logo
Why was G-Dragon's Übermensch concert in Malaysia ‘frustrating'? All about ‘unfair' treatment of local fans and scalping issues

Why was G-Dragon's Übermensch concert in Malaysia ‘frustrating'? All about ‘unfair' treatment of local fans and scalping issues

Pink Villa6 days ago
K-pop legend G-Dragon recently held his two-day Übermensch concert in Kuala Lumpur on July 19 and 20. The show marked a major event for fans, especially those in Malaysia who had been eagerly awaiting his comeback. But despite the impressive stage production and G-Dragon's star power, the weekend ended on a bitter note for many local fans.
G-Dragon's KL concert faces scalping controversy
Even before the concerts began, ticket sales had drawn controversy. It's due to alleged scalping and difficulty for local fans to purchase tickets. Organiser Star Planet attempted to tackle the issue by re-releasing a limited number of tickets. However, the move only stirred fresh concerns when fans noticed unusual patterns at the venue.
Once the gates opened, attendees observed numerous empty seats, raising eyebrows given the event was officially sold out. Fans pointed to the possibility that scalpers, unable to resell tickets, had caused these gaps in the audience.
Further fuelling suspicion was the sight of many VIP lanyards left untouched at the registration counter. They were still unclaimed even after the show had started. Though those empty spots were eventually filled, many fans believe they were occupied by foreign buyers, not locals. It deepened frustration over how tickets were allocated.
G-Dragon's Malay moments fall flat
K-pop fans are known to celebrate idols who make the effort to speak in their local language. It's often a highlight of any K-pop show in foreign country. But during G-Dragon 's concert, his attempts to connect with the audience in Malay were met with a noticeably muted response.
Some fans speculated that the lack of energy could be because many in attendance didn't understand the language. This possibly points again to the heavy presence of non-local fans in the crowd. For a region known for its loud and passionate fanbase, the subdued atmosphere felt out of place.
G-Dragon's team comforts tearful fans outside Malaysia show
As is common during sold-out concerts, several fans chose to gather outside the venue to experience the event from afar. However, this time, the scene turned emotional. Viral TikTok videos showed fans chanting and booing, calling on staff to open the doors so they could catch even a glimpse of the show.
What made it even more emotional was the reported appearance of G-Dragon 's team. They approached the crowd to collect supportive messages for the artist. Many fans, some in tears, shared heartfelt notes. They expressed both their love for G-Dragon and their sadness at not being able to see him perform live. The clips touched fans across the internet, with many calling out the organisers for not doing more to accommodate local supporters.
No response yet from G-Dragon concerts' organisers
As of now, Star Planet Malaysia has not released an official statement regarding the allegations and backlash. While G-Dragon's performance was praised for its creativity and stage presence, the overall concert experience left a sour taste for many. Fans now hope that should G-Dragon, or BIGBANG as a full group, return to Malaysia, the event will be better organised.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

'Goodbye for now!': K-drama star & ASTRO's Cha Eunwoo bids emotional farewell to fans on eve of military enlistment
'Goodbye for now!': K-drama star & ASTRO's Cha Eunwoo bids emotional farewell to fans on eve of military enlistment

Time of India

time22 minutes ago

  • Time of India

'Goodbye for now!': K-drama star & ASTRO's Cha Eunwoo bids emotional farewell to fans on eve of military enlistment

Cha Eunwoo ( Image credit : Cha Eunwoo set to enlist in the military. Credit: Instagram|eunwo.o_c ) Cha Eunwoo bids emotional farewell "I'll say goodbye for now.. Bye bye! I'll go and come back safely.. I won't get hurt and will always be careful.. Erm, how do I turn off the live? Once again, thank you and love you. bye~ ppyong" 250727#ChaEunWoo | #차은우 | #チャウヌ | #车银优 | #ชาอึนอู | #아스트로 | # — Cha Eun Woo 차은우 Daily (@chaeunwoodaily) July 27, 2025 Cha Eunwoo's meaningful send-off with ASTRO members and late Moonbin's sister Cha Eunwoo's K-drama work Wonderful World A Good Day to Be a Dog The WONDERfools Hong Sisters Just in June, fans saw all the 7 BTS members wrap up their mandatory military service, and now the enlistment spotlight has shifted to the beloved K-drama actors. However, what happens when the artist enlisting is both a popular idol and an actor? Fans can't help but get emotional and that's exactly what happened with the news of ASTRO's Cha Eunwoo's Eunwoo is officially set to begin his mandatory military service on July 28, 2025. Known for his stunning visuals and work in both K-pop and K-dramas, Eunwoo will serve in the Republic of Korea Army's military band. His service is scheduled to last 548 days, with a discharge date set for January 27, of enlistment, in the live broadcast, Eunwoo appeared in a white T-shirt with his new haircut, offering finger hearts and a warm smile. He said, "I'll say goodbye for now… Bye bye! I'll go and come back safely. I won't get hurt and will always be careful. Erm, how do I turn off the live? Once again, thank you and love you. Bye~ ppyong."Not just the live chat - Cha Eunwoo also posted a set of photos on Instagram, showing off his new buzz cut. In addition, he shared a touching photo from his farewell dinner with ASTRO members MJ, JinJin, and Yoon San particularly emotional moment came with the presence of Billlie's Moon Sua, the younger sister of the late ASTRO member Moonbin. Fans were deeply moved by their reunion - a quiet tribute to the lasting bonds and cherished memories within the actor's recent work spans across multiple platforms, including the K-dramas(2024) and(2023–2024). Prior to the enlistment, he was busy with the upcoming Netflix series(2025). He was also reportedly in discussions to star in a new K-drama by the, but ultimately chose not to join the Cha Eunwoo begins this new chapter, fans are sending him off with heartfelt messages, especially on social media - and promising to welcome him back when he returns.

Priyanka Chopra And Nick Jonas Attend BLACKPINK's Concert, Croon Malti Marie's Favourite Song APT
Priyanka Chopra And Nick Jonas Attend BLACKPINK's Concert, Croon Malti Marie's Favourite Song APT

NDTV

time4 hours ago

  • NDTV

Priyanka Chopra And Nick Jonas Attend BLACKPINK's Concert, Croon Malti Marie's Favourite Song APT

Looks like the BLACKPINK fan club just got a big Bollywood-Hollywood addition. Priyanka Chopra has made it official – she is a BLINK. Over the weekend, Priyanka and her husband, Nick Jonas, attended BLACKPINK's Deadline World Tour concert in New York. The couple seemed to have a blast, and they shared glimpses from the event on their Instagram Stories. The actress was dressed in a chic grey dress paired with statement earrings, while Nick kept it cool in a shirt, jacket and pants combo. They were not just there to pose – they were all in, singing along with the crowd and soaking in the K-pop energy. Nick Jonas posted a video of BLACKPINK's Rose performing her hit song APT. In the clip, both he and Priyanka are seen vibing to the track along with thousands of other fans. He simply captioned it, ' APT,' and added a fire emoji. But here is the cute twist—turns out the song might be a hit at home too. Priyanka Chopra reshared the video and wrote, 'Winning brownie points with Malti Marie.' She also tagged Rose and Bruno Mars, who co-sung the track with the BLACKPINK star. So now we know – little Malti Marie's got great taste in music, and her parents are clearly keeping up. Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas got married in 2018. The couple welcomed Malti Marie via surrogacy in 2022. On the work front, Priyanka Chopra was last seen in Heads of State alongside Idris Elba and John Cena. The film premiered on Prime Video on July 2. Up next, she is set to appear in projects like The Bluff, SSMB29 and Citadel Season 2.

The Harvard-educated linguist breaking down ‘skibidi' and ‘rizz'
The Harvard-educated linguist breaking down ‘skibidi' and ‘rizz'

Indian Express

time5 hours ago

  • Indian Express

The Harvard-educated linguist breaking down ‘skibidi' and ‘rizz'

Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs — a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. Influencers shared stories from their 'seggs lives' and spoke about the importance of 'seggs education.' Lots of similarly inventive workarounds have emerged to discuss sensitive or suggestive topics online. This phenomenon is called algospeak, and it has yielded terms like 'cornucopia' for homophobia and 'unalive,' a euphemism for suicide that has made its way into middle schoolers' offline vocabulary. These words roll off the tongue for Aleksic, a 24-year-old linguist and content creator who posts as Etymology Nerd on social media. Others may find them slightly bewildering. But, as he argues in a new book, 'Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,' these distinctly 21st-century coinages are worthy of consideration by anyone interested in the forces that mold our shifting lexicon. 'The more I looked into it, the more I realized that algorithms are really affecting every aspect of modern language change,' Aleksic said in a recent interview, padding around the Manhattan apartment he shares with a roommate and wearing socks stitched with tiny dolphins. Even those who steer clear of social media are not exempt. If you have encountered Oxford University Press's 2024 word of the year, 'brain rot' (the 'supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state,' thanks to a firehose of digital content), you, too, have had a brush with social media's ability to incubate slang and catapult it into the offline world. Aleksic has been dissecting slang associated with Gen Z on social media since 2023. In wobbly, breathless videos that are usually about a minute long, he uses his undergraduate degree in linguistics from Harvard University to explain the spread of terms including 'lowkey' and 'gyat.' (If you must know, the latter is a synonym for butt.) The videos are more rigorous than their informal quality might suggest. Each one takes four or five hours to compose, he said. He scripts every word, and combs Google Scholar for relevant papers from academic journals that he can cite in screenshots. He appears to be fashioning himself as Bill Nye for Gen Z language enthusiasts. In the process, he has become a go-to voice for journalists and anyone older than 30 who might want to understand why 'Skibidi Toilet,' the nonsensical name of a YouTube series, has wormed its way into Gen Alpha's vocabulary. What he wants now is to be taken seriously outside of those circles. 'I want to balance being a 'ha-ha funny' TikToker with academic credibility,' he said. 'It's a little hard to strike that balance when you are talking about 'Skibidi Toilet' on the internet.' Aleksic settled in his living room, under the apparent surveillance of several stick-on googly eyes left over from his most recent birthday party. To the left of the entrance was a makeshift ball pit filled with orbs that resembled enormous plastic Dippin' Dots. (He installed it as a bit, but has come to appreciate its ability to foster conversation.) In person, he is animated but not frenetic, a click or three less intense than he appears in his videos. He is happy to lean into the persona of a fast-talking know-it-all if it means engaging people who wouldn't otherwise spare a thought for etymology. He started speeding up his cadence when he realized that brisk videos tended to get more views. 'I'll retake a video if I don't think I spoke fast enough,' he said. Just as Aleksic changed the way he spoke in response to algorithmic pressure, language, too, can be bent by users seeking an audience on social media. Take 'rizz,' which means something along the lines of 'charisma.' According to Aleksic, the word was popularized by Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, whose young fans picked up the term. So did the robust ecosystem of people online who make fun of Cenat's every move. Soon, the word had been flagged by TikTok's recommendation algorithm as a trending topic that it could highlight to keep viewers engaged. Influencers — including Aleksic — who wanted their posts to be pushed to more viewers now had an incentive to join in. This process slingshots trendy coinages into the broader consciousness. But it also yanks terms from their original context faster than ever before, he said. Words with origins in African American English or ballroom culture, for instance, are often mislabeled as 'Gen Z slang' or 'internet slang.' Aleksic tackles that well-documented phenomenon in a chapter titled 'It's Giving Appropriation.' Other sections of the book, which was released by Knopf this month, spend time with subcultures that play an outsize role in modern language generation, including K-pop fans, who boosted the term 'delulu,' and incels, or involuntary celibates, who popularized the term 'sigma.' Words have always traveled from insular communities into wider usage: Aleksic likes the example of 'OK,' which was Boston newspaper slang in the 19th century that spread with the help of Martin Van Buren's reelection campaign. (His nickname in full, 'Old Kinderhook,' was a bit of a mouthful.) But 'delulu' and 'rizz' didn't need the eighth president's help to travel across the country — they had the internet. And TikTok's powerful algorithm is more efficient at getting the word out than Old Kinderhook's most overachieving press secretary. Today, the cycle of word generation has been turbocharged to the point that some of its output hardly makes sense. Nowhere is that more evident than in a chapter titled 'Sticking Out Your Gyat for the Rizzler,' a chaotic mélange of slang that is hilarious to middle schoolers precisely because it is so illegible to adults. Words and phrases don't need to be understood to go viral — they just have to be funny enough to retain our attention. Aleksic argues that 'algospeak' is no longer as simple as swapping sex for 'seggs'; it is a linguistic ecosystem in which words rocket from the margins to the mainstream in a matter of days, and sometimes fade just as fast. When influencers modify their vocabulary and speech patterns for maximum visibility, those patterns are reinforced among their audiences. Aleksic said he works hard to keep viewers' attention, for example, jumping between camera angles roughly every 8 seconds. He longed for a forum in which he could discuss his ideas at length, and last January, he began refining an idea for a book about algorithms and language. That's an ambitious goal for a recent college graduate without an advanced degree or decades of research experience, the kinds of qualifications that abound in the linguistics publishing crowd. But youth has its upsides when it comes to the world of internet slang, said Gretchen McCulloch, the author of 'Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.' 'The tricky thing with internet linguistics is that the point at which you're the most qualified to speak about it from personal experience is also the point at which you have the least, sort of, academic credibility,' McCulloch said in an interview. She, too, is fascinated by how short-form video is affecting language, though she wonders which changes will be permanent and which will fade with time. Take the way that influencers often begin their videos with superlatives like 'The most interesting thing about …' Will those hyperbolic phrases bleed into other forms of communication, or will they lose their potency with overuse? There is a whole graveyard full of internet-speak — 'on fleek,' you will be missed — that has fallen out of fashion. While Aleksic wades through these big questions, he is also making time for really small ones. He is hoping to make a video about urinal conversations, which have been the subject of more academic papers than you might think. While we spoke, he pulled up his email inbox to scan through the questions that had come in from his followers. (He gets about 10 a day.) 'Somebody emailed me about the word 'thank' versus 'thanks,'' he said, scrolling through a message. 'You know, that's kind of interesting.'

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store