ESCAPE FROM SM ISLAND: How He Do It??

For years, we've all assumed that crossing the SM Entertainment gang was almost practically a career death knell. Almost NO ONE left SM and lived to tell the tale. H.O.T. left SM in 2001 due to a contract dispute and where are they now? Donezo, forced to disband since then. JYJ (aka Jaejoong/Chuck, Yoochun, and Junsu) left in 2009 due to a contract dispute, blacklisted ever since. Hangeng left Super Junior in 2009, hasn't done shit since. Jessica left SNSD in 2014, and while she's pretty much her own woman now with BLANC & ECLARE, she may or may not be blacklisted from performing on the major music shows. 

So how is it that Kris Wu managed to escape in 2014 and reach even greater heights than he did with EXO? 

NOTE: Luhan definitely managed to escape too but since he's mostly big in China only (but he's HUGE in China, don't get me wrong), he only gets this small honorable mention.

Kris Wu poses with American smuggler after successful escape from
SM Island, 2014. Colorized.

Just a casual glance through his Wikipedia page post-EXO should wow you.

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Those accomplishments blow anything and everything he did with EXO out of the water. Salty EXO-Ls may protest and whine and bitch as much as they want, but he DEFINITELY won the break up. He's been rubbing elbows with American pop-star royalty ever since!

As a not-so-small side note, I want to draw attention to the line:

In October 2017, Wu released a single titled "Deserve", featuring U.S rapper Travis Scott. Upon its release, "Deserve" placed No. 1 on the U.S. iTunes chart, making Wu the only Chinese artist to achieve the feat.[29]

So if Kris as a former KPop star hit No 1 on the US iTunes chart before any other past/present KPop act, does that mean we have to cancel literally everyone else since we don't let anyone ride on anyone else's coat tails for free? We should definitely retroactively scrub all instances of BTS's American promotions from the internet, and might as well write letters to all of the big American media corporations to make sure that no one else (INCLUDING those EXO guys) gets an undeserved boost from Kris's hard work.

At any rate, aside from his appearance in xXx: Return of Xander Cage (which was an interesting enough movie you can just turn your brain off to enjoy), I didn't really care about his success until he started appearing in my sports feeds. Now, everyone knows the public mainstream in America doesn't really give a shit about you unless you either a) release a hit song, b) star in a hit movie, or c) appear with other famous people. Somehow, Kris has managed to parlay b) and c) into more c)s, which further fuel his mainstream appeal. He's been named an NFL Super Bowl Ambassador, whatever the hell that means, but people cared enough to ask him what he thought was going to happen during the game!!

The man has even managed to appear in 3 back-to-back NBA All-Star weekends in the Celebrity Game.

Here he is in 2016, going up against Kevin Hart!

Here he is in 2017 with Nick Cannon!

And now look at him in 2018 chattin it up with Justin Bieber, probably shooting the shit about their mutually-shared experiences with batshit crazy fangirls who just won't leave them alone!

Why does this matter? Well, 1) I'm mostly envious of how much cool shit he gets for free and how much cool shit he gets to do (I wanna do NBA stuff too...), and 2) I think it's hilarious that Kris's success only affirms how shitty it is to be in trapped in KPop as more-or-less a slave for the duration of the contract. THIS is how a young person should parlay pop stardom into being able to do shit they actually care about. The money is a nice perk too.