Episode 59: The Rise and Fall and Rebirth of TVXQ Part 1—Past Prologue (1989-2003)
This is the first part in an episode series on the rise and fall and rebirth of TVXQ aka 東方神起 aka 동방신기. I touched on the group in my history series—which you may want to listen to first if you haven’t—but the circumstances surrounding the group’s almost disbandment and multitude of legal problems which began in 2009 and lasted for years afterwards are still contentious with fans (and anti-fans) to this day and their story really deserved proper time and attention paid to it.
I tried my best to remain as neutral as possible throughout this story and where a single narrative wasn’t possible I attempted to steel man all sides of the argument. Listeners can make up their own minds about the heroes and villains of this story.
This first episode covers the founding of S.M. Entertainment and some of the circumstances that led up to the creation of TVXQ.
I really hate the narrative parroted today from English-language media like Rolling Stone in their bafflingly bad list of the “the best” Korean pop songs, which places the start of “K-Pop” with Seo Taiji and Boys. This has become the mythology thanks to the constant repetition from outlets like Rolling Stone but the truth is far more interesting and nuanced. Seo Taiji and Boys did not spring, fully formed, from a vacuum. Seo Taiji was not part of the scene that centered around the Moonlight Club, a popular hangout for Black American G.I.s posted to Seoul, but he did happen to catch the act of Moonlight regular Park Nam Jung and friends one night and was impressed enough by it that he asked one of those “friends”—a guy named Yang Hyun Suk—to give him dance lessons. The story goes that Yang Hyun Suk took his money and then promptly enlisted to do his military service without making good on the lessons. Meanwhile, Seo Taiji started writing songs inspired by these new sounds and rhythms he’d been hearing and when Yang Hyun Suk returned from the military he looked up Seo Taiji to make get something going and that was the start of Seo Taiji and Boys.
As you’ll hear in the episode, Seo Taiji and Boys had some help in their launch in the form of ex-S.M. Planning manager Choi Jin Yeol, who had been working with hip-hop/R&B artist Hyun Jin-Young before Hyun Jin-Young went to prison for smoking marijuana. So, while it’s true that Seo Taiji and Boys were the focus of an explosion of massive teenage energy, the group was also part of a larger ecosystem of musical acts—none of which were “K-Pop idols” the way we know them today. In every way that matters, the first K-Pop group is H.O.T. (And I will die on that hill: H.O.T. paved the way.)
H.O.T. also has a complicated story that I will leave for somebody else to tell but I do think it’s worth flagging that the group’s disbandment—while similar on the surface to TVXQ—is the result of a very different set of circumstances.
This episode also touches on S.M. Entertainment’s links to Japan’s Avex group, an almost completely ignored part of early K-Pop’s story. I don’t think it’s too big an exaggeration to say that without the intervention of Avex, we wouldn’t have K-Pop the way we know it today.
The songs played are:
“The Way U Are” by TVXQ (performed live on Music Camp)
“삐에로는 우릴 보고 웃지” by Kim Wan Sun
“통화중” by Sobangcha
“Every Little Step” by Bobby Brown
“야한여자(Rap Ver)” by Hyun Jin Young
“난 알아요” by Seo Taiji and Boys
“흐린 기억 속의 그대” by Hyun Jin Young
“두근 두근 쿵쿵” by Hyun Jin Young
“캔디” by H.O.T.
“전사의 후예” by H.O.T.
“Dreams Come True” by S.E.S.
MC and greetings from an H.O.T. concert in China, February 1, 2000.
“A Better Day” by JTL
“Come to Me” by M.I.L.K.
“날개” by Black Beat
“ID; Peace B” (Japanese version) by BoA
“Boy Meets Girl” by TRF
“Boys and Girls” by Hamasaki Ayumi
“Bing Bing Bing” by CLON
“Meaning of Peace” by BoA and Koda Kumi
“Ten Minutes” by Lee Hyori
“나쁜 남자” by Rain (비)
“브레이크 어웨이” by BigMama (performed live on Music Camp, July 26, 2003)
“Atlantis Princess” by BoA
Our opening song today is TVXQ’s “The Way U Are” performed live on Music Camp, July 17, 2004. I’ll link the video in the show notes because it’s worth watching for the incredible visual-kei inspired hairdos alone.
