This week, though, what Variety Magazine describes as the “brutal pressure” these boys and others in the K-Pop profession face has shown its ugly and extremely sad side. Many around the world are mourning the death of Jong-hyun, the 27-year old lead singer in the most popular of all the K-Pop bands, SHINee. The 27-year old singer took his own life earlier this week. A farewell note tells of Jong-hyun being “broken from the inside. The depression that had been slowly eating me up finally devoured me and I couldn’t defeat it.”
Many in K-Pop’s stable of bands are recruited as teenagers into what is a notoriously high pressure competitive industry. Variety adds that many may not be emotionally mature enough to handle the discipline, the fame, the facial plastic surgery to ensure each fits the ‘required look’ and the extremely high standards of off-stage behaviour demanded by the conservative Korean public. Korean-American singer Seo Ji-won was one of the first to commit suicide, afraid that his second album could never match the huge success of the first. He was just 19.
Jong-hyun joins a growing list of Asian performers who, despite enormous success and wealth, have succumbed to the depths of depression. It reminds me of the total shock felt in Hong Kong in 2003 when Asian pop sensation and hugely successful movie actor Leslie Cheung leapt to his death from the 24th floor of the city’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Handsome in the extreme and only 46 years old, he was a true Asian icon. In one series of solo concerts, he performed for 33 consecutive evenings in Hong Kong’s 12,000-seat Coliseum, his costumes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier. In a 2010 poll run by CNN, Cheung was voted the Third Most Iconic Musician of all Time after Michael Jackson and The Beatles.
His fame had extended to the west largely through his appearance in two major movies that garnered a stash of awards, including wins at the Cannes Film Festival and Oscar nods. In Chen Kaige’s gorgeously filmed and moving “Farewell My Concubine”, he plays a gay actor who falls hopelessly in love with a male colleague – and then kills himself when his lover leaves him for a woman. In the bleak and emotionally draining “Happy Together”, two Asian gay men travel to see the Iguazu Falls in South America in the vain hope of re-igniting their feelings for each other.
Leslie, as everyone called him, had come out as gay and was known to have been in a happy long term relationship with a Hong Kong banker of his own age. Yet in the days following his suicide, it became clear he had been treated for severe depression for more than a year. In his pocket, police found a note. It read, “I can’t stand it any more . . . In my life I have done nothing bad. Why does it have to be like this?”