It’s gonna be a long week here in the Late-Night TV Music bunker. And if you have a tweenage daughter, you already know why: The non-threatening K-Pop man-boys of BTS have taken over The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where they’ll be performing all week. As in Every. Single. Goddamn. Night. Good thing I stocked up on booze recently.
But even if the BTS brigade are the biggest pop band in the world right now — both in size and global popularity — I prefer to start smaller and noisier: With punk rocker Jeff Rosenstock’s high-voltage performance of Scram on Late Night With Seth Meyers. After that, pretty much everything sounds like a ballad — though in this case, pretty much everything was. Rex Orange County took to his Steinway to croon Pony on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which also posted a clip of Jake Isaac singing New York from a studio in London. Meanwhile, Summer Walker, the evening’s lone female artist, offered up a lofty version of her number Let It Go for The Late Late Show With James Corden. And finally, since I can’t avoid it any longer, BTS performed Idol, the first instalment of their week-long Tonight Show residency — along with a Roots-augmented version of Dynamite. And so it begins. I may need to invent a BTS drinking game to get through this one.
https://youtu.be/n42ael0cY8A
https://youtu.be/QKuspare9Ig