So, in my history series I spent a fair amount of time on Dong Bang Shin Ki aka 東方神起 aka DBSK aka TVXQ. The super-influential and super-popular group debuted as a five member “a capella” unit, presumably in the mold of NSYNC, and, as five, rose to the very toppermost of the poppermost before imploding spectacularly, leaving behind two of the members carrying on the group name as a duo while the other three scattered to the winds. What happened and why is something that I only briefly touched on in my history series because the story of TVXQ’s disbandment is extremely complex and the details remain contentious among fans even now.
I’d wanted to do something on this for a long time and the recent turmoil in SM Entertainment seemed as good a reason as any to actually dig into SM’s past to try and understand the rise and fall of TVXQ. So, because this is my podcast, let’s start at the beginning. Before we can understand TVXQ, we have to look back at SM Entertainment and their history of, well, let’s just call them “control issues.”
A lot of what plays out in the story told in this episode series is heavily influenced by the economic realities of the music business in Korea specifically, and in Asia more broadly. So let’s take a minute to get the lay of the land. As I’ve covered on the podcast before, what we now know as K-Pop started bubbling up in the mid to late 1980s. South Korea was emerging from years of strict authoritarian control and the brand new pop music market was wide open for anybody who wanted to compete. This included the Big 3—you know, Jigu Records, Seoul Records, and SeungEum—as well as foreign entertainment conglomerates, Korean chaebol companies, and upstart indie companies.
As our main characters begin to come on stage, just keep in mind a couple of things:
1) Bootlegging and piracy were rampant in Korea and would remain so. Ironically, this gave an edge to the domestic producers over the foreign conglomerates trying to enter the market and the foreign major labels would lobby for years to try and claw back revenue from Korea. The overwhelming impression of the music industry in Korea in the 1980s leading into the 1990s is one of handshake deals and backroom agreements. At least looking back from 2023, government regulators at the time seemed way more interested in making sure songs were free of improper lyrics than in financial impropriety.
2) As the 1990s dawned, with economic liberalization came an attempt to fit the Korean music consumer habits to a kind of global standard. It does not work. But during these years you saw Tower Records and the Virgin Megastore moving into Seoul. Unlike in Japan where physical Tower Records locations remain open for business in 2023, there just wasn’t (and isn’t) the same culture around record/CD buying in Korea and the stores will not last.
Okay, so let’s start this story. Put yourself back in the mid-1980s. The 1988 Seoul Olympics are coming. The music field is wide open. Old guard labels like Jigu, formerly home to trot King Cho Yong-Pil, are trying their hand at contemporary teen pop with singers like Kim San-Won aka the “Korean Madonna.” These new teen pop singers borrow heavily from what was happening in the massive Japanese pop music market in their styling, dancing, and songs. Kim San-Won’s poofy hair and skirts could have been taken directly from Nakamori Akina’s wardrobe. Three member boy group Sobangcha, launched by the entertainment firm Hanbat Planning, looked and sounded a lot like three member boy group Shonentai from Japan’s Johnny’ & Associates. Parents may not understand but the kids are having a blast… within government-approved limits.
Now meet Lee Soo-Man. This former artist-turned-aspiring-producer had just returned from a stint studying abroad at CalTech in California with an appreciation for American pop music and, especially, for MTV, which had launched in 1981. He decided to jump in on this new sparkly teen pop scene and introduce a more American-influenced superstar for the Korean market. Specifically, he was taken with the look and feel of Bobby Brown and his “Every Little Step” video. In the video, Bobby Brown is flanked by two backing dancers, creating a look that was perfect for the boxy television screens of the era.
Enter Hyun Jin-Young, one of the many talented young dancers in the scene centered around the famous Moonlight club, a popular hangout for Black American G.I.s posted to Seoul. Hyun Jin-Young came from a somewhat troubled background. His mother had a long and very expensive battle with stomach cancer before passing away when he was only 14 years old, leaving both the young teen and his father, a jazz pianist who was already in his mid-50s at this point, both emotionally and financially devastated.
