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Here’s How V of BTS’s ‘White Christmas’ Collaboration With Late ‘Idol’ Bing Crosby Came Together

V of BTS and Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" duet has arrived. Here's the story of how Primary Wave, ARMY and modern tech made it happen.

Nearly 7,000 miles away, the person who would turn out to be key to both goals was in the midst of an era-defining career explosion as part of South Korean boy band BTS, which brought renewed global attention to K-pop in 2021 with a breathtaking run of sunny dance singles – most prominently the 10-week Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “Butter” — dazