Dear Gossips,
Is everyone done with Elite season 3? Because I am and I need to talk about it but Kathleen has to share a television now that everyone’s staying home so she hasn’t caught up. Let’s give it a couple more days because I know some of you haven’t gotten into it yet and you’ll need to start from season 1. This is like Spanish Gossip Girl, only they lean all the way into the crazy. And it’s only 8 episodes a season so you won’t feel overwhelmed.
Anyway, I know I said last week that my social distancing plan was to finish off Elite (done) and Crash Landing On You but I got sidetracked by the BTS archive. As I mentioned before, there are almost 100 episodes of their reality show, Run BTS!, and sometimes you start one and it turns into a three-parter and you can’t stop because they’re so fun, so funny, and so f-cking cute. And on top of their old sh-t, they’re relentless about releasing new content.
Last Friday, one of their members, V, dropped a new solo track called “Sweet Night” as part of the soundtrack for the series Itaewon Class starring his good friend Park Seo-joon. “Sweet Night” topped iTunes charts in 77 countries this weekend, including the US and the UK. And this on top of the fact that BTS has already been dominating world music charts for three weeks now since the release of their album, Map of the Soul: 7.
So if you’re social distancing and you’re looking for culture to consume, maybe you want to get caught up on the biggest band in the world? A few people have written to me wondering if I might put together a BTS playlist or a 101 guide to their viewing library while we all do our part to “flatten the curve” and I’m definitely thinking about it but first, if you haven’t already, listen to V’s “Sweet Night”. He wrote, produced, and performs it himself and I’m leading with this because, again, for the uninitiated, the assumption where BTS is concerned is that they just came out of a factory and aren’t responsible for their own work.
This song is its name – it’s SO sweet and it’s sad and it’s perfect for his voice, which is sweet and sad at the same time. Here’s the video with scenes from the TV series, now available on Netflix, if you want to start exploring the East Asian drama library.
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
