Korean Media News

‘Idol House’ SM Entertainment shows a male idol group, EXO-K for the first time after SHINee from 4 years ago. By having a peculiar promotion, they successfully drew the attention of the whole world before even debuting. They raised the expectation with a total of 23 teasers during 100 days. EXO is divided into EXO-K who promotes in Korea and EXO-M who promotes in China, they debuted at the same time on April 9th.

This time, the expression ‘Great boast, small roast’ was proved wrong. The six members, who got their peculiar name EXO-K from the word ‘EXOPLANET’, which stands for a planet out of the solar system, have such a sophisticated and perfect image that they can give the impression that they really fell from another planet.

You would think that they kept on going easily with the strong support of their company but armed with the SMP, it was a handicap. As much as it’s difficult to change one’s likes and dislikes, the members have various charms and respectable skills worthy of the love they receive. 

We recently met EXO-K’s members for this interview and instead of the stiff expressions they showed during the showcase, they shouted energically their official greetings “We are ONE. Hello, we are EXO-K” more relaxedly and with a bright image. A month ago they were at loss and had trouble working as a group, but during this time period, the members matured a lot.

“These days, it’s going well when we’re doing music programs. On days with music shows, we generally sleep around 4 hours, but today (Monday) we slept 7 hours” (Kai)

“I’m really having fun now. For my first birthday after our debut, the members and the fans congratulated me a lot and we had an event too” (Baekhyun)

These days, everytime they’re asked how they’re doing, the members reply like this with a shy expression. On stage, they hit high notes like professionals and match their difficult synchronized choreography looking like they are completely familiarized with it, but when facing them, we get the strong feeling that they’re ‘like children’. But here, they held the conversation with D.O’s round and bright eyes, Suho’s passionate image representing the team and with always a noticeable utterance, and Chanyeol’s brightness.

When watching the angelic members’ image, we were curious about whether they felt pressured by the media’s attention just because they’re SM rookies and the public’s expectations for them to have performances at the level of seniors such as DBSK-SHINee.

“Our promotions lasted for a very long time, right? I think that while the fans were waiting their expectations raised by quite a lot. Moreover, our seniors opened the Hallyu and K-POP path well so it pressured us even more of course. But under that pressure, we promised to practice even harder and to put in a lot of effort” (Chanyeol)

The genre of the title song ‘MAMA’, the SMP (SM Music Performance: its peculiarity is the splendid and strong performance), resembles the first generation of idols like H.O.T and Shinhwa and to the early days of the 5-membered DBSK, which makes them confident.

“When I first heard it I really liked it. It’s really imposing, and it’s been a long time since the SMP appeared, right? I thought that we could show a performance different from the other singers” (Suho)

“You can think that it’s old-fashioned or out of season but I think that this generation didn’t get to hear a lot of the SMP. Instead I thought ‘Won’t it be an original and new genre to them?’” (Chanyeol)

But thinking back to their first broadcasted performance on ‘Inkigayo’ only makes them dizzy. Starting from D.O’s ‘Superior (Imposing) Orchestra”s slip of the tongue, the members really tensed up. As soon as the subject was brought up, D.O headdesked, not knowing whether he should laugh or cry. After that mistake, when D.O just hears about the ‘first broadcast’, you can only see him sigh.

“Our first performance wasn’t live to emphasize on the performance. The pressure of the live of course decreased with that. But since it was our first time wearing an ear-mic, everything was unfamiliar so we were really nervous” (Baekhyun)

“Truthfully, even now, this kind of interview is easy but the interviews with cameras are really hard. You know how your face is still but only your mouth smiles? Recently, we had an interview once with Tony senior on ‘M!Countdown’ and I got scolded because my lips were really shaking” (Kai)

Even if they look perfect, they’re still rookies who are scared of the camera. “We can’t choose only one fan-idiot (T/N: A fan-idiot is a member who’s awkward with the fans and doesn’t know how to react and interact with them). We’re all fan-idiots” They gave us this standard answer. They showed their images only through teasers at first, that’s how they were exposed to the public before their debut, but as opposed to that they got to meet the fans through music programs, fanmeetings and fansigns and they were so amazed by it, it was totally showing.

EXO-K is complete only once these 6 members, who look similar yet totally different, are all together. They said that until now their singer seniors, such as DBSK, Super Junior, SHINee, etc. helped them a lot.

“DBSK’s U-Know Yunho senior and Max Changmin senior always monitor us and always give nice words to each one of us everytime we meet them after a while. Sometimes they even tell us warm words through speaker phone when we’re practicing. Seeing that we had a lot of members, Super Junior’s Leeteuk senior too told us a lot of things like ‘Make them unite as a leader’, ‘Unite a bit more’, ‘You exist because you are a group’” (Suho)




source: bntnews
translation cr; emilie @ exok-trans