JJ Lin 林俊傑 - "Road to JJ20" Concert at SAP Center in San Jose
A few weeks ago, my friend and I attended JJ Lin's "Road to JJ20" concert (it's been 20 years since his debut). She and I had gone to his L.A. concert seven years ago, and we were looking forward to attending a concert after many years of deprivation of live entertainment. Plus, we figured we'd save on airfare money since JJ was coming to our city.
What we didn't expect was that his concert tickets would explode to 3x as much as last time and that what seemed like the entire young adult Chinese population in San Jose would be fighting for tickets the second they went on sale. Last time, we bought the cheapest tickets ($68) long after they had gone on sale; there were tons of tickets left, and we were surrounded by empty seats at the concert. This time, the cheapest tickets were $188, and the entire concert was sold out on Ticketmaster in five minutes. By chance, I happened to score some $268 tickets, which ended up being around $300 after all the Ticketmaster fees. Definitely the most expensive concert tickets I've ever bought. But was it worth it?
HECK YES.
End of JJ20 concert in San Jose, CA - "You complete me..."
Some awesome parts of the concert:
- The concert started even more punctually than last time, probably around 20 minutes after the official start time. (I was very pleased with this because the concert was held on a random Tuesday, which means I had to get through the rest of the work week.) The concert itself was almost 3 hours long, with no intermission. So despite the astronomical ticket cost, well worth the money.
- Like last time, there were song subtitles. In simplified Chinese, yes (not sure why because JJ is from Singapore and obviously writes in traditional), but it definitely helped with keeping up with the songs. I wish subtitles were a thing at all concerts.
- I talked about this last time, but I love how JJ fluently moves between English and Chinese when speaking. My Chinese literacy is nowhere near my English capabilities (I could read about 90% of the subtitles), but my listening skills are fine and hearing Chinese just gives me a homey feeling that listening to other languages doesn't.
- Finally got to hear JJ sing "Still Miss Her" (我還想她), one of my favorite songs and one he did not sing last time in L.A. I am pretty certain I will never get to hear him sing "Lord Vader" (黑武士) live, which is my other favorite song, but I'll still keep hoping.
Click to view- Before singing "If Only" (可惜沒如果), JJ played just the opening chord, leading to a huge roar from the audience because we all knew which song it was. He then joked that it might be a different song and pretended to be giving us a tease of a WIP piece. See video embed below. (There's another video from a better angle here, but it doesn't have the playful banter beforehand.)
Some not-so-great parts:
- JJ's L.A. concert in 2016 seemed more chill and relaxed, whereas this one was very much a production. Not saying I didn't like the cool visual effects and such, but when I go to a JJ Lin concert, it's to hear him sing and play piano. I'm not there to see the dancers or the weird anime transition videos he had. I get that using videos makes it easier for JJ, but... these videos were weeeird. You can see a glimpse of one in this video from the opening of the concert (which, by the way, A+ for opening with "Remember" (記得), except that means he sang a truncated version of it).
- About halfway through the concert, JJ thanked all of us for coming and sticking with him for so many years. Pretty standard fare for a live concert, especially one to commemorate 20 years in showbiz, but then he went on to talk about how there will always be people who try to bring you down and how he'd gone through a pretty dark time. It got so depressing that my friend and I were wondering if we should be concerned for his mental health. Luckily the mood lightened up later, but it was still bizarre. The next day, I Googled "jj lin scandal" and found that he'd been accused of being linked with the Kris Wu scandal, which I guess would suck for anybody.
Apart from those two points, our concert experience was overwhelmingly positive, and it was nice not having to fly out to Socal, even if we didn't really end up paying less money since the tickets were so much more expensive. Will we go to another JJ Lin concert? If the tickets don't go up another threefold and if JJ comes to San Jose again, maybe. Which he should, if the sold out arena is any indication.
Also, hello to anyone on my friends list who may be reading this. I know I haven't updated in close to 5 years, and I haven't done any drama updates in...maybe 8 years? Which pretty much coincides with when I started grad school part-time, while also working full-time. To protect my sanity at the time, I decided to give up dramas for the duration of my grad school program, from August 2016 to December 2018. So I completely fell out of the habit of keeping up with currently airing dramas. Nowadays I watch more anime and Disney+ shows, and while I have caught up on some dramas I missed during my grad school stint, I can't be bothered to blog about them. Oh well, such is life. I still keep up with my f-list here, though!