Summer Rerun | BTS for Beginners

Pop Literacy

This episode originally aired April 16, 2019.

After years of massive popularity around the world, Korean boy band BTS is breaking through to the top of mainstream American culture. They just dropped a new album (Map of the Soul: Persona), which includes the single “Boy with Luv,” featuring Halsey; and they played Saturday Night Live, a first for a Korean act. They also recently surpassed 5 billion streams on Spotify.

All of this has many Americans wondering what, exactly, is going on with these seven boys with pastel-colored hair, Korean lyrics, impeccable stage production, and supernaturally synched dance moves. We walk through the BTS basics with Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly’s critic-at-large, who wrote the magazine’s cover story on the group.