What story is SM telling?
It's Wednesday night, May 14, as I write this. I spent the prior weekend in LA, and arrived home to NYC yesterday morning after zooming to a redeye from the Monday night launch party of Lee Soo Man: King of K-pop, directed by Ting Poo and now streaming on Amazon Prime.
Although I'm featured in the film as a talking head briefly, I had not actually booked my LA trip to attend the premiere of the film. I had booked it because of SMTown, SM Entertainment's roster-wide concert, taking place on Sunday, and the premiere coincide with it.
This was the second time SMTown had been held in LA, and the first time since 2010. The SMTown 4-hour show featured many artists currently under the company, and the tour commemorated SM's 30th anniversary. (Thirtieth on a bit of a technicality: the company really began as SM Studio in 1998, but was reestablished in 2005 as SM Entertainment.)
The concert and the film both are ostensibly homages to the power of SM, and its legacy amid pop culture history. But I'm home now and I'm not entirely convinced that either told the story of "why we should care in 2025" particularly well.
That's not to say that SMTown and King of K-pop weren't entertaining or interesting, but the narratives of each failed to thoroughly explore not only the past and future of the company, but also made me wonder about the current state of things.
SMTown, for instance, was bookended by performances from TVXQ! and Super Junior, the most senior acts attending (the company's most senior artists like BoA and Kangta were absent). It then went more or less in order from the newest acts - British group DearAlice, the latest batch of rookies, or SMTR25, and the company's latest girl group Hearts2Hearts - to more mid-career ones and then senior ones. Some acts performed covers of hit SM songs, but some just performed their latest songs and while others performed their hits.
SHINee and EXO were only represented by two and three members, respectively, performing their solo songs rather than representing their teams; RedVelvet was the current trio under SM, after Wendy and Yeri had left the company earlier this year. Girls' Generation, BoA, Shinhwa, and several other acts weren't represented despite their oversize impact on the company's three-decades of growth (EXO's three members performed an H.O.T cover). There were no collaborative stages like at past SMTown's, such as the one at Madison Square Garden I saw in 2011 (my first K-pop concert ever!) Most of the communal, collaborative vibe, instead, went on backstage to be posted on social media. There was little joy or true feeling in it all, just putting on a show for the sake of it; it wasn't a celebration, it was an obligation.
Although I enjoyed each song and set, it felt inconsistent from a narrative perspective; I walked out wondering why there wasn't some cohesion in the narrative, but rather people came onto stage and left it. Why didn't they all do something like perform their debut song, biggest hit, and their latest single as a show of the past, present, and future of the company? Or just do anything other than lip service. For a company that has excelled at storytelling over decades, it felt like a major failure.
Then there was Lee Soo Man. A documentary I became part of because of my coverage about the ousting of Lee from SM, and the battle over its ownership by Hybe and Kakao. That only ended up being about the final 15 minutes of the doc, so I wasn't in it that much (I wasn't even featured talking about that in the end), but that's honestly fine because there was a lot to cover.
Tamar Herman
Tamar Herman
A lot to cover, because it's seemingly aiming to be a historical record (creativity can't exist amid political upheaval was a good takeaway, a celebration of the past of Lee and his influence on K-pop (and sometimes a reprimand), and a look at what he's doing in the future (AI! Tree planting!). The film essentially narrates Lee's story as that of South Korea's rise into a cultural powerhouse in recent decades, and aims to humanize him in small moments. But more than the actual story of Lee Soo-man or SM Entertainment, it spends a lot of time exploring Lee's relationship to technology... And how he ideally would create multiple versions of himself using AI.
As I sat there, it felt less like a tribute or exploration of Lee and/or SM, and more yet another way for a wealthy man to seek immortality via technology.
Although the film certainly explored some moments of SM's history, and got some insight from Lee about very specific moments, there was such an expanse to the plot it felt like it never truly decided what to be: is King of K-pop a history of SM and K-pop with Lee's place in it? Is it Lee's story, shown through SM's growth? Is it promo for Lee's new company, A2O? All of the above. (A2o had actually hosted the event, and after the film girl group A2O and upcoming trainees performed. All of the trainees that performed are under the age of 15, which is a think piece I need to write about sometime..).
That's not to say the film isn't good. This is a film definitely crafted for general viewers who maybe don't know anything about Lee or K-pop, and it does address some things Lee rarely acknowledges, such as Hyun Jin-young's rise and fall, or how Lee felt about getting ousted from SM. It gets the most intimate when exploring his early days and personal relationships, such as with his wife and how he feels about being ousted from SM in part by his nephew. There were moments that I felt extremely moved by, and it was interesting to get some perspective from the man himself about certain moments of SM's history and Lee's career.* It was humanizing, even if sometimes it felt like it was sidestepping some particularly contentious topics and skipping over entire acts' careers.
But both SMTown and King of K-pop spent much of their time looking at the past and the future, and I came away from the weekend wondering about the present. When you can't cohesively tell your story, what do you even represent?
I'm being a bit blunt here, and perhaps overly dismissive, because there were interesting threads and I did enjoy the film and the concert. But it feels between the two events it felt like there was a filter over everything that SM currently is, overlaying the past and uncertain, divergent, future at the cost of acknowledging where things are in the present.
*I can't stop thinking about surprise Lee expressed regarding how he couldn't understand how vicious comments online could have led Sulli to suicide. As a woman, especially one who has spent much her career Very Online, it felt anything but shocking.
What I'm reading
Have some less than fun things on the reading list so first... Dazed explored why silly music is in right now (recession core, yay!), published the day ahead of the release of Katseye releasing "Gnarly", which is so absurd and catchy it's a major hit.
Related to this weekend... Leeteuk of Super Junior is making headlines because he gave a loving shoutout to Trump and Musk at the end of the concert. He had done it at the end during the farewell and final moments, so it wasn't necessarily something I was paying attention to while enjoying the final verses of finale song "Hope" and seeing the SM crew wave their way off stage. I had only heard him declaring his love of Tim Cook and Apple, and turned to a friend saying that I hoped he hadn't been just shouting off names of people he loved and yet... here we are. It doesn't necessarily feel like an immensely intentional political statement but rather him listing off random things he likes about the US, but given the state of things in the world it feels in bad taste to throw around if you don't actually mean it. K-pop stars typically avoid political connotations during South Korea's own elections, so it feels in bad taste to praise the president and the world's wealthiest man seemingly in jest as they're gutting the US federal government.
KG of VCHA has released more information about why she's attempting to nullify her contract.
Enjoyed Jeff Benjamin's newsletter about the doc and this weekend. He attended not just SMTown and the premiere but also Wango Tango, where Hearts2Hearts and A20 May performed, the first time any SM and A2o acts performed at the same event. He also had some insights about the discourse over the "Dark Side of K-pop" trope and how the film tackles it.
And for something fun... "THE COMEBACK KID: How I Styled My First Big Editorial Back at a Big Kid Magazine"