When Hyun Jin-Young was only about only 16 or 17 years old, a troubled young teen earning money by back dancing for other Moonlight Club scenesters like teen heartthrob Park Nam-Jung, he was scouted by aspiring producer Lee Soo-Man for his new company: S.M. Planning. A couple of years later, in 1990, after some time training, Hyun Jin-Young and Wawa release their first album, the New Jack Swing-influenced, midi-packed New Dance 1. It was a killer album; unfortunately it was also just a little too ahead of its time and had only modest sales. The hottest male teen idol act was still Hyun Jin-Young’s old Club Moonlight buddy Park Nam-Jung, who despite his cool shades and Michael Jackson-esque costuming, was sonically still firmly in the trot category.
To make matters worse, the next year, in 1991, Hyun Jin-Young was sniped by the police while performing on stage—literally he was arrested on stage—at an outdoor concert in Busan. He was convicted of smoking marijuana and had to serve prison time. (During which, unfortunately, as he would later explain, he was introduced to a much wider sphere of drugs and drug dealers.) His arrest caused major headaches for the young company, with other company employees also coming under investigation. One important early SM employee, manager Choi Jin-Yeol, was so upset that he quit and took all of his industry connections and know-how and went to work with a young, unknown up-and-comer named Seo Taiji.
Lee Soo Man, however, did not give up on his one and only star just yet. Hyun Jin-Young was still under contract. So, when he released from prison in 1992 and began performing again, the response was apparently good enough that Lee Soo-Man called him back to SM. And later that year, with the jibing encouragement of his old Club Moonlight buddy Yang Hyun-Suk, aka YG, one of Seo Taiji’s “Boys” who had just kicked off a massive wave of teen popularity, Hyun Jin-Young released New Dance 2 into a market much more ready to hear the sounds he wanted to make. The album was a monster hit with teenage audiences. For high school kids across the nation, Seo Taiji and Boys’ “Nan Arayo” was replaced by Hyun Jin-Young’s “You Are Unclear In My Memory,” a song written by Hyun Jin-Young and yet another Club Moonlight alum, Lee Tak.
Hyun Jin-Young and SM Planning were supposed to split the profits 6:4 (with Hyun Jin-Young getting the 4). Except that the company that was manufacturing the albums, Seorabeol Records, had some problems of their own. Seorabeol had taken a massive financial hit after a tragic crowd crush incident where a young teenager died and dozens were injured at a New Kids on the Block concert. SM was unable to collect about 500 million won that they were owed in sales, through absolutely no fault of their own.
Still, work began on New Dance 3 and a lot of time and money was sunk into the production. In 1993, teenagers across the country waited anxiously for the massive chart battle: Seo Taiji vs. Hyun Jin-Young. Fans bought hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies of both Seo Taiji and Boys II (and title track 하여가) released in June 1993, and then of New Dance 3, (and title track 두근두근 쿵쿵) released in September 1993. The financial stability of S.M. Planning depended on getting the money for this album, as well as the associated merch and television appearances, and so on. Everything was riding on Hyun Jin-Young’s success and it looked like they had another smash hit on their hands.
There was one very large problem with this plan. Hyun Jin-Young was busted, again, for drug use in November 1993. This time it was methamphetamines and he would not be making a triumphant comeback from jail. The unsold Hyun Jin-Young merch was destroyed; albums were confiscated; and Hyun Jin-Young himself was blacklisted. Lee Soo Man even had to sell off some real estate holdings to pay off his debt. He washed his hands of Hyun Jin-Young and of the hip-hop genre completely. He tried pushing artists like R&B singer Yoo Young-Jin, another Club Moonlight alum, who had debuted in August 1993 (“Your Scent”), followed by rock trio Major and then duo J&J in 1994. It’s not that these acts were bad or total flops, the problem was—circling back to what I said at the top of the episode—these adult-oriented and general public-facing acts simply weren’t generating enough revenue to keep S.M. Planning afloat in an increasingly competitive marketplace. How could a small independent music company like S.M. Planning compete with mega-corps like Samsung or Warner Brothers? Well… it couldn’t.
But Lee Soo Man was not finished with the music business. To understand everything that comes after the founding of SM Entertainment in 1995, you have to try and remember exactly how burned Lee Soo Man had been, not just by Hyun Jin-Young’s out of control antics but also by the industry and the government. It wasn’t his fault Seorabeol Records had been negligent but he’d taken a massive financial hit, regardless. His office staff hadn’t been responsible for Hyun Jin-Young’s drug use and yet he’d lost important members of his team because they’d also been thrown under government investigation.
Lee Soo-Man needed money, yes, but—almost more importantly—he needed control. More control over his artists and more control over how the money was coming in.
By this time, Lee Soo Man had watched the huge mobilization of teen fan club power (and teen consumption power) for Seo Taiji and Boys. This was an extremely powerful money maker and one that he’d only gotten a taste of with Hyung Jin-Young. To properly harness it, he needed artists free of what Lee Soo-Man would later call 인성에 문제 or “problems with their personalities”. This would be instrumental in the formation of Lee Soo-Man’s first big project with SM Entertainment: a teen idol group called H.O.T., High-Five of Teenagers, who were intended to promote a healthy and specifically teenage pop culture.
As told by then-CEO Jung Hae-Ik: they had done careful market research, landing on the formula of teenage group + dance + songs + new trends with the idea that the members would “graduate” from the group when they got too old in order to keep H.O.T. eternally young. (Lee Soo-Man would continue to chase this concept all the way up until he was booted out of the company in 2023; it never worked.)
So, like other teen pop singers before them, the boys of H.O.T. were carefully chosen for their looks and talents, but SM Entertainment wanted something different for the new group. Making the first moves towards creating “idols” out of pop stars, another important factor in selecting the members of H.O.T. was their personalities. These were good kids. Hard working, diligent, and respectful, Kangta, Moon Hee-Jun, Jang Woo-Hyuk, Tony Ahn, and Lee Jae-Won debuted as H.O.T. with the album We Hate All Kinds of Violence in September 1996. The two first singles, “Warrior’s Descendents” and “Candy,” remain K-Pop mainstays to this day.
While the adults may still not have understood, H.O.T. were a hit with their target market, teenagers, and the boys were driven hard to capitalize on this new success for S.M. Entertainment.
H.O.T. were followed by S.E.S., Korea’s first really successful female idol group, in 1997.
Things seemed to be going very well for Lee Soo-Man and his new company, especially since Lee Soo-Man had formed a new advisory and production company in 1997, of which he was the sole owner, called “Like Planning” and signed that new company to a sweetheart deal with his growing SM Entertainment which meant he got a nice cut of all the revenue coming in. But then in 1998, during the making of H.O.T.’s third album, Jung Hae-Ik was forced out by Kim Kyung-Wook, who took his spot as the number two man in the company and in one of the balliest moves in K-Pop business history, Kim Kyung-Wook also managed to assign himself the copyright for the name “H.O.T.” Himself, personally. He owned the name H.O.T.
Why CEO Jung Hae-Ik was forced out is not something I could uncover from my perch in America. He was accused of doing… something and it’s unclear whether or not he did this something or if he was just accused of doing it. Whatever the reason, Jung Hae-Ik was pushed out of SM Entertainment in 1998 and eventually landed over with rivals Sidus where he helped launch the very popular boy group g.o.d. in 1999. We will meet with him again in a few paragraphs.
So, despite the launch of six member boy group Shinhwa in 1998 and then R&B duo Fly To the Sky in 1999, H.O.T. and S.E.S. remained SM Entertainment’s main moneymakers. S.E.S. had been put together with an eye towards the Japanese market but they never really found success in Japan (they were turned down by Sony Records and landed at an agency more associated with modeling and television) but H.O.T., in particular, were expanding the reach of not just SM Entertainment but all of the Korean Wave—Hallyu—into the important market next door in mainland China. H.O.T. opened the door to the Chinese pop market for Korean artists and the next couple of years would not only see teens copying their outrageous hairstyles but Chinese companies scrambling to assemble their own knock-off groups. But that is a story for another episode.
So, as we roll into 2000 and 2001, things are going to get complicated so buckle up.
