Cravity, a K-pop group with a Southern California member, comes to KCON in Los Angeles

The last time Allen Ma came to KCON he was a fan, a teenager from Hacienda Heights in a crowd of 50,000 there to see bands such as Twice and Seventeen at the annual celebration of Korean pop music and culture in downtown Los Angeles.

Now he’s on the other side of the stage, a rapper, singer and dancer in the K-pop boy band Cravity, which is one of the bigger names who’ll play for tens of thousands in Crypto.com Arena on Saturday, Aug. 20, the second of three days at KCON LA this year.

“KCON LA has always been a stage I wanted to stand on,” Allen says on a video call from South Korea with Jungmo, the stage name of Koo Jung Mo, another of the nine young men in the band. “Ever since I attended KCON LA back in 2018 as a guest, as an audience member.

“So I feel like it’d be super-surreal to be standing in what was once called Staples Center and performing,” he says. “The stage, you know, is 360 degrees. There’s going to be fans all around surrounding us.

“My family – my brother, my mother – is going to be there. My friends from high school are going to be there. I’m just super-excited and can’t wait to rock that stage.”

Cravity – the name is a portmanteau of creativity and gravity – is one of the latest K-pop acts from Starship Entertainment, whose best-known act is the boy band Monsta X, which debuted in 2015 with performances that included a stop by KCON LA.

Cravity debuted in April 2020, quickly finding success with K-pop fans. It was the fifth-fastest Korean group to enter the Billboard Social 50, peaking at No. 12 on the chart that measures fan passions and engagement on social media. The group also earned best new artist type awards at a handful of Korean music awards.

Songs such as “Break All The Rules,” “My Turn,” and “Adrenaline” connected with fans; Cravity was success, but because of the pandemic, it was experienced in a weird kind of virtual limbo.

“Debuting in the pandemic is a little bit different than I thought and dreamed,” Jungmo says, saying he’d imagined seeing cheering fans but it was not to be. “There was just cameras, no fans.”

KCON LA, Cravity’s second live performance in the U.S. after KCON Chicago in May, will change that, and the six-city KCON tour that follows the L.A. show, and the release of “Boogie Woogie,” the first English-language single by Cravity, will finally make their delayed dreams real.

So Cal to Seoul

It’s not completely unusual for a K-pop band to have members from Southern California. Tiffany Young of Girls’ Generation grew up in Cerritos, as did Jae Park, who goes simply as Jae, of the band Day6.

For Allen, who is Taiwanese American, it was a dream since childhood.

“It’s crazy because I’ve had quite a long journey myself from being a little kid aspiring to be a K-pop star in Hacienda Heights to actually flying across the ocean and receiving all this training, and actually making my debut as an idol.”

A brief primer on K-pop band terminology before we continue: Before a band goes public, its members are known as trainees. Once they have an official debut they are known as idols. New bands are known as rookies or juniors. More established bands, like BTS or Monsta X, are known as seniors.

And bands’ fandoms all get their own fandom names. BTS fans are famously known as Army. Twice’s fandom is called Once. For Cravity, the fans are collectively known as Luvity.

Back to Allen’s story: His goal identified, Allen went online to find K-pop companies holding auditions in Southern California near the end of high school.

“I signed up for one of them and luck was on my side and I happened to make it,” he says. “I guess the company saw something in me.”

Jungmo’s path into Cravity started another way. A casting agent spotted him on the street, walking home from high school, liked his K-pop-ready looks and invited him to try out.

“My friends and family were fully supportive of this move,” Allen says. “They were really happy and proud of me, and so thanks to their support, their undying love and support, I believe that’s how I was able to come so far.”

Not that it was easy at first.

Training camp

Allen went through training to become a performer for four years before he and Cravity debuted publicly in April 2020.

“Training is actually a very necessary process and very important as well,” he says. “What you see now from our performances and our songs is the result of all the hard work and dedication we put in during our training days.

“We would spend almost the whole day just – I wouldn’t say locked up – just stuck in practice rooms,” Allen says, laughing. “We kind of had to figure out what to do with that time, whether we cover a song or copy a dance, learn a few dance moves.”

