Why BTS Made History is K-Pop's first musical guest of Saturday Night Live

The BTS Marked the Story of Last Night by Becoming the First K-Pop Band to Happen on Saturday Night Live . The band was introduced by the episode's host, Emma Stone – herself a big fan of K-pop – and performed flawless performances of their songs "Mic Drop and" Boy With Luv. "

.the first American historical moment for the group of seven musicians, who has been in the forefront of the global explosion of South Korean pop, a style marked by an irresistible fusion of pop, hip-hop and EDM, all sung to a large extent In Korea, BTS was the first Asian act to win a Billboard Award and became the first K-pop band to be a Grammy presenter this year. Boy With Luv "broke YouTube records by recording 78 24 million views just 24 hours after its debut last week and the US love for BTS is part of a broader trend: after decades of ignorance of non-English-speaking music, the American public listens more than ever to international successes.

album Love Yourself: Tear was only the fifth album in English in top of the Billboard charts, and the only version of this little g roupe not to sing in a Romance language. Only 17 songs in non-English language ranked in the top ten American. But that seems to change – after 16 years of drought between "The Macarena" in 1996 and "Gangnam Style" of Psy in 2012, there were four major non-English hits between 2013 and 2018. According to The Guardian only four Spanish speaking tunes ranked among the top 100 in 2016, while 19 registered the following year.

Part of the American success of K-pop is due to the advent of social media, which allowed artists to bypbad some of the usual custodians who historically prevented world musical acts from reaching listeners US. And BTS has mastered social media more than any other artist – the band has surpbaded the Social 50 end-of-year ranking of the influence of musicians on social media in 2017 and 2018.

While BTS is the first act of Korean pop to obtain musical guest status, they are not the first K-pop artist to appear on SNL – this distinction belongs to Psy, who made a cameo at the climax of the "Gangnam Style" craze. That the song and its endlessly endless videoclip satirize the tropes of K-pop could easily escape a public unfamiliar with the genre, and it was sometimes difficult to say whether the Western audience was laughing with or in the manner of Psy.

In this respect, BTS is changing the story in another way: they have cultivated an American audience that treats the group with the same kind of dedicated cult of boys' groups, which was generally reserved for groups composed of Western men white and Caucasian. The members of "The Army", as called by the fans of the group, camped outside NBC for a week, hoping to win tickets to attend a BTS performance. on SNL . And when their idols finally took the stage, the shouts of the fans were deafening.