First of all, in April 2000, SM Entertainment became the first K-Pop company to be publicly listed on KOSDAQ, a Korean stock exchange kind of equivalent to the NASDAQ here in America. In order to achieve the necessary market capitalization to get the company listed, SM Entertainment issued some new stock and Lee Soo-Man allegedly withdrew money from the company ledgers only to use it to buy that newly issued stock, artificially inflating the value of the company enough to get it listed. Lee Soo-Man, for his part, maintains that he acted on behalf of the company and if, in the process, he personally happened to make a lot of money, well that’s just a bonus, isn’t it?
I think it’s also important to note here that Lee Soo-Man is not an outlier in his early 2000s financial shenanigans. To be clear, I’m not saying that what Lee Soo-Man did was good or right, what I’m saying is that he wasn’t an outlier in the broader industry and it’s important to keep that in mind. There was a hugely publicized effort at the time from the public prosecutor in Seoul to clean up the music business, which, to be fair, was soaking in payola and kickbacks and other far more unsavory things. While Lee Soo-Man has developed an outsized reputation in K-Pop stan lore, SM Entertainment was far from the only company to be hit with charges and the charges against Lee Soo-Man were nowhere near the worst of the worst.
Anyways, however you want to spin his actions, Lee Soo-Man got word that he was coming under investigation for fraud back in June 2001 and fled to Los Angeles, leaving CEO Kim Kyung-Wook (remember him?) in charge of the day-to-day running of SM Entertainment while Lee Soo-Man spent his days playing golf and overseeing what he could via e-mail.
Also, at this time, in late 2000 into early 2001, contract negotiations for SM Entertainment’s top earners, H.O.T., were not going well. To put it mildly. Essentially the group had been broken into two camps: Kangta and Hee-Jun vs. the other three: Tony, Woohyuk, and Jaewon. There are conflicting reports about what actually happened but here is the background against which the contract negotiations played out:
1. H.O.T.’s album sales for the fifth album, Outside Castle, while still very big, were not quite as big as they had been. Outside Castle sold about 900,000 copies, which is great but it’s also almost 500,000 copies less than their fourth album, I Yah! and it’s likely this was taken as a sign of decreasing popularity, which would have meant the end of the group anyway. This ignores the broader trend of decreasing album sales across the region but you can understand why SM management would have thought this.
2. H.O.T. as a group, while not causing Hyun Jin-Young levels of trouble, had still caused headaches for SM Entertainment. Getting banned from television, stirring up controversy. And in something that still happens as idols grow in their careers, they start wanting more control and more money and were likely growing harder and harder to control.
3. At this time, normal contracts for teen pop stars were only for a three year term. H.O.T.’s top rivals—DSP’s Sechs Kies—had just disbanded in 2000 because of their three year contracts. While DSP wanted the group to continue, the members would not agree to a renewal. It hadn’t occurred to these entertainment companies that a teen pop group might have legs beyond that initial boom of popularity. So, even though H.O.T. was doing very well and brought in a lot of money to SM Entertainment, they also cost SM Entertainment a lot of money. And with these contract renewals, the members were (by some accounts) asking for an even bigger piece of the earnings they brought in. Something that SM Entertainment did not necessarily want to give them.
Kangta and Hee-Jun had signed contracts earlier than the other three—you can actually see them back dancing for Yoo Young-Jin when he was an artist under S.M. Planning.
They had signed renewals for more money in 2000 and given promises of solo work and unfortunately, the three members whose contracts were up for renewal in 2001 were also considered the three least popular members, at least by SM Entertainment.
What seems to have happened at this crucial point is that SM Entertainment, under the direction of Lee Soo-Man, had taken a look at the bottom line and decided that H.O.T. simply cost too much money and they would keep just the two most popular members and turn them into solo acts. So while the other three thought they were negotiating for a better deal, SM never had any intention of offering one. By their account, the remaining three members didn’t actually want to quit H.O.T so it was a real shock for them when they were told that their services were no longer required.
It was possibly one of the dumbest business decisions in the history of K-Pop if not the dumbest decision and it was an early sign that SM Entertainment had a learning curve when it came to understanding what boy group fans actually wanted from an idol group. Something that we’ll also see play out with TVXQ is that while, yes, H.O.T. was popular, there is a magic about a group—about a group brand—that doesn’t necessarily transfer to the individual members when they go solo.
