What SHINee Taught Me About Grief, Friendship, and Joy

In this essay, writer Victoria Huynh examines her relationship to iconic K-pop group SHINee as they reintroduce themselves on their newest comeback, Don’t Call Me. Content warning: this article contains discussion of suicide.

In 2020, the global pandemic brought me and my friends back to our hometown in the suburbs of San Diego. Something about sitting in our childhood bedrooms for months, waiting hopelessly for some unknown future to arrive, returned us all to our high school selves. We messaged our group chat as we re-watched sitcoms from 2014, picked up gaming, or fell back into K-pop, like I did by the summer.

I thought I had outgrown K-pop long before this past year, along with the days my high school friends had spent subsumed by our favorite idols. College had made my music taste more measured. I couldn’t think of the last time I’d loved anything with the pure adoration that K-pop demands, that bright and breathless joy.

But that was before I knew how much we would need those old joys to disappear from the world outside. So on some late-night online foray, I found my way back to SHINee, the K-pop group I thought I’d left behind.

You’d think that the things you loved in high school would embarrass you now. And maybe they do — but honestly, SHINee still hits. In 2008, SHINee debuted with the R&B single “Replay,” in which members Onew, Jonghyun, Key, Minho, and Taemin play boys in love with an older woman. “Replay” still feels timeless, the synth heartbeat of its opening notes instantly transporting listeners to some hazy nightclub that only plays Usher. SHINee soon set the standard for mainstream K-pop with their well-balanced harmonies, thrillingly complex choreography, and endless capacity for experimentation. By the time my friends introduced me to them in 2014, each new release felt like a feat of reinvention. We watched SHINee’s comeback with Odd (2015), followed by 1of1 (2016) — both were a mix of new jack swing and the sleek beats of deep house, SHINee traversing between old school and new.

Last summer, I listened to SHINee as I drove to and from work each day, replaying their discography from the start. Some songs I’d outgrown, and others I still had all but memorized. SHINee’s electro-pop singles like “Ring Ding Dong” and “Lucifer” were my friends’ karaoke staples, though we could never get through the latter without laughing at lyrics like “HER WHISPER IS THE LUCIFER!” We all knew SHINee’s R&B ballads and their Jackson Five-era neo-soul sets, probably because our friend Aya often forced us into three-hour concert viewings at her house. Odd and 1of1 were already my favorite albums back then, and in 2020, both reminded me of everything that summers with my friends used to be. We’d drive to the beach on weekends, rolling down the windows to play our favorite tracks beneath the warm and endless sun.

I’d stopped listening to SHINee in late 2017, after 1of1’s release. Back then, SHINee’s main vocalist Kim Jonghyun had suddenly passed away. K-pop no longer felt like something my friends and I could easily share.

With Jonghyun’s absence, it was impossible for SHINee’s music now to be anything like the songs we used to love. So I don’t know what else I was searching for this past summer, if not nostalgia, when I opened SHINee’s album Story of Light (2018). As the rest of my friends disappeared into their old comforts, I loaded up the tracklist and hesitantly pressed play.

Before K-pop’s unprecedented ascent into global pop culture in these last few years, it was just something else that my friends and I had in common. In the Asian American suburbs of southern California, K-pop was the soundtrack to our coming of age. Our families all frequented the Korean grocery stores, and our favorite tofu houses in Convoy always projected early to mid-2000s K-pop music videos onto their back walls.

There were other things that brought us together, too. Before we used terms like queer or people of color, in high school we’d all felt like the odd ones out. Half of us had grown up in different cities, and we were all arts and humanities kids tired of our hyper-competitive STEM peers. I think we found kinship in our shared strangeness, which translated into our too-loud sense of humor and our disenchantment with suburban life. Or maybe it was just our ringleader Aya, who started our group chat in 2014 to get us into her various obsessions. As years went on, I watched in confusion as my friends started spamming the chat with pictures of people I didn’t recognize, with frenzied captions like “look at him!!!!!! my SON!!!!!!!!!!!!!.” But I couldn’t understand K-pop until I was in it. I had to be eased in slowly, then hurtled headfirst into the ah, f*ck of a 2 a.m. night, my hours lost to meme compilations, my texts inexplicable to anyone else except my friends.

How better to while away the never-ending days of high school than with friends who love the same things as you do, with the same bright, teenage fervor? We spoke of our idols with such fierce affection that we might as well have been talking about each other. The absolute chaos of their friendships felt so much like ours: our wit and our earnesty, the way we cared for each other and teased each other in the same breath. We’d disrupt our classes and get kicked out of neighborhood parks for our antics. Our friend Anisa would make some wildly inappropriate joke, egged on by others like Carol or Aya, and the rest of us would fall over in helpless laughter.

When asked about SHINee’s relationships on a talk show once, Jonghyun caused a small stir by saying that the members were simply brought together by SM Entertainment to work, in his too-honest way. What he meant, he clarified later, was that those circumstances made their friendships more special. “We’re a family, a community of common fate,” Jonghyun said. Whether SHINee or my high school friends, every great friend group feels bound by that common fate. Every great friend group strikes upon something like magic, some strange alchemy that makes you all your weirdest, funniest, most brilliant selves. Regardless of what brought you together, you always arrive at the same place: trading incomprehensible inside jokes and stories that sound like near-death experiences, filling the midnight hours with each other’s laughter. I barely remember what we could have talked about, long into the night. I only remember how it felt, giddy and endless, aglow in the neon light of being with each other.

By December 2017, we were all midway through college, scattered across the country when someone sent the news to the chat. Kim Jonghyun, born 1990, member of Korean pop group SHINee, discovered dead in a hotel room. Likely suicide. In the following months, his friends performed concerts in his honor, while his fans organized memorials across the world. I wish that I’d been there for any of it, but I wasn’t. I didn’t talk about it to my high school friends, who eventually didn’t talk about it either. Soon after, I stopped listening to K-pop completely.

I thought that letting go of SHINee was just another by-product of outgrowing my younger self. Now I wonder if it was that I wasn’t ready to grieve. I didn’t really understand grief yet, in either its public or intimate forms, so maybe I was scared of what it would mean to my life, what it would change. Which was foolish, thinking back, because everything had already changed. I had already felt time slip away each time my friends and I came home from college, driving through the streets that once mapped our world and wondering if they were always this small. Or when we tried too hard and still failed to explain to each other everything we’d since become, so instead we replayed our high school stories, over and over.

Maybe growing up is just an accumulation of grief anyway, whether that grief is for the abrupt, unexplainable deaths of others or the slow erosion of all your younger selves. The more you understand how lonely and difficult this world is, the more you miss the days when you still took joy for granted. Mostly, you miss your friends: the earnesty of your obsessions, the easy feeling of your love.

This past summer, I ventured into the online archives of Jonghyun’s life and expected to feel the loss I’d left behind. Instead, I fell in love all over again with who he was, this time for different reasons. Jonghyun was more than a bright fixture of my high school days. He’d had to grow up quickly as he navigated the demands of fame, and he was wiser and more complex than I’d ever realized.

As SHINee’s main vocalist, Jonghyun’s rich, golden voice brought his members’ diverging tones together. He felt music with his entire being—the earnest passion of his ballads, the bright punch of SHINee’s dance numbers. SHINee members always teased Jonghyun for being the first to cry in their concerts, but fans admired his love for his craft. It was a love that he had fought for, as one of the few K-pop idols to write and produce his own songs at the time. It helped him to subvert the rigid expectations of his industry. Jonghyun adored funk and soul and R&B as much as K-pop, and his best songs often skipped across genres to arrive at something suddenly, wonderfully, new.

Fans loved Jonghyun most when he couldn’t help but be himself, on or off stage. He’d describe himself as “simply a person who shows up on TV” with bemused practicality, wholly uninterested in being anyone’s false god. Even now, his honesty feels daring, unprecedented. On Twitter, he’d talk about various injustices out of the responsibility he felt to his fans. In 2013, Jonghyun sent a DM to a trans student in Seoul and asked permission to change his profile picture to a letter she’d written in protest of LGBTQ discrimination. Undeterred by backlash, he humbled himself to his fans and corrected himself in their many online conversations on racism, sexism, and inequality. “When time passes,” Jonghyun mused in a 2015 interview, “and I look back at my youth, how embarrassing would it be if I hadn’t even taken an interest in the contradictions of the world, and hadn’t made any effort to say things to right its wrongs?”

My friends and I thought K-pop was a way to escape from our lives, but Jonghyun knew that there were things in this world that refused to disappear. So instead, he extended a hand through the lonely fog of the world to those like him, the fans who he spoke of as old friends. On his late-night radio show Blue Night, he’d read aloud his listeners’ stories of everyday hardship and heartbreak. In turn, Jonghyun shared his own experiences with anxiety and depression and offered his hard-won wisdom. It was alright to be sad, he often told us, alright to struggle, to be alone, and to not have easy resolutions for any of these things. Still, let out your breath, he wrote in songs that felt like letters, today, you did well.

As weary as Jonghyun often seemed, I like knowing that he could find solace in Blue Night. There, he felt like the friend you called when neither of you could sleep. Your jokes were funnier, your musings were more honest because you were together, there in the midnight hours. You hope that nights like those would last forever. And they do, but only in memory, or as his producer Park Jeong Eon writes, on a grey day where everything still feels clear.

In February 2018, only two months after Jonghyun died by suicide, SHINee proceeded with their pre-scheduled concerts at Tokyo Dome to honor their commitment to their fans. They kept Jonghyun’s backing tracks in every song, even when forced to cover his solos. In their tribute songs, members left a space for Jonghyun on stage and looked up at the sky, through a blur of tears, as his pre-recorded voice soared above theirs. SHINee would always be five, Minho reminded their audience at the concerts’ end. But I’m grateful for their honesty. There was no use pretending that they were completely alright, or that their music or friendships could be the same as they were before. Jonghyun’s death had tasked us all with the strange, uncertain work of learning to live in the world he’d left behind.

In the empty hours of the last summer in quarantine, I waded through nearly three years’ worth of online grief. I hadn’t realized how ubiquitous my feelings had been. So many of us had stopped listening to SHINee after Jonghyun’s death, including my friends. Others near and far wondered what else they could have done to help him. And still others wondered whether they should have been mourning at all. It felt like we’d lost an old friend. But then it also felt undeserved, even embarrassing to be sad about someone we didn’t know. We love our idols for who they are and for what they mean to our lives, which means our grief over them defies easy categorization.

Grief itself rarely makes sense anyway. I’d scroll through heartbreaking letters to Jonghyun, beautiful tributes to his life, then suddenly find myself laughing at a video of him playing the kazoo. Then I’d wonder if it was even okay to laugh if we were all supposed to be sad.

On a whim, I contacted the person who ran for you, jonghyun, a memorial blog and the most extensive archive of Jonghyun’s life that I could find in translation. Brittany explained the things I’d seen in online fan spaces: fights, deleted accounts, but more than that, the commitment she and others had made to remembering Jonghyun, however difficult it was. Like others, she’d struggled with his absence in SHINee’s 2018 comeback. “That gaping hole is always going to be there, and I figure it's better to still feel it than to feel nothing at all,” Brittany wrote in our email exchange. I knew exactly what she meant, I wrote back, that gaping hole. Except I was too scared to feel it back then, so now I was reversing course, searching for what I’d missed.

