K-pop act tops Billboard album chart; singer Post Malone drops to No. 2
K-pop has finally gone to No. 1.
“Love Yourself: Tear,” the new album by Korean boy band BTS, has opened at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. This makes it the first entrant of the exuberant Korean K-pop genre to reach the top of the album chart, six years after Psy’s song and video “Gangnam Style” brought the style to the U.S. mainstream.
“Love Yourself: Tear” had the equivalent of 135,000 sales in the United States in its first week out, of which 100,000 were copies sold as a full album, according to Nielsen; streams and downloads of individual tracks made up the rest. The sevenmember group, which has been steadily building its U.S. fan base online, performed its hit “Fake Love” at the Billboard Music Awards last week, where BTS also won top social artist.
Not only is “Love Yourself: Tear” the first K-pop album to reach No. 1, but it is the first foreign-language album — it is sung mainly in Korean, with some English — to go to the top since 2006, when the classical crossover group Il Divo released “Ancora,” according to Billboard.
Also on this week’s chart, Post Malone’s “Beerbongs & Bentleys,” the top album for the past three weeks, falls to No. 2, and rapper Lil Baby opens at No. 3 with “Harder Than Ever.”
Fine-tuning Broadway’s dings
What kind of noise does a wand make? How about an angel? In 2014, Tony Awards administrators eliminated sound design as a contest category, arguing that too few voters understood the craft well enough to judge it. But an outcry ensued, and this year, the category is back, with a twist — only about half of the 841 voters, those deemed expert enough, will be allowed to vote.
Award nominee Adam Cork, who handled sound tasks for “Travesties,” said the challenge was to capture the spirit of Tom Stoppard’s zany and chaotic play, told in a series of repeating and often conflicting flashbacks that feature real-life figures James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Dadaist Tristan Tzara. One key element: A library desk bell signifies the restart of a memory.
Other nominees are “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” “Angels in America,” “1984” and “The Iceman Cometh.”