Starting a conversation with someone you don’t know is often harder than expected. You do not know who they are or how they will receive your words. Reaching another person’s heart always requires care.
At SoFi Stadium, those boundaries fell away with surprising ease.
From early in the day, the area surrounding the stadium was packed with fans awaiting the BTS concert. They came from different generations, ethnic backgrounds, and nationalities. Some came from other states, including Indiana, Utah and Florida, while others traveled from overseas, including Japan and Mexico. Different languages mingled throughout the crowd.
Fans struck up conversations even when meeting for the first time. They exchanged handmade slogans, keychains, bracelets and photo cards. They did not know one another’s names, yet they welcomed each other warmly.
Most fans initially grew cautious when I introduced myself as a reporter. Mentioning a shared love of BTS immediately softened the atmosphere. That single word—“love”—closed the distance between people who had just met.
BTS Music Breaks Barriers in an Age of Division
We live in a guarded age. As the Trump administration intensifies immigration enforcement, voices questioning who deserves to remain in this country have grown louder. Barriers at national borders have extended into invisible lines between neighbors. Social media algorithms bring together people with similar views, further reinforcing the boundaries of their separate worlds.
Even when people occupy the same space, they look into different screens. The world is more intricately connected than ever, yet the distance between people rarely seems to shrink.
Laws, order and standards are necessary. The practical problems facing a community cannot be resolved through emotion alone. Yet, humanity must remain at the foundation of every judgment. We must first seek to understand one another as human beings.
A true community begins when people can acknowledge their differences and still choose to stand together. It cannot be built by first questioning whether an individual is qualified to belong. The moment that order is reversed, a person’s rich, lived experience is reduced to a few words on a document.
The scene at SoFi Stadium offered a glimpse of another possibility. The people gathered there spoke different languages and came from diverse racial and generational backgrounds, yet they sang the same songs. The sound that began onstage transformed into an immense vibration, flowing through the very bodies of the audience. Seventy thousand voices resonated as one.
Music does not erase the diversity of its listeners; it simply creates a single point of connection among them. That small common ground gives strangers a reason to speak, share what they have, and listen to one another’s stories. Perhaps what society needs today is not another grand discourse, but this simple sense of shared experience.
When Emotion Needs No Translation
Music does not speak in complete sentences. It does not offer a logical explanation or try to force anyone into agreement. It simply allows sorrow and joy, longing and comfort to resonate.
Even without understanding every lyric, listeners can deeply feel the emotions within. Another person’s world—one that carefully chosen words may never reach—can brush against our own through sound and vibration. No agreement is required to laugh and cry together.
I keep thinking about the face of one fan I met while reporting. She was a 14-year-old girl who had flown from Mexico to see BTS. She even remembered exactly when she became a fan: January 2023. It was her first BTS concert, and her expression—nervous yet full of excitement—felt strangely familiar.
It reminded me of myself at 14, a part of my life I had almost forgotten.
I attended my first BTS concert in December 2017. Determined to see them, I boarded a train to Seoul alone. The feeling of that day remains vivid. I can still picture the air inside the venue and the confetti fluttering overhead.
In the Mexican girl’s face, I felt as if I were seeing myself nine years ago. We had grown up in different places. We spoke different languages and were different ages. None of that mattered. Without exchanging many words, I felt I understood what was in her heart.
Throughout the concert, the lives and memories of 70,000 people overlapped for a few hours. In that moment, no words were necessary.
That is how BTS Music Breaks Barriers: not by erasing what makes people different, but by giving them something they can feel together.
