BTS began a four-night stay at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium on Tuesday night — the last North American stand of the K-pop boy band’s first world tour since the group’s seven members completed their mandatory South Korean military service.
For fans, the concert was an extra-special occasion given that it came on Jung Kook’s 29th birthday; late in the two-hour show, his bandmates put a crown on Jung Kook’s head and led the audience — some wearing paper party hats — in a giddy rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
BTS’ tour follows the release of “Arirang,” the group’s first studio LP in six years, which debuted atop Billboard’s album chart after it came out in March. Yet K-pop entered something of a transitional phase while BTS was away: On one hand, the genre reached a new level of cultural ubiquity with the Academy Award-winning “Golden,” from Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters”; on the other hand, acts like Enhypen and Stray Kids — though huge sellers to an ultra-devoted core fanbase — failed to match the kind of crossover success that BTS achieved before its hiatus with smash hits like “Dynamite” and “Butter.”
To complicate matters further, BTS recently said it would boycott next year’s Grammy Awards ceremony in apparent protest of the Recording Academy’s introduction of a new category for Asian pop.
“We hope our music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language,” the members said in a statement in July.
However fraught the state of the K-pop industry, BTS seemed to be in high spirits Tuesday; though the three-act show featured plenty of intricate choreography (and costumes and pyrotechnics), the evening’s lengthy final chapter had the singers and rappers basically milling around the stage as they performed songs while trying to crack one other up. The show’s surprise songs — a fan-favorite element of every tour date — were “Boy in Luv” and “Magic Shop.”
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