Currently, the K-pop industry is going through a period of shock after the internal dispute over SM Entertainment's operation rights.
Recently, SM's co-CEO Lee Sung Soo made several claims against SM Entertainment's founder, accusing his uncle Lee Soo Man of using his vision for a 'SMart Music City' - featuring music festivals, open auditions, creative collaboration, a drone port, and more - as a means to further his own greed and ambitions.
While talking about the "sustainability" of the environment and planting more trees, Lee Soo Man's real vision was to establish casinos at his 'Music Cities' where Marijuana would be legal. According to Lee Soo Man's vision, these 'Music Cities' would mainly attract tourists and consumers in their teens and twenties, and Lee Soo Man was an advocate of "legalizing marijuana," which would "allow people to enjoy music and entertainment even more."
To promote his idealogy, Lee Soo Man often included words such as "Sustainability" and "Greenism" in various SM artists' songs.
Lee Sung Soo claimed that Lee Soo Man ruined aespa's comeback. Initially, the girl group was set to release a new album on February 20, ahead of their first solo concert in Seoul from February 25-26. However, during the album production process, Lee Soo Man ordered Yoo Young Jin and aespa's A&R team to change the lyrics of the group's comeback song to include references to "tree planting" and "sustainability." Even though these themes did not fit in with aespa's metaverse storyline, Yoo Young Jin and the A&R team attempted to include lyrics such as "just sustainability" and "decrease by just 1%".
Lee Sung Soo ultimately decided to cancel aespa's comeback, as the group's new song was "ruined." The aespa members even shed tears after hearing that their new song would be scrapped, delaying the girl group's comeback.
After all these facts were exposed by the co-CEO, many fans now understood why SM artists' songs would include strange words and concepts.
Netizens commented, "Singing about the environment is good but when he first started adding these words to the songs, I felt it was really random and out of place. But now we know that it was all part of his grand scheme," "It's funny how he suddenly was supporting the environment but releasing various goods and merchandise for his artists when he can stop making those things to really help the environment," "All this time, we just thought it was a weird concept that SM was pursuing," "Now we know why these 'out-of-place' words were placed in the songs," "I feel so bad for the artists," "It was really random," and "All the mystery about these weird concepts and ideology is finally making sense."
Unless sustainability has a different meaning in korean it doesn't scream weed to me so not sure how they make that leap...
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