But Lee Soo-Man’s dumb business decision was a lucky break for his old friend Jung Hae-Ik over at Sidus, the company that was emerging as SM’s next big rival. He welcomed the three ex-H.O.T. members with open arms, signing them as JTL. And when SM Entertainment cut their big girl group S.E.S. the next year, Jung Hae-Ik grabbed up S.E.S. member Eugene too.
The newly christened JTL roared into the charts (and fan’s hearts) with “A Better Day,” despite efforts on the part of SM Entertainment to keep them off the air.
Meanwhile, SM Entertainment was about to enter a very dark era. With Lee Soo-Man hiding out abroad he’d left the company in the hands of CEO Kim Kyung-Wook. And under CEO Kim, nicknamed the man with the “minus touch”, the company had let go of their top earners with no replacement plan in place. Every single artist that debuted under CEO Kim flopped big time. Most K-Pop fans today have never even heard these names: Milk, Black Beat... Not only were the acts failing to duplicate the success of H.O.T. and S.E.S., CEO Kim had also set up a subsidiary company for each group, possibly trying to duplicate what Lee Soo-Man had done with Like Planning, and this created both financial and management complications for S.M. Entertainment as a company.
And remember that while CEO “Minus Touch” Kim is struggling to launch Milk and Black Beat, the public prosecutor in Seoul was also bringing down hellfire on the music industry, leveling crippling fines and creating an overall chilling effect among domestic producers.
SM Entertainment stock prices were cratering and the company was in real trouble. The one bright spot was a young teenage singer called BoA. After a modestly successful Korean debut in 2000, at age 13, BoA had been shipped off to Japan where she got a crash course in how to be a J-Pop idol. Her manager at the time was a man named Kim Young-Min. We’ll encounter him again later.
Just like with H.O.T., there are a few important things in BoA’s story that feed into what happened to TVXQ and are worth digging into. I mentioned earlier that SM Entertainment girl group S.E.S. had flopped in Japan and, allegedly, one big reason for that was the relatively short length of their contract. This could be apocryphal but it makes complete sense with what happened later. The story goes that S.E.S. had been turned down by Sony Records because they only had a five year contract with SM Entertainment and Sony said that to properly launch in Japan, they needed seven years. Figure in another year or two for debut in Korea plus training time and suddenly you’re needing a commitment of at least ten years from your teen pop artists.
This is almost certainly why BoA was debuted so young, in response to the failure of S.E.S. in Japan. Lee Soo-Man later confirmed that when BoA was scouted they were looking for a girl in junior high school. Her young age would give the company more time on the clock. And as an aside, it was also around this time that the women who would become Girls Generation were also brought in as trainees, just like BoA they were also preteens or tweens at the time. Another young trainee, a boy, also joined at this time. His name was Kim Junsu.
So, BoA made her Japanese debut in 2001 with a Japanese version of her Korean debut song. Her single was released on Avex Trax, the first release in what would be a long partnership in Japan between S.M. Entertainment and a Japanese company called Avex.
I’m going to pause the story of S.M. Entertainment here in 2001-2002 so we can take a look at Japan’s Avex. Avex grew out of the scene of record heads that worked and hung out at a chain of record rental shops called “You & I.” Matsuura Max started as a part time employee at a branch in Yokohama before opening his own franchise in 1986. A true record head, one of the things that Max did which separated him from the competition was offer “liner notes” for the records he rented. He also had an eye for talent, and a not insignificant number of later Avex artists had been patrons or staff at Max’s branch of You & I.
Max’s shop reflected his own wide-ranging taste in music, specifically in imported Eurobeat. He was ambitious and when he was approached by a buyer for another shop for help in getting imported albums, Max decided to get into the wholesale record and CD business. And that’s where Avex began, in 1988.
Max was then approached by Time Records Italy to release an album directly in Japan rather than just importing it. He took a major gamble and started a new record label, Avex Trax, releasing Super Eurobeat Vol. 1 in 1990. For the next few years, Avex Trax was mainly focused on dance and club music. It was the right time and the right place for Eurobeat and early Avex artists like Komuro Tetsuya and the eternal TRF had monster hits with songs like “EZ Do Dance.”
Avex would eventually branch out of pure dance music and make moves into R&B and pop, reaching an agreement with Japanese idol company Johnny’s & Associates in 1995 for their new boy group, V6. Max would also scout and sign a young Hamasaki Ayumi, who would release her first single on Avex Trax in 1998, reaching her first number one on the Oricon charts in 1999 with “Love Destiny” in April and then her first million seller, “Boys & Girls” in July and her second million seller “A” in August.
Keep in mind this is all playing out against the background of the massive financial crisis in Asia in 1997 and SM Entertainment wasn’t the only company looking to expand its reach. Dance music was something that had gained in popularity around Asia and Avex wanted to try and take advantage of it. To that end, Avex pushed into Taiwan with a deal with Taiwanese label Rock Records in 1998. Rock Records was also home to another foreign act: Korea’s CLON. If you remember back at the beginning of the episode, Hyun Jin-Young had a backing group named “Wawa.” The first generation of Wawa debuted as their own dance-focused unit called CLON, who were primarily a dance music act. Just like the Avex artists, CLON also found the Taiwanese market very open to foreign club music.
In a couple of articles I found, a senior Rock Records employee tells a story of CLON’s first showcase in Taipei. Not many people initially turned up to see some unknown act from Korea, but more and more people stopped to listen as they performed. By the time they finished the showcase by ripping open their shirts to expose their muscled chests they had attracted a really big crowd… who all went into the record store next door to buy their album. CLON went on a lengthy hiatus as a group for sad reasons that I won’t get into here but their song “Bing Bing Bing” is still one of the best known K-Pop songs in Taiwan and if you search the Chinese name on youtube (酷龍 繞繞繞) you’ll find all sorts of parodies and cover versions.
So, at this point by the mid-to-late 1990s, Avex and Max had to have been aware of the Korean wave… in dance music. And it makes sense that Avex would be the perfect partner for a small but fast-growing independent Korean music company also looking to break into foreign markets: SM Entertainment.
In October 1998, the governments of Korea and Japan had announced a new era of cooperation. And in November 2000, SM Entertainment and AVEX group announced their own joint partnership. SM Entertainment would distribute AVEX artists in Korea (no songs featuring Japanese lyrics though) and AVEX would distribute SM artists in Japan, and later have a stake of the new SM Japan subsidiary when it was launched. (S.E.S. would make the jump to Avex at this point, although it was too late). The two companies were not only both forward-thinking and growth-minded but I’m sure they were also betting on the upcoming 2002 World Cup, which was jointly held by Japan and Korea, to open hearts (and wallets) on both sides of the East Sea/Sea of Japan. And the first artist to benefit from this brand new era of cooperation would be—circling back—the young teenage BoA.
So, here we are back in 2000 going into 2001. SM Entertainment was just listed on the stock exchange; they’ve just signed a deal with one of the hottest music companies in Japan; H.O.T. was the biggest thing in Korean music; and BoA is off to Japan to work on her Japanese debut with the people who had just launched million-selling Hamasaki Ayumi. And then… things fell apart for SM Entertainment with H.O.T. disbanding and Lee Soo-Man wanted by Interpol but BoA would soldier on.
Just days after H.O.T.’s legendary “227 Concert,” held on February 27, 2001, at Seoul Olympic Stadium in front of something like 80,000 hysterical fans, the final time the five would perform on stage together until 2018, BoA would perform a modest showcase in front of 150 fans at a Komuro Tetsuya/Avex owned dance club in Roppongi, Tokyo. It was March 7, 2001. She was 14 years old and spoke almost no Japanese.
For BoA, her first year in Japan, 2001, (remember she’d debuted in Korea in 2000) was all about growth. She released two modestly successful solo singles in Japan followed by a tie-up single with Korean mega-corporation Lotte for a chocolate brand, Air Le and a collaboration charity single called “The Meaning of Peace” with another up-and-coming Avex artist: Koda Kumi. Slowly, slowly BoA was building her brand.
And then when BoA made her Japanese album debut on March 13, 2002, she would enter the Oricon Chart at number one for the week. It was a remarkable achievement for a Korean artist in Japan. The next month, April 2002, she would release her second Korean album. In May 2002, she would pass the Korean equivalent of the G.E.D. exam and also perform a showcase in New York City, and then in June she was invited to attend the 2002 World Cup closing ceremonies in Japan, as a special representative of Korea. In September she recorded a duet with popular Irish boy band Westlife in London. In October she performed at a Japan-Korea friendship pop concert and in November at an SM Live in China concert. BoA performed the Korean version of her single “Valenti” on Korean TV and then performed the Japanese version of the same song on Kouhaku Utagassen, the prestigious New Year’s Eve concert on Japan’s national broadcasting channel, NHK, on December 31, 2002. She wasn’t even 18 years old.
2003 would see BoA continue her successful run in Japan with a solo tour and a run of top 5 singles. Meanwhile, in Korea, Lee Soo-Man finally returned from Los Angeles to face the financial impropriety charges and try to steer SM Entertainment back in the right direction.
Something that is important to note when looking at BoA’s story is that for all that she is rightfully looked at as breaking new ground for Korean artists in Japan, her story is a bit different than the wave of artists that would follow her. Despite her debut happening during the giant build-up to the jointly held 2002 World Cup, BoA wasn’t marketed as a Korean artist in Japan. She was marketed as an up-and-coming Avex artist and powerhouse vocalist. I already mentioned Avex artist Hamasaki Ayumi but Avex artist Koda Kumi would also break out around this time. And this was also the era where solo female singers like Utada Hikaru, Misia, Otsuka Ai, Crystal Kay, Ai, Aiko, and so on were dominating the popular music scene. BoA fit right into the Japanese pop zeitgeist.
Meanwhile, in Korea, S.M. Entertainment and the idol industry were struggling, although that hadn’t stopped talented young trainees from flocking to the brand new idol agencies, hoping to be a part of the next H.O.T. or S.E.S.
During this era—about 2001 to 2003—idol groups seemed to be on the way out in Korea. Sure, there was Shinhwa, who had a hit with “Perfect Man,” but they weren’t generating H.O.T. numbers and they weren’t getting support from CEO Kim, who let their contract expire at the end of 2002. He also let popular girl group S.E.S. go at the end of 2002, as I mentioned earlier. But it’s not fair to blame CEO Kim completely for this. Part of the problem for SM (and other companies producing idol groups) was that the mood in Korea had turned against the kind of bubblegum teen pop represented by songs like H.O.T.’s popular hit “Candy.” In a lot of ways, it echoed what happened in America around the same time. Just like American teens had moved on from Backstreet Boys vs NSYNC to rock groups Blink 182 and KORN; Korean teens were moving on from H.O.T. vs Sechs Kies.
In June 1999, before all of this went down, Lee Soo-Man wrote a very telling editorial for the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper where he defends H.O.T. against charges that they can’t sing but also says that it’s true that they aren’t “singers” per se, they’re singing entertainers (싱잉 엔터테이너). What this points to, to my eyes, is that in Korea, the teen pop boom was seen as a trend and one that wasn’t taken very seriously…which was a problem when the idol groups that companies like SM Entertainment wanted to sell to audiences in Japan and China weren’t something that Korea was necessarily interested in.
As 2003 dawns, SM has a successful working roster of basically just BoA and former H.O.T. members turned soloists Kangta and Moon Hee-Jun. Meanwhile, DSP has ex-Finkl member Lee Hyori as a breakout star with her too-erotic-for television song, “Ten Minutes;” JYP debuted a massive new solo star named Rain; YG Entertainment launches massive R&B star Se7en and vocal group Big Mama; Cho PD and Drunken Tiger were making waves in hip-hop… this was a real crisis point for the burgeoning K-Pop idol industry. With the company swiftly circling the drain, could SM Entertainment (and Lee Soo-Man) assemble a dream team of young SM trainees that could 1) sing well enough to beat the “singing entertainer” charge and compete with groups like Big Mama and 2) appeal to not only Korean teens but also to teens in Japan and China? It would take a maniacal level of control and a lengthy commitment from the group…
We’ll meet the men who tried it, the Rising Gods of the East: Do Bang Shin Ki; Tohoushinki, DBSK, TVXQ, THSK in the next episode.
I’ll play us out on one of my favorite BoA songs, Atlantis Princess.