Boyband BTS and ex-stripper make Billboard history

Cardi B (above) knocked Taylor Swift off the top of the charts with her song, Bodak Yellow (Money Moves).
Cardi B (above) knocked Taylor Swift off the top of the charts with her song, Bodak Yellow (Money Moves). PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA
BTS with their Top Social Media Artist award at the Billboard Music Awards in May.
BTS with their Top Social Media Artist award at the Billboard Music Awards in May. PHOTO: REUTERS

NEW YORK • South Korean boyband BTS' EP Love Yourself: Seung Her opens at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 album chart this week, the highest chart position yet for a K-pop group.

The album had 18,000 sales and 14.5 million streams.

BTS' song, DNA, debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart at No. 85, said Yonhap News Agency. The seven-piece band became the second K-pop act to have a Korean-language song on the chart, following rapper Psy, whose Gangnam Style peaked at No. 2 in 2012.

Also known as Bulletproof Boy Scouts and Beyond The Scene, BTS won Billboard's award for Top Social Media Artist in May, their first major win in the United States.

But perhaps the biggest news in the Hot 100 is from former stripper Cardi B, who knocked singer Taylor Swift from No. 1 with Bodak Yellow (Money Moves).

Cardi B, who grew up in the Bronx, became an Instagram celebrity and star on the reality show Love & Hip Hop: New York with bawdy talk and lots of wigs.

Bodak Yellow (in which she raps, "I don't dance now, I make money moves") had been fast shooting up the chart this summer, and on the latest edition it went to No. 1, bumping Swift's Look What You Made Me Do to third place after three weeks at the top. Post Malone's Rockstar is No. 2.

Bodak Yellow marks the first chart-topper by a solo female rapper in nearly two decades, since Lauryn Hill's Doo Wop (That Thing) in 1998. Cardi B's label, Atlantic Records, celebrated the milestone on Monday in Manhattan with a champagne toast and a cake modelled after a box of Christian Louboutin high heels (referred to in the song as "red bottoms" or "bloody shoes").

In brief remarks to the crowd, Cardi B noted the grassroots, viral nature of the song's rise, thanking her friends and family for promoting it on social media. "I never asked them, they just did it voluntarily, every day harassing their followers like, 'Make sure you download and stream Bodak Yellow' - and look what you made me do," she said, breaking into a good-natured rendition of Swift's hit.

Also this week, Foo Fighters clinched the No. 1 album spot for a second time with Concrete And Gold, the band's ninth studio release, which opened at No. 1 with 120,000 sales and 9.3 million streams, according to Nielsen.

Rapper Lil Uzi Vert rose two spots to No. 2 with Luv Is Rage 2 and country singer Thomas Rhett's Life Changes, last week's top seller, fell to No. 3.

NYTIMES, REUTERS

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on September 27, 2017, with the headline Boyband BTS and ex-stripper make Billboard history. Subscribe