get up. Girl, Get up. Girl, Get up again.

This week (July 23rd specifically) marks the 8th anniversary of K-pop group GFriend’s “Me Gustas Tu”. But this isn’t a post about the song or the music video. It’s of a moment tied to the song which is now entwined with the legacy of it. And that moment is the performance of the song at an SBS concert in 2015.

Now. I’mma be honest. I’m terrible. Every now and then I watch this video and I wheeze with laughter each time. Po’ thing spent more time on the floor than she did standing. But this isn’t a post to just laugh at somebody dancing like Bambi on ice, but the impact that this performance wound up having on GFriend and the legacy of “Me Gustas Tu”.

You would never think it, and even at the time it wasn’t that clear, but this performance really did a lot for both GFriend and their song, due to how viral it went. For many people, this performance was their introduction to GFriend. For some this was the only thing of GFriend they’d seen and heard, and that remains the case to this day. For others, they came to see what the fuss was about concerning Yuju slippin’ and sliding, and wound up actually liking the song and becoming a fan of the group. Where-as others were so won over by Yuju’s sheer determination and professionalism to just keep getting up and keep going, that it made them fans of the group by association.

But something more extraordinary about this video going viral is that it played a part in the hallyu. This video didn’t just go viral within the K-popsphere. It went viral EVERYWHERE. I remember a bunch of music outlets and Buzzfeed-like websites posting on this video, because who faceplants during a performance four times!?

One of the more serious things to come out of this video going viral was an awareness of the conditions in which K-pop acts have to perform. Yuju wasn’t constantly falling because she is clumsy. She wasn’t even falling because of her bandaged knee. She was falling because the floor was wet, there was debris on the stage and there were mutant moths who fancied being K-pop girlies too. And this video going viral resulted in others posting videos where other acts had slipped on this very same stage; raising some genuine concerns as to why acts are made to perform in very clearly hazardous conditions. Yuju wound up breaking her finger during one of the falls. And in some corners of the Internet, this led to conversations about the numerous questionable conditions under which K-pop groups are made to work. Although this is a conversation which shocks everybody one minute and then has everybody turning away from it the next once the next ‘bop’ comes along. K-pop loves a diversion tactic, and it’s an easy business to do it with because of how fast it moves and un-retrospective it tends to be.

And here’s another wrinkle. Fancams are now considered a form of memery, going viral regularly; although the term has pretty much lost meaning outside of K-pop. What is widely considered a fancam is edited together clips of a person. But an actual fancam is as the name implies. It’s footage of a performance captured by a fan. And this actual fancam of GFriend’s performance was an early instance of one going massively viral. There are several videos of this particular performance of “Me Gustas Tu” uploaded to YouTube, one of which has 16 million views.

It’s really unfortunate for Yuju that a video of her falling went so viral and that it’s something she is now going to be known for. (Shout-outs to Tenitra Williams and that 106 & Park performance). But her level of professionalism to get up and keep it moving is not lost on me, even in my fits of laughter watching her fight the floor and lose. And neither is the overall impact of the virality of the performance.