j-hope conquers Lollapalooza

When j-hope walked onto the Lollapalooza stage in Chicago on July 31, 2022, it wasn't just his first big festival performance without BTS. That night, he became the first South Korean artist to headline the main stage of a major American music festival.

Lollapalooza is one of the biggest American festivals, and that year's headliners included Metallica, Dua Lipa, J. Cole, and Green Day. j-hope got the closing slot on the festival's final day in Grant Park. He'd released Jack in the Box, his first official solo album, just weeks earlier, making Chicago his chance to show for the first time what that new sound looked like on a big stage.

It was clear something special was brewing well before he even took the stage. ARMY gathered in front of the stage hours ahead of his set, and ARMY Bombs and banners started appearing throughout the crowd. The fandom quickly renamed the event Hobipalooza, a nickname that spread so widely it practically became another name for the whole night.

And then j-hope literally jumped out of a box. He opened the performance by emerging from a large box on stage, a clear reference to Jack in the Box, and launched into a set considerably darker and rawer than the image part of the audience associated him with up to that point. The set blended the new album with his older solo tracks and his BTS material, showing just how much material he already had for a solo show.

A special moment came near the end when Becky G joined him on stage. The two performed Chicken Noodle Soup live together for the first time, nearly three years after releasing the song in 2019. A collaboration that had until then existed mainly through the song and its music video finally got a shared stage.

There was a lot more preparation behind the performance than what showed during those roughly seventy minutes. The documentary j-hope IN THE BOX later revealed just how seriously he approached Lollapalooza, from building the setlist and rehearsing to the pressure he felt over his first major solo show. Instead of playing it safe, he chose to present audiences with exactly the side of himself he'd been exploring on Jack in the Box.

How much that moment meant to him is maybe even clearer from today's vantage point. Talking a few years later about his first solo projects, j-hope explained that he'd felt stuck in a certain mold at the time and wanted to break out of it to show his own music more freely. Lollapalooza was the first big test of that decision, in front of an audience most artists never get for a debut solo festival set.

By the end of the night, it was no longer a question of whether a BTS member could carry a stage like that on his own. j-hope arrived in Chicago with an album that showed a different side of his sound, and left after a performance that earned its place in the history of both Lollapalooza and Korean music. He headlined Lollapalooza again three years later, this time in Berlin, but Hobipalooza 2022 remained the night it all started.