BTS star J-Hope to make music history at Chicago's Lollapalooza festival
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J-Hope is slated to close the four-day Lollapalooza festival with a main-stage performance on July 31.
PHOTO: IBIGHIT.COM
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LOS ANGELES (REUTERS) - K-pop star J-Hope of boy band sensation BTS will perform this month as the finale act at Chicago's annual Lollapalooza show, becoming the first South Korean artiste to headline a major American music festival, organisers said on Tuesday (July 19).
J-Hope, whose real name is Jung Ho-seok, is slated to close the four-day Lollapalooza festival with a main-stage performance on July 31, according to Live Nation Entertainment.
The billing of J-Hope, 28, comes barely a month after the seven members of BTS (short for the Korean phrase Bangtan Sonyeondan, or Bulletproof Boys) said they were taking a break from musical ventures as a group to pursue solo projects.
Live Nation also announced that the five-member South Korean boy band Tomorrow X Together, also known as TXT, are billed to perform at Lollapalooza on July 30, marking their American festival debut.
Welcoming both acts to the "Lollapalooza family", festival founder Perry Farrell said in a statement: "Their global audience speak different languages but possess an intense passion for their music. ...These are the superstars of the global phenomenon of K-pop."
J-Hope, a rapper, songwriter and dancer, made his debut as a member of BTS in 2013 and released his first solo mixtape, Hope World (2018), five years later.
The mixtape peaked at No. 38 on the Billboard 200, making him the highest-ranking solo South Korean artiste on the United States album chart at the time, according to Wikipedia.
Still, J-Hope's solo following pales in comparison to the blockbuster global success of BTS, the best-selling act in South Korean history, with over 30 million albums sold, and one of the few recording groups since English rock band The Beatles in the 1960s to have charted four US No. 1 albums in less than two years.
Lollapalooza, which began as a touring show in 1991, has since made Chicago's Grant Park its annual venue and ranks as one of the leading events on the US musical festival circuit.