Starship Entertainment provided lessons with coaches and teachers to help the nine guys improve whatever skills they needed to strengthen, he and Jungmo say. Dance lessons for some, rapping and singing for others.

“Since I came from the States, I had to take Korean lessons as well, with a teacher one on one,” Allen says.

“Dancing was hard for me the first time, so I practiced dancing,” Jungmo says.

“Yeah, because Jungmo, he got cast on the streets with good looks,” Allen says. “He came into the company not knowing how to do anything as compared with other members who might have come from other companies, or who might have attended dance academies.”

Allen says outside of Korean language classes his most challenging work involved improvements to his singing, especially the Korean ballads they’d sing at their monthly company evaluations.

“That kind of vibe, coming from the States I couldn’t really emulate it as well,” he says. “I had a pretty hard time practicing singing Korean ballads.”

Jungmo, who sang and played guitar in school bands from elementary to high school, says the singing was easy. Everything else, not so much.

“I didn’t enjoy learning the hard things because obviously it’s not really fun to learn those kinds of things,” he says, shifting from English learned during part of his childhood spent in New Zealand to Korean interpreted by a translator on the call.

A pandemic debut

The debut of Cravity during the pandemic was, as Jungmo earlier noted, unfortunate.

“We all were just … there was a bunch of emotions,” Allen says. “We’re just making our debut when we’re coming out into the world, so we’re full of hope, we’re full of excitement. There’s nerves as well, kind of the fear of the big future.

“And then we got this pandemic situation going on, so that kind of like brought anger or frustration,” he says, recalling the early days as chaotic. “I don’t actually remember much of it.

“I just remember being so excited to finally come out of the training dungeon,” he says, laughing.

Earlier this year, some of that he and the rest of the band had hoped to experience finally began. Cravity traveled to New York City for publicity events and played their first U.S. show at KCON Chicago.

“Oh man, after being able to experience what a performer should actually experience, I just feel like things like this will never ever happen again,” Allen says. “I feel like through this pandemic situation we shouldn’t take for granted just how amazing our fans are and how much strength they provide us with while performing on stage.”

For Jungmo, too, Chicago is now indelible memory.

“During the performance, there was a segment when the members went to the audience down the stage,” he says, speaking through the translator. “Because I was right in the middle of the audience, I could feel their screams, their chants.

“That experience is like a different level for me.”

The K-pop generation

Allen is 23, Jungmo a year younger, making them both of the generation in which K-pop took off, a musical supernova that touched fans far beyond its traditional scene in South Korea and other Asian nations.

For casual onlookers, it might seem that BTS has done this alone, but Allen and Jungmo, and dedicated K-pop fans, know this recent history of Western success stretches back well over a decade now.

“Ever since YouTube or other streaming platforms became very large, widely used, I think that was the big moment when K-pop could finally be enjoyed by a lot of fans around the world,” Jungmo says. “Our seniors, Monsta X and also BTS, they did such a great job in paving the way for other junior groups to make their way into the U.S.”

As a boy growing up in Southern California, Allen says he was exposed through the diverse Asian American communities to early K-pop acts such as Big Bang, Wonder Girls, and Girls’ Generation more than a decade ago.

“And as a little boy growing up during middle school, high school, you know, we just want to be cool,” Allen says. “We want to do something that will attract the ladies.”

Big Bang member Taeyang’s 2009 solo single “Wedding Dress” was a big hit then, and Allen says he and his friends practiced its dance moves, which led to more hip-hop dancing and more interest in the music that inspired them.

“And then I guess what really popped everything, like what really blew everything off was ‘Gangnam Style’ in 2012, he says of the inescapable crossover hit by the K-pop star Psy. “That really put K-pop on the radar around the world.

“But also, with K-pop music itself, I feel like just the emotion that’s within the music kind of breaks that barrier of language, and it communicates straight to the heart, to the listener’s emotions,” Allen says.

“No matter if you understand the Korean language, whatever message, whatever emotions that the artist wants to convey in the music, it will be communicated.”