Hey I'm Brian Hyatt, you're listening to Rolling Stone Music Now.

I'm in the studio with Brittany Spannos, Bob Sheffield and special guest Maria Sherman,

who's a senior editor at Jezebel and has a new book coming

out in July called Larger Than Life, a history of boy bands from NKOTB to BTS.

Now Maria's presence may give you a clue given the book of what today's

subject is. I thought it was time to talk about the phenomenon that is BTS, the

South Korean boy band that has almost literally conquered the world

and use that as a segue into the larger and kind of fascinating history of Boybands. But let's start with BTS who have a new album out.

And Rob wrote a really fascinating review of that BTS fans actually liked which is very rare for anything ever written

about BTS and I think that that's in this case something to be proud of their

albums called Map of the Soul 7 Rob gave it a four-star review.

But before we get to the album specifically, what I wanted to ask, maybe Maria and Rob, and Bernie

if she wants to jump in, why and how did this happen? How did a boy band who a lot of their

music is in Korean do something that no one has really done in America and elsewhere.

Sai broke through and he was kind of an anti boy band guy from South Korea.

When I interviewed him, he defined himself entirely against the kind of pop factory stuff in South Korea.

But here we have BTS conquering America.

How did this happen?

I wish I had a really concise answer and if I did I would probably have a net worth of about 700 million like

HitMan Bang who sort of created Big Hit Entertainment, BTS's company, but I think there's sort of a variety of factors whenever I think

of BTS I think this is like the sort of one of the final evolutions of a boy

band this was always supposed to sort of happen they play to certain successful boy band tropes and they also

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