Intro for July 9, 2026
– 2 min read
Dear Gossips,
It won’t just be Madonna, Shakira, BTS, and Justin Bieber on stage for the first-ever FIFA World Cup halftime show. They will also be joined by Burna Boy, Gustavo Dudamel, the PS 22 Chorus featuring Coldplay …and the Muppets. Also the performance is supposed to be a mere 11 minutes. Which is why the immediate reaction after the announcement yesterday was… howww? But also it might explain why BTS doesn’t need that much rehearsal time since they’re on tour and are performing in Paris the night before the final. This might not be that heavy of a lift.
Probably safe to assume that Shakira and Burna Boy will be together at some point since “Dai Dai” is the official song of the tournament. BTS and Coldplay have a song that topped the Billboard Hot 100 a few years ago called “My Universe” so it’s a good bet that we’ll be hearing it on Sunday 19 July. But the BTS collab that ARMY has been waiting on is actually BTS and JB.
There is a lot of lore here. Jung Kook is a huge Justin Bieber stan. He’s covered several JB tracks on Soundcloud, he recently livestreamed himself singing “Beauty and a Beat”, and there are multiple mega viral videos of him grooving to JB’s music, including this moment, filmed by j-hope.
In 2019, they broke the internet together when Justin wished JK happy birthday on Twitter. The tweet has since been deleted but at the time it was heavily, heavily, heavily shared.
Then in 2020, at the beginning of COVID, Justin shared an IG video of himself listening to BTS’s “Spring Day” and doing the BTS fan chant.
And then a few months later, when BTS dropped “Dynamite”, JB actually narrated a video explaining why “Dynamite” popped off. Obviously the script was written for him, but the fact that he agreed to voice it was a very big deal.
So there’s definitely mutual admiration here, and over a decade of history leading up, perhaps, to one stage, when eight artists might meet, and two fandoms will collide. If JB ends up in one frame with RM, Jin, Suga, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook …. look out, it will for sure be the most memed and most trafficked frame of the halftime show.
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
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