From “ACE” to “CHASE”: How Minho Concluded The SHINee Plagiarism Series
SM Entertainment
SHINee’s Choi Minho felt the importance of his group’s legacy on the day his first solo album was released.
This album, titled “CHASE”, would be the final addition to a series that began eight years ago, almost innocuously, with the release of SHINee’s youngest member, Taemin’s debut “ACE”. One year later, Jonghyun would be inspired to title his first solo album “BASE”, an action that would set into motion something that SHINee fans (known as Shawols) would refer to as “The Plagiarism Series”.
In 2018, two additional SHInee members followed suit. Key released “FACE” in autumn, which signified the series would continue, followed by ONEW’s “VOICE”, just two weeks before his military conscription began.
The series paused for four years in 2018 when Onew, Minho, and Key left for military service. SHINee staged a comeback in 2021, and Minho continued to focus on a successful acting career. Yet Minho did release and write music. He contributed “Area” to “Atlantis”, a song that described the pain of losing Jonghyun, and last winter he released his first solo single “Heartbreak”.
“Other members [of SHINee] have all released solo music,” he said at the album’s press conference, “and I’m so excited to become the last piece of the puzzle.”
The album design follows a format created for Taemin’s “ACE” in 2014. Each SHINee solo debut is packaged as a miniature hardcover book with a rectangular picture in the center and a quote from the member below the photo. Minho was reverent to this style.
“I think this EP would be a great gift for our fans, because all five of us SHINee members’ solo CDs have the same packaging size and theme,” he told Super Junior’s Eunhyuk, who was the press conference’s MC. “So mine is the final piece, and I’d feel so proud to see all five of our CDs placed together on my bookshelf.”
It felt like an honor, he said, to continue a tradition that each member had participated in.
“As the last SHINee member to release solo music, I really had to keep in mind the interconnectedness with the other members’ previous releases,” Minho stated. “It was a much bigger picture I had to be part of. The general design and theme are all unified, even the components inside. In a way, it was handy that there was already a theme to adhere to. It was also tricky to express myself while keeping that certain uniformity in mind, but I’m thankful that the other members laid down a format.”
You could say that the first puzzle piece was connected by Jonghyun.
“[My music is] like fixing a puzzle,” he told Dazed and Confused. “It’s filled with interesting things that make you search for the hidden link.”
In 2015, Jonghyun was set to release his first solo album BASE. The singer wanted his album to reflect his individuality, and Jonghyun felt he had no room to compromise.“The one thing I put my heart and soul into the most is the album’s quality,” he admitted to Elle. “Anyone who does music would be sensitive about their own albums but all of my nerves were on edge as if I was abnormally obsessed with it.”
Originally Jonghyun was excited about the idea of releasing a solo album. He wrote most of the music in his room “around midnight”. “The melodies,” he told GQ, “matched that time of night.” Jonghyun’s musical inspirations for the album went back to his teenage years when he first discovered American R&B singers like Musiq Soulchild and D’angelo. His vocals, which could reach a soprano octave, could make you weak.
But his excitement dissipated when he met with SM Entertainment executives. “When I heard the concept that the company proposed,” he remembered in 2015, “I said that if I can’t go the direction that I want, then I might as well do a unit (project).”
Jonghyun bid his time. In interviews he projected a cool demeanor about the album’s release. “There was no rush,” he told Dazed and Confused magazine, to complete the album. “I’ll be doing music for the rest of my life,” he also told Elle. Why would he release something he wasn’t proud of?
It was his self-described “stubbornness” that eventually won Jonghyun the right to make the album he wanted. He would not put his name on an album that didn’t reflect the artist he wanted to be. “BASE contains an image of myself that I want to build up little by little,” Jonghyun told The Celebrity magazine. It was, he said, “my foundation in music.”
“When I heard the concept that the company proposed,” he remembered in 2015, “I said that if I can’t go the direction that I want, then I might as well do a unit (project).”
It was his self-described “stubbornness” that eventually won Jonghyun the right to make the album he wanted. He would not put his name on an album that didn’t reflect the artist he wanted to be. “BASE contains an image of myself that I want to build up little by little,” Jonghyun told The Celebrity magazine. It was, he said, “my foundation in music.”
Jonghyun was also specific: “BASE” would reflect how he had spent nearly half his life with SHINee. “I can’t leave SHINee out of my life or my activities in music,” he said in the same interview. That is why he slyly chose to “plagiarize” ACE and create an album that built upon Taemin’s first contribution.
SM Entertainment
The timing felt right, Minho told NME, to release the album now.
Next year Taemin will return from the military. In May, SHINee will celebrate their fifteenth anniversary, a milestone that very few groups have ever reached. If there was ever a time to release the album, and to cap a nearly decade-long project, Minho felt it was this one.
“I’m excited to tell my story in this EP based on hip-hop and R&B, which are genres I always wanted to challenge myself to,” Minho said. The album reminds me of some of the smoothest parts of SHINee’s career: the dreamy duet with Lim Kim in “Waterfall” also struck Minho as something that felt like SHINee’s style. “Run Away”, a collaboration with the rapper Gemini, was a close call for the title track because of how much he loved the song’s hip-hop sound. Minho loved that track so much that an SM staff member traveled to North America to purchase the song from the songwriter.
Minho sought the opinion of nearly everyone who contributed to his growth as a singer for the creation of “CHASE”. Taemin and Onew visited him on the set for the title track, and he sent the song to Key for his reaction. “He said very little,” he told BoA, the superstar who made SM Entertainment the giant company it is today, at a showcase last week. She laughed. “Key can be like this,” she empathized with a smile.
This was an opportunity, Minho told Eunhyuk, for him to finally receive feedback from the seniors who he respected so much. “Yunho of TVXQ! gave me extremely detailed feedback for my new lead track’s dance performance,” he said. “He gave me advice for almost every second of the performance video I sent him, attaching screenshots and everything. I really wanted to get feedback from him, because he’s known for his dancing, but it was so much more detailed than I had expected.”
He laughed as he recalled this. I thought he seemed somewhat surprised that the SM seniors wanted to help him as much as they did.
But “CHASE” is an opportunity for Minho to repay his seniors, to honor the legacy of his group, and perhaps most bittersweet, continue the story Jonghyun created when he decided to copy Taemin’s album concept. The work is a culmination of K-Pop history, but it also is deeply personal. This is for Jonghyun; it’s for Shawols but, crucially, the music allows Minho to look back at his history.
At the press conference, he thought about the day he recorded the hip-hop track “Prove It”. “I wanted to prove that I’m capable of a different kind of genre,” he admitted to Eunhyuk.
Eunhyuk smiled and responded warmly to Minho. “I don't think you have to prove anything.”
