Mark's K-pop domination may finally be complete with his new solo album

One of the biggest names in K-pop music at the moment is Mark Lee, known to his millions of fans simply as Mark. 

The Korean-Canadian K-pop star is with SM Entertainment, one of the biggest K-pop labels in the industry. He is best known for debuting in the group NCT nine years ago. But now, after almost a decade in the business, he has released his first solo album called The Firstfruit. 

Today on Commotion, culture writer Lucy Ford talks with Elamin about the album, and why fans have been eagerly awaiting NCT Mark's debut solo record.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Mark's new solo album is very autobiographical, and there are songs inspired by every city he's lived in. That includes Toronto, where he was born, Vancouver, where he grew up. He was involved in the writing of every song on this album. For a debut solo K-pop record, how unusual is that?

Lucy: It's pretty unusual, especially for SM Entertainment, which is the label he's under. There are a few K-pop groups that are known for being self-producing — BTS, Stray Kids, Seventeen are ones you might've heard of. But very few SM groups or artists are. And I think it's just because they're a little bit more controlled. SM has a sound that it sticks to. So for Mark to have so much creative freedom is really interesting. I think it speaks to maybe the pull he has in SM just by virtue of being the backbone of multiple groups. I imagine it was a conversation that was had, like, "I will do all these things if I'm able to have such creative freedom when it comes to finally being a solo artist." He debuted nine years ago; he's only 25.

Elamin: He's been at this for a long time.

Lucy: Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I have described this album as sort of a magnum opus, which is a bizarre thing to say to someone who is 25. It's an incredibly nostalgic album. It's so autobiographical. Again, crazy to say as someone who's 25 to be nostalgic about their life, but he's packed a lot in, in that time.

Elamin: The idea of your magnum opus arriving at 25 is a wild and kind of stunning thought…. You said [Righteous] is your favorite track off the album. Why is this one your favourite?

Lucy: I think this is my favorite variant of Mark Lee. Like I said, he does a lot. But I love Mark Lee when he's being sort of propulsive, when there's a real fight to his energy. I think it is a cathartic song to listen to, and also feels like probably a cathartic song to perform. 

Sonically it is very similar to NCT 127, which is probably the NCT unit that I personally like the most as a sound. But I think the reason I like it so much and what I gravitated towards with it when I first heard it is, it really encapsulates the ethos of the album really succinctly. The album is about his faith, his parents and just how confident he is. And that's all in this song. Every lyric is just about those three things, and it's just very neatly packaged — like, the thesis statement is there.

Elamin: You've been covering K-pop for a while. When you look at Mark's new solo album in the context of his general career as a K-pop idol, someone who's been a member of all these different groups, what's your takeaway?

Lucy: I think what I've always been so interested in in K-pop is just the way that it tries to strike a balance. And what I mean by that is ultimately, it's a huge experiment in capitalism. It is constantly trying to find ways to make money out of fans, but also it has a product that people need to be emotionally invested in and have some level of authenticity to it. So balancing that is really difficult. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. 

Mark is a really good litmus test of how much you can make someone a workforce before people start demanding a union for him, you know? And so I think with him, we've been waiting to see when he's not being splintered across all these groups, sort of forced to be doing different sounds, who is he? What is him as a whole, complete being? And I think this album is really successful in doing that, probably because he had so much creative freedom, but he clearly has been thinking about it for a long time.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Lucy Ford produced by Jean Kim.