Before the end of summer 2020, I found my way back to where it all began. I met up with my high school friends in the park to ask what they remembered about our K-pop stan era. We reminisced on the idols we loved, how much they’d changed, and how much we had, too. “Wait you guys, look at this,” my friend Carol interjected. She’d scrolled through our group chat’s photos and found a video of our other friend Anisa circa 2016, in a hospital bed after her appendix burst. Delirious on painkillers, Anisa looks at the camera and addresses me, very seriously: “Victoria, if you don’t know the answer to something, just remember (starts rapping) dibidibidis, my name is Minho, flaming charisma…(pause) why is he called that again?” The camera starts shaking with Carol’s laughter. “Anisa, what the f*ck??”

If all my life I tried to avoid the grief of losing people, then this was what I would miss, the weird, hilarious joy of loving them. We all have to grow up at some point, anyway. At least we don’t have to do it alone.

When SHINee’s comeback began in May 2018, I’d briefly opened the music video for their first single “Good Evening,” then closed the tab. Now I understand what I’d felt. If not the immediacy of grief, it was the familiar ache of realizing that nothing would ever be the way it once was. But why should it be? Even as they returned us to long-beloved songs, SHINee has always defined themselves by their capacity for reinvention.

Building from Odd and 1of1’s forays into deep house, SHINee’s Story of Light plays with the lighter, more upbeat textures of the sub-genre tropical house while staying close to their origins. “Good Evening” samples the chorus of 112’s Cupid, a 90s R&B ballad seeking to assuage a doubtful lover: “True love doesn’t lie, but we won’t know unless we give it a try.” SHINee speeds up this steady yearning with neon synth lines and agile harmonies, creating a more hopeful arc than the one they inherited. Lonely in the dark, “I’m coming to find you [in the light],” they sing.

On stage, the way they move is different too, freer and more expressive than the multi-step coordination of their old days. Members seem unaware of their audience’s gaze, as if we’ve just happened to glance into the window of their interiority. We wait until the bridge for them to even come together on stage, and then until the last chorus to see their burst of thrilling synchronicity, which ends as soon as it’s begun. However brief, it’s a joy that now feels earned.

Story of Light felt like an offering. Fans recognized themselves in its moments of quiet longing and took heart with Our Page, penned by members in honor of Jonghyun. Throughout their comeback, SHINee also took care to speak of Jonghyun honestly, addressing his loss in interviews and laughing over fond memories together. Key still posts old videos of Jonghyun on his Instagram. Scrolling through his archives one night, I found something else I’d missed years ago. Key had written a letter to Jonghyun just a few days after his passing:

I keep coming back to Key’s letter, how honest it feels in its sorrow, yet gentle and unselfish in its acceptance. Key doesn’t need to ask why. Instead, he reminds us that grief pulls you back into memory as much as it propels you forward into possibility. Grief asks you to grow up and live well for the ones you love. We’d been doing that all along, all these years.

SHINee has continued to mature in their artistry; they redefined themselves anew with Story of Light, and they’re set to do it again two years later with their comeback album “Don’t Call Me.” “We used to try to show people what they would like,” Taemin explained in their 2018 interview on Radio Star. “That’s what we always strove to do. But now, we want to do it for ourselves.” It felt like something Jonghyun would say, in his clear-eyed understanding of what made art and life worthwhile.

 Like SHINee, my friends and I have learned to leave our younger selves behind, though not completely. If anything could sustain me through the uncertainty of growing up, it wasn’t nostalgia or escapism. It was the rare joy of coming home to my old friends. The feeling of realizing that we all grew up in the same directions, our lives ready to converge once more.

Wherever we go next, Jonghyun will be there too, I think. Not like he was before, but in the way that you always carry around the people you love, their words a guide in your back pocket as you try and find your way.

If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 or text Crisis Text Line at 741-741.

Let us slide into your DMs. Sign up for the Teen Vogue daily email.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: K-Pop Helped Me Reconnect With My Asian-American Identity