K-pop giants BTS launch world tour after releasing final Love Yourself album, and tell fans to ‘seize the day’
With music video to Idol, signature track on Love Yourself: Answer album, breaking a YouTube record, band embark on world tour by explaining its meaning: happiness only lasts for fleeting moments, so seize them
K-pop stars BTS have been talking about the meaning behind their latest “Love Yourself” album and world tour. The album’s main track, Idol, is a call to “seize the day” and find happiness, band member RM said, as he likened the tour to a festival.
“When you think of a festival, the preparations take a very long time, but the festival ends after a brief moment and leaves behind tonnes of garbage,” RM said at a press conference before the start of the first concert.
“I think life is the same. Happiness only lasts for fleeting moments and only leaves behind a few snapshot images,” he said. “After grappling with many questions, we want to send the message that [we should] enjoy life and seize these fleeting [happy moments].”
The “Love Yourself” concert tour – which was launched with two shows in Seoul last weekend – will take the band to 16 cities in the United States, Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Japan and will run until February next year.
The tour started after Friday’s release of Love Yourself: Answer, the finale of the four-part “Love Yourself” album series, which explores the search for identity.
The single Idol contains many references to BTS’ previous songs and its video has already received around 90 million views on YouTube. The EDM song and its music video are primarily based on South African beats and, unusually, adopted elements from traditional Korean music and traditional Korean imagery such as the hanbok garment and a pavilion.