Yesterday, Jea of Brown Eyed Girls introduced, LUNAFLY, the upcoming new boyband, which features a British member from BEG’s entertainment company, NegaNetwork via a picture posted to her twitter account. The tweet read: “This is BEG’s dongsaengs, LUNAFLY, who are about to debut soon! Teo, Sam, and Yun. These three are all very good at music! You guys will show them your love, right??” [Source: allkpop]
Those of you who have watched any of MBC’s Star Audition 2: Birth of a Great Star may recognise Sam (full name Sam Carter) from the London auditions. He is half British/half Korean, originally from London and is a former professional footballer who’s career was ended due to injury. Although he didn’t make it all the way to the finals, it seems that Sam was promising enough to be picked by NegaNetwork to join their company and will debut with their new band, LUNAFLY, at some point in the near future.
So far there has been no official announcements regarding exactly when the band will debut or what their concept and musical style will be like but if all the members are as talented as Sam appears to be, then we will be expecting great things from them! Although today they did a TV recording for educational network EBS on one of their music programmes so it seems like it won’t be long until their debut.
It will be interesting to see how the his company and the Korean media will handle the fact that the group has a mixed-race British member and whether this with be highlighted when the group are being promoted. I personally hope, for the sake of the group that there is not too much attention placed on this as it detracts from the actual talent of a group and gimmicks are never a good way of gaining long term success. Chocolat have shown already that in K-pop having mixed race members can in some ways create barriers to success as people judge the group only on the different appearance of certain members and not on their musical ability or performances.
As one of, if not the first, Brit to debut in a K-pop group we will be giving Sam lots of support, especially as he has such a good voice, and if you want to learn more about him and LUNAFLY and give them your support you can check out both their Twitter accounts here (@SamCarterSC) and here (@officiallunafly) and click here to listen to a song written by Sam and performed with famous youtuber and fellow MBC auditionee, Megan Lee.
Are you excited for this new group? Will you be supporting them because they have a British member or is that not important? Do you think the fact that a band has a mixed race/foreign member will cause the group problems in the industry? Is this a positive sign for the future of K-pop in the UK? Please tell us your thoughts in the comments below.
