Hot Blood, Episode 10: The real Hot Blood was the friends we made along the way.

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(Written May 17, 2024)

Welcome to the series finale recap of Hot Blood,  an episode in which we should finally get rid of that porn title so our groups, 2am and 2pm, will emerge.

With each episode lasting only 30 minutes, I thought this would be the easiest show to recap, but that wasn’t the case.  It’s been really hard to identify our trainees because the translators kept changing the spelling of their names, and after the groups became famous, several members changed their own names.  I had to keep remembering that Junsu is now Jun K, and JaeBoem became Jay Park.

And I still haven’t figured out how JoKwon came back after being eliminated.  The translation is sketchy.  I know I’ve missed a lot of details, so thanks for hanging in there with me.

We open on the JYP Building again.  We’re told it’s the night before a fan meeting event, and the trainees are rehearsing.  They look more like a real K-pop group now, moving in sync and being more intuitive with each other.  They are on their way to becoming idols. 

Rehearsals stop when it’s time for correspondence.  A bag of blank cards is dumped out on the floor of the practice room.  The guys spread out on the floor and begin writing messages to the fans.  These cards will be given out to the fans at the event.  The idols really put effort into it – drawing cute little pictures and hearts and writing sweet messages.  They finally finish and stand up, stretching their sore muscles.  They need to get some rest.  They have a big day tomorrow.

D-Day – Fan Meeting Day – arrives.  Fans are already gathered outside the JYP Building.  The idols make their way through the crowd and onto the bus.  They’re hoping at least 100 people show up.  After seeing how many people showed up at their guerilla concert, I don’t think they have anything to worry about.

We cut to the venue.  We have three hours until showtime, and the line already extends down the block.  Fans are writing questions for the idols on a big poster.  The guys go inside for rehearsal and soundcheck, and then on to hair and makeup.

The fans start entering the venue, and each one is handed one of the handwritten cards.  This really was a great idea on the part of JYP.  I was a teenager in the 80s, and if I had arrived at a Duran Duran concert and been handed a handwritten note by Nick Rhodes, the entire course of my life would have changed.  My DNA would have been altered.  I would probably be living in one of those capsules on the London Eye right now, living off spare change and temp shifts in punk clothing stores.  I would have legally changed my name to Rio.

I watch as the fans excitedly read their cards and show them to their friends.  I’m telling you, lives are being changed.

Showtime!  The lights go down, the girls start screaming, and out come our idols.  They start with a self-written rap.  Then they dance to a Will Smith song.  We’re getting clips of each performance, and it looks like a lot of fun.  The girls are losing their minds. 

After a few minutes of this, the idols take seats on the stage so they can answer fan questions.  We see the posterboard crammed with questions, and I have to laugh when the host says, “Some questions are quite perverted.  I’m not choosing them on purpose.  Everyone, what were you thinking?”

One question read aloud is, “What part of your body are you most confident in?”  Jay Park stands up and removes his jacket, pretending to look surprised at the wave of screams it brings from the audience.  He says innocently that he was just trying to show his arms.

They’re asked about their time on the island, and they are very positive about their answers, saying they learned a lot.  As they’re talking, we hear someone offstage blow a whistle.  The soldiers are here!  They march in, wearing nice suits instead of the camo uniforms.  Thankfully, they are here to celebrate the idols’ first fan meeting and not to drag them back onto the ferry.

The idols greet their former tormenters and hug them.  The soldiers join them onstage to talk about how everyone cried at the first eliminations and how moving it was.  I keep waiting for one of them to look at Kwon and say, “Wait a minute, what are you still doing here?”

Now it’s time for another guest.  It’s Jessica, the yoga teacher!  Oh no.  I know exactly where this is going. 

Jessica walks onto the stage, looking lovely as always, and suddenly our suave idols can’t speak.  They’re literally stammering and blushing.  They can’t even look at her.  Instead, they look shyly at the host and say they’re happy that Jessica is here, and their hands are trembling because they’re nervous.

I’m telling you, if Wonho were here, he’d look right into Jessica’s eyes and ask if she’d like to see the muscle she’d helped strengthen.  THAT is what a true K-pop idol would do.  Just saying.

Now for another guest.  They spell his name Kim Ji Su here, but we know him as Kim Kisoo from Episode 8, the one who took them to girls’ schools to creep on underage girls advertise the guerilla concert.  Yay.  He brings out a cake with lit candles to celebrate the fan meeting.  The idols gather around him and blow out the candles.  Thank you, Mr. Kim.  Now if you’ll kindly step backstage, an American named Chris Hansen would like a word with you.

More chat between the idols and their former instructors.  Then Seulong tells Jessica she is pretty and has a beautiful figure and wants to know if she can show him some exercises to help maintain his figure.  THERE you go, Seulong!  I know at least one of you could do this! 

Jessica is game.  She stands up and demonstrates a tree pose.  Then Kim Kisoo tries the same pose.  Dude, just leave.

Time for more performances.  We get solo songs and really impressive dance moves.  Khun plays an electronic keyboard during a ballad.  

