Before BTS played its final song on Sunday, J-Hope, one of the seven members of the K-pop superstar boyband, took a moment to share his feelings with the crowd inside SoFi Stadium for the second of four sold-out shows.
“This concert is going to be a big part of my life story, my history,” he said, speaking in Korean as a translator echoed his words in English.
“This is a special concert for you; this is a special concert for us,” J-Hope continued. “I hope tonight was also a highlight for your own life stories, too.”
And that would have been about it for any other band in the world – a few words and on with the show, a blast of fireworks to send everyone back into the night.
But BTS isn’t any other band, and their fans, known collective as ARMY, aren’t like any other fandom. And so for at least 15 minutes, each member of the group — RM, Jimin, Jungkook, V, Suga and Jin — followed J-Hope with their own words of appreciation for the night.
In a show that packed 24 songs into two-and-a-half hours of crowd-thrilling performance, this simple segment of the show said more than anything else about how and why these seven young South Korean men are the biggest global sensation in pop music today.
There’s a sweet and innocent sincerity in how BTS interacts with its fans – on stage, television and video, in music and words – that’s unlike anyone or anything else out there.
There’s a bond that drew fans from across the United States and 78 countries around the world for these first live shows since the pandemic canceled plans for a 2020 world tour. It’s a connection that had those fans cheering not just the stream of BTS videos that screened before the show began, but individual moments within each video.
Of course, the preshow cheers were nothing compared to the moment BTS appeared on stage, emerging from an introductory video that had them holding up mugshot placards inside a police station, onto the stage from a jail cell.
The night kicked off with “On,” a raucous spectacle that featured BTS clad in white couture backed by 30 dancers and drummers in a crisply choreographed routine punctuated by the first of many blasts of colorful pyrotechnics.
Between “Dope” and “DNA,” the guys quickly said hello – the cheers each time they spoke: deafening – and then slipped off for the first of four costume changes during the concert, a break filled with the first of several mini-movies built around the theme and name of the tour: Permission To Dance On Stage.
Much of the BTS catalog features upbeat pop and hip-hop, with a healthy measure of danceable grooves, they’re also quite good at slower ballads, such as “Blue & Grey,” an early highlight. It, like the album “Be” on which it appears, was written and recorded during the pandemic and addresses themes of loneliness and anxiety and other emotions of the past two years.
Many of the songs on Sunday featured the seven BTS-ers alone on stage – for a big production, the show really didn’t lean on its core of backing performers much at all. They’d pop out for a more ornately choreographed number such as “Black Swan,” but then disappear offstage for long stretches.
And, in truth, the ARMY in the seats, added color and light throughout the night, thanks to their “bombs,” the name for the high-tech lightsticks a huge majority of the crowd bring to the show and then connect via a Bluetooth app to enter their seat location.
Take a song like “Fake Love” (or really, any song in the set): The lighting crew can trigger a rainbow of colors in the stadium, painting light patterns on the bombs the ARMY carry. (Weird terms for such a peace-and-love group, but a cool and very impressive visual effect.)
A trio of songs – “Boy With Luv,” “Dynamite,” and “Butter” – delivered three of BTS’s biggest hits in the middle of the show, and the reaction from fans was as you’d expect. “Dynamite,” released in August 2020, is the first of six No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 within a span of 13 months, and on Sunday it was as ridiculously catchy a disco-pop track as ever.
“Butter,” another of those No. 1 hits, in the week before the SoFi shows was nominated for a Grammy for best pop duo/group performance, and also won favorite pop song at the American Music Awards. It also got a remix with hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion, and on Sunday, Megan strutted out in a pair of over-the-knee pink pastel boots with bows up the front to join the boys for the first time in concert.
“Megan, how you feeling?” one of the BTS boys shouted as they walked back from the remote stage.
“I’m feeling like a hot girl every season!” Thee Stallion replied.
Unlike BTS’s last performance in Southern California, a pair of shows at the Rose Bowl in May 2019, these four shows were designed for full-group performances only, with no solo or duet performances scattered across the set.
“We’ve been away for two years and we wanted your full focus on all seven of us,” explained Suga during his end-of-show comments.
And that probably added to the feeling of a family all together again that infused the concert all the way to the main set-ending performance of “Idol,” a rousing anthem that opened with RM, J-Hope and Suga rapping the first verses over pounding drums, before vocalists Jungkook, Jimin, V and Jin joined in.
The encore delivered two of the three songs that weren’t performed on opening night – “Epilogue: Young Forever,” and the fan-favorite “Spring Day” – before the group members took their turns speaking to the crowd.
Jimin admitted feeling a little bit awkward on the previous night after two years away from live fans. RM told them he’d woken up Sunday wiped out by the energy spent on Saturday night, but told the fans they were “my magic, my miracle,” that restored him by showtime.
Jin, who came out for the encore with longish hair tied with red ribbon to form short pigtails, revealed what that look was all about when he opened his section by acting a bit of the Red Light Green Light Doll character from the Korean Netflix hit series “Squid Game.”
“I think you and I, we’re making a movie together,” he then said. “To make this movie of life with you really makes me happy. This is a movie that we will continue to make until the very last day of our life.”
And then, only after each had had his say, did BTS launch into its final number, “Permission To Dance,” which they did, and the fans did, and the long-awaited reunion reached its very happy ending.
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