Dear Gossips, 

BTS has been pretty quiet the last few weeks. Not entirely off the grid, and still releasing treats for their fans, but in terms of major announcements that get circulated beyond ARMY awareness, it’s been pretty low-key. This week though, ahead of Lunar New Year, there is big news: 

 

My priority this week, LOL, has been to find out whether or not MTV Canada will be airing BTS Unplugged at the same time as everywhere else. The band’s Unplugged session is happening from Seoul, South Korea and will feature some of their most career-defining songs and tracks from their current hit album, BE. What I love about this is that Unplugged is…well… unplugged. Everyone knows that the Unplugged brand is about live performance, which directly contradicts many of the assumptions people make about BTS and by extension K-pop: that it’s so heavily manufactured and that their artists don’t deliver live. In BTS’s case that couldn’t be further from the truth and while it’s obviously sh-tty for them that they weren’t able to record the session with an intimate live audience the way the Unplugged brand first came to prominence, when you consider how RM, Jin, Suga, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook have been able to innovate during the pandemic, they may even reimagine and elevate Unplugged in a way that moves the feature forward. 

 

Today is Lunar New Year’s Eve in the west. In the East Asian time zone, by the time you read this, it’ll be Lunar New Year proper! And the band sent out a photo of all seven members in hanboks with their well-wishes: 

For those of us in the west though, we still have time for last-minute cleaning and remember, wash your hair tonight but DO NOT WASH it tomorrow. You’ll be rinsing away your luck. 

Yours in gossip,

Lainey