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BTS Transforms Into The Beatles Before Your Eyes, Ed Sullivan Theater And All

BTS, with Stephen Colbert as Ed Sullivan.
Scott Kowalchyk
/
CBS
BTS, with Stephen Colbert as Ed Sullivan.

If you're going to bring the Korean boy band BTS to the spot where The Beatles conquered American TV back in 1964, you might as well milk it for all it's worth. Welcome to BTSmania, courtesy of Stephen Colbert.

A few weeks removed from a flashy turn on Saturday Night Live, the K-pop juggernaut found itself back on late-night TV, this time at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which records in New York's Ed Sullivan Theater. So the show couldn't resist drawing on the symmetry — "exactly 50 years later, plus 5 years, 3 months and 6 days" — with another massive (and mop-topped) international crossover who took the same stage.

Naturally, BTS performed a black-and-white take on its smash "Boy With Luv," punctuated by audience screams — and a couple more opportunities for Colbert to trot out his Sullivan impression.

BTS's new EP is titled Map of the Soul: Persona.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)