K-Pop Superstars BTS Lit Up Citi Field’s Stage. Their Fans Did the Rest.

By King Nguyen

The bulbs cost $57. In the hours before the versatile K-pop maximalists in BTS took the stage at Citi Field on Saturday night, fans were lining up by the thousands at stands throughout the Queens stadium, laying out not-insignificant amounts of cash for branded light sticks the shape of microphones and the size of Big Gulps.

Once in their seats, or out on the field, they held the lights — called Army bombs — aloft for the duration of BTS’s two-and-a-half-hour show, waving them in time with the music as various patterns were triggered via Bluetooth, turning the crowd into an ever-shifting sea of color.

Shows of severe devotion are the norm in K-pop, but even in that universe, the fervor generated by the seven members of all-boy BTS — RM, J-Hope, V, Jimin, Jungkook, Suga and Jin — is unusually intense. And Saturday night’s vibrant, sometimes seismic concert, with a sold-out crowd of about 40,000, was a sort of dialogue between artist and fans, a collaborative exercise. It was the final show of the group’s Love Yourself tour, and the group’s first stadium performance, in this country.

Some BTS fans — they are called Army — had been camping out for almost a week to be the first to receive general admission wristbands so they could stand as close to the center-field stage as possible.