Opinion | BTS live concerts in Las Vegas connected Army with the group they love in a way I’ve never experienced before
- The four concerts, part of BTS’s ‘Permission to Dance On Stage’ tour, saw Army fans and the K-pop kings make Las Vegas a city all of their own
- It felt like the eye of a storm that had been building for years, reflecting millions of fans’ love towards a band that has shared their stories and struggles
Something special happened in Las Vegas when BTS came to town.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in the 32 years I’ve lived here,” a staff member at a hotel told me.
The “it” was the vibrant feeling buzzing around the famous Las Vegas Strip, which had laid out a red carpet, or rather an orange one, for BTS ahead of their four shows in the city in April, part of their “Permission to Dance On Stage” tour.
The hotel worker was unaware that I had spent much of the night before waving a plastic, Bluetooth-controlled light stick in time with 50,000 other people, singing and dancing along to seven artists whose performances and lyrics viscerally resonated with us all.
Music is typically something we feel more on an emotional level rather than a physical one, but it was impossible to deny the power reverberating across Sin City as the South Korean septet and their loyal fans, collectively known as “Army”, turned Las Vegas into their own personal playground for the first of two back-to-back weekends of concerts.