Lee Soo Man: “President of Culture” and “Avenger of K-pop”
Lee Soo Man has recently announced his new plan about promoting K-pop group SuperM worldwide. “Starting with SuperM, we are slated to work on a collaboration with Marvel. I’m not sure how exactly that collaboration will work, but we will work on making a story with SuperM, and with the Marvel Story, and make a song that everyone can sing,” Lee soo man said, as reported by Business News.
Born in 1953, Lee Soo Man is a successful record producer and entrepreneur of South Korea, and he was known to the world by founding the famous company “SM Entertainment”.
Lee started out as a singer and made his own album LEE SOO MAN in 1977. During his year of being a singer, he gradually developed his own opinion about South Korean entertainment industry. Four years later, he stopped his career as a singer and went to University of California for master’s degree. When he went back to South Korea, he started thinking about his own business, and founded SM Entertainment in 1995. Since then, his business got better years by years. SM Entertainment has successfully made lots of famous K-pop group such as Super Junior and H.O.T, and Lee has been considered as “president of culture”, due to his huge contribution to Korean Wave. Till now, K-pop has already in a dominant position in Asia entertainment industry and make a huge profit every year. However, Lee is not satisfied with the current situation, and he recently turned his attention to western market.
SM Entertainment has recently created a new K-pop group named SuperM, which is formed by famous idols from other K-pop groups of SM Entertainment. Lee announced in his speech that this group will collaborate with Marvel Entertainment and debut in America.
This news soon became hot-discussed worldwide. Although it was not the first time that K-pop tried to enter western market, people still got shocked about this brave attempt. Lee touted his new K-pop group as the “Avenger of K-pop”, which showed his determination to take control of western entertainment industry, just as he did in Asian.
To enter western market, the new group is a lot different from other K-pop groups in South Korea and trying to make themselves locally. Firstly, their music style is close to American style instead of traditional South Korea style which is sweet and relax. Also, they changed their outfit from South Korea’s daily style to western style.
This collaboration was a marriage of South Korean culture and American culture and is also a huge step of promoting K-pop. However, not everyone appreciates this action. The negative voices are mainly from two groups of people, the original fans of the idols in SuperM, and the fans of Marvel Universe. Firstly, the original fans of the idols in Asia are not satisfied with sending their idols to western world which is far away from them, and they are also not satisfied with the new group. Some of the fans even comment on the Internet as “bring our idols back to us”. Moreover, they are worried a lot if their idols are under too much pressure. Secondly, fans of Marvel cannot appreciate Korean culture, and consider this collaboration as wired.
Lee’s new attempt aims to promote K-pop to a bigger stage and develop oversea market for SM Entertainment. It is absolutely a great action for K-pop, and if it succeeds South Korean culture would become more and more popular worldwide. In this case, some people consider Lee Soo Man as the pioneer of Korean Wave and appreciate for everything he did for Korean culture, while others still think he is just daydreaming.
After the debut of SuperM in America, it gained lots of attention from different groupa of people, and the sales of its first album proved that the debut was successful. The group recently reached the top one group in Billboard and gained more and more attention all over the world.
However, there is still a long way for Lee to go if he wants to make K-pop takes control of western market. The first thing he needs to do is to make western consumers accept Korean idol culture, and to be crazy about it just as consumer in Asia did. In this case, he needs to combine South Korea culture with western culture carefully.
If you are familiar with Lee Soo Man, you will know that he is a man with huge enthusiasm and tries his best to make the culture of his own country more popular worldwide. “We will make K-pop the most popular all over the world one day.” He said so decades ago in his speech and worked hard to achieve his words these years. Maybe some of his attempts are not appropriate and failed, lots of people still consider he as a great producer who made incomparable contribution to South Korean culture.
Bibliography
3. https://www.nme.com/news/music/k-pop-label-sm-entertainment-partnership-marvel-2551415
4. http://h9t.hanju.cc/hanjudongtai/171751.html
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Soo-man