Now for a raffle.  Each idol pulls a number, and the audience member with that number gets to come onstage to interact with that idol.  Some get songs sung to them, while others get to dance with the idol or have a rose handed to them.  There’s a sweet moment when Kwon calls his mother’s number, and she comes onstage to hug her son. 

More performances.  I’m getting concerned because we’ve only got about five minutes left, and our boys have not been split into the two groups.  Turns out that’s not going to happen here.  The idols come out for a final farewell, and that’s it.

For people who were watching the show live when it aired, that was probably a satisfying ending.  They thought they were watching the debut of the Hot Blood Boys.  But for people like me, writing years afterward, it’s kind of confusing.

Google, help me out here. 

Apparently, the group’s name was always One Day, even while they were training on the island.  Maybe it was part of the conversation that was not translated.  At some point before any studio albums were released, JYP entertainment split the group, putting four members in 2am and the remaining seven in 2pm.  The 2am group is a ballad group, more sophisticated and romantic.  The 2pm group is the hip-hop, more dance-focused group.  The music of 2am is calm and quiet, reflecting that time of day, while 2pm brings the heat of late afternoon.

One thing I also missed is that during the audience voting, Jay Park got the highest number of votes.  He was a huge fan favorite.  However, his role in 2pm ended almost as soon as it began.  Let’s talk about Park Jae-beom, or Jay Park.

Jay is American-born, from just outside of Seattle.  He grew up obsessed with hip-hop and kept cutting school to perform with his group Art of Movement.  His mom got tired of trying to keep him in school and suggested that he try out for JYP Entertainment, which was hosting auditions in Seattle.  He made it in and was brought to Seoul as a JYP Trainee in 2005. 

Three years later, after enduring the grueling life of a trainee getting lessons in rap, singing, and dance, he was chosen for the Hot Blood documentary.  He eventually became a part of the group 2pm.  He also recorded songs for television show soundtracks and became a cast member on several Korean variety shows.  His star was rising very quickly.

A year later, in September 2009, it came crashing down.  In Korea, there are     K-pop fans with such a fierce loyalty to certain bands, they work to destroy the lives of idols they see as competing with their favorites.  One of these toxic fans hacked Jay Park’s MySpace account and found comments he’d written in 2005, the year he first came to Korea.  Those comments were leaked to the Korean media.

The comments, on their faces, were pretty bad.  He wrote things like “Korea is gay,” “I hate Koreans,” “I want to go back to the States again.”

The public was furious.  Jay Park tried to explain the context.  He was a teenager in a foreign country where he didn’t fit in.  He was homesick and lonely, he didn’t speak the language or understand the culture, and the life of a trainee was wearing him out.  He was venting in English in private messages to a fellow MySpace friend back in the US.  

I get it.  I was in high school when I became an exchange student in Barcelona for a semester.  I barely spoke Spanish and was attending an American school, so I wasn’t learning much more.  I was immature and judgmental about everything, especially since I’d been raised in a strict Catholic household and hadn’t pulled out of the religious mindset yet.  I hated every minute of that experience and wrote about it in letters to my family and friends and vented about it over the phone.  I was not very nice to my host family.  If social media had existed back then, I’m sure I would have vented there as well.

I am a drastically different person than I was as a teenager.  I’m sure most people can say that, including Jay Park.  If the outraged Korean public had stopped for a moment and been honest with themselves, they would have had to admit the same thing. 

But they didn’t.  The public demanded that the very idol they had voted most popular be removed from 2pm.  JYP Entertainment initially dug their heels in and said no.  But a day later, Jay announced he was leaving the group and returning to Seattle.  Everything he had worked so hard for, all the risks he had taken, and all the exhausting training he had endured on the island, was all for nothing, just because he had behaved like a typical teenage boy would in such unusual circumstances.  There was no forgiveness or any attempt to understand the context. 

The punishment extended to the rest of 2pm.  After Jay left, the group had to cancel scheduled TV appearances as well as the final episode of another reality show they were filming.  They had to re-film a music video to erase Jay’s presence. 

The Korean media does not forgive easily, but sometimes, they eventually do forgive.  They began looking at the situation with more clarity and tried to understand Jay’s mindset when he wrote those messages.  Fans began calling for Jay to return to Korea and 2pm.  JYP, however, would not risk getting burned again.  They terminated Jay’s contract.

Thankfully, Jay Park is doing fine.  He began appearing with Art of Movement again and started performing his own music on YouTube.  He became a huge success on the platform and filmed a movie called Hype Nation.  He also got an endorsement deal with Levi Strauss & Co.  He returned to South Korea in 2010 to a welcoming public. 

Over the next couple of years, he joined SNL Korea and co-founded his own hip-hop record label AOMG.  He founded another label in 2022.  He’s been named one of GQ Korea’s Men of the Year.  I would argue that he’s doing better than he would have if he’d stayed in 2pm.

Both 2am and 2pm had worldwide success, although 2pm was the more popular and successful of the two groups.  They are both still active and releasing music, and the individual members have been doing plenty of solo projects. 

And that, my fellow music fans, wraps up our wild, intense, questionably legal K-pop survival reality show. 

I’ll be taking another break, but I do want to continue doing recaps.  And I’m serious about Femme Factor.  Please someone make it into a show.  You can have the idea for free.

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