There’s been major drama happening in K-pop this week at the executive level. And amidst all this, it was announced yesterday that RM’s second album will drop in May. We’ll come back to this in a minute. Let’s talk briefly about the mess within HYBE, which is BTS’s company.
HYBE is the biggest entertainment conglomerate in South Korea (they acquired Scooter Braun’s Ithica Holdings a couple of years ago, this is the scale we’re talking about), and has several subsidiaries, one of them being the music label ADOR, which is run by Min Hee-jin, the executive who produces NewJeans. NewJeans broke out in a big way two years ago and they have plans this year, with a new release coming next month, to take it to the next level.
Earlier this week, HYBE claimed that Min Hee-jin (who owns 18% of ADOR) was attempting a corporate takeover and was trying to take control of ADOR and they’ve stated their intention to report her to police. Min Hee-jin fired back and accused HYBE of all kinds of shenanigans including undermining her artists, NewJeans, and plagiarising her ideas for other groups. You can read more about that here.
Yesterday Min Hee-jin, flanked by her lawyers, held a wild press conference and spilled a reservoir’s worth of boardroom tea about HYBE’s business practices. She also showed text messages that she claims prove that HYBE executives, including its founding chairman Bang Si-hyuk, who signed BTS and produced some of their early work, have been doing her – and NewJeans – dirty.
Needless to say, it’s a sh-tshow over there. And yet, just hours after that presser ended, following days of controversy about NewJeans’s creative director, RM’s album is announced. The timing… is curious. Especially since the allegations are that HYBE hasn’t been doing enough to support NewJeans and ADOR and Min Hee-jin’s work and might even be undermining it – now we find out that they’re dropping RM’s album ON THE SAME DAY as NewJeans’s new music. I wrote more about the mess at HYBE in today’s mailbag at The Squawk open to all subscribers.
So is this a strategic attempt at distraction on HYBE’s part? And was it good strategy to begin with? There are people online who are side-eyeing this release given the chaos that of this week. Because at the heart of this, the priority should be the artists, all the artists, their rights, and all of them deserve to have every support possible, every opportunity to be successful – in this case both NewJeans and RM. Now NewJeans’s future is uncertain and RM’s exciting news is coming in tandem with the controversy surrounding the company.
And it IS exciting, this new album. Right Place, Wrong Person is the title and it “captures some of the universal emotions we all experience at some point in life, such as the feeling of being an outsider who doesn’t fit in”. The press release describes that the music falls “within the alternative genre” and that RM is sharing some “frank, honest lyrics”.
So…
Right Place, Wrong Person… is a breakup album? That’s how I’m reading it, even though the description in the press release is more general about not belonging, this is a play on an expression that’s often associated relationships. Which makes this extra intriguing because the members of BTS and K-pop stars in bands in general don’t talk about their love lives. They are not Taylor Swift who works out her personal heartbreaks through her music. So we’re looking at the possibility that we might get some insight into RM’s romantic history …while he’s currently single and serving in the military. That’s the other angle to all of this.
RM’s been on duty for five months or so now. Which means, like his bandmates, he banked all kinds of content before he went in. Like a whole ass album. What else are they hoarding in that vault of theirs? We’re still over a year before all seven members of BTS will have completed their service!
PS: Pray for me. I’m not sure which fanbase of which band I might have pissed off with this post. And with all this craziness happening in K-pop right now people are volatile and unpredictable. If this site disappears, we’ll try to get it back online as soon as we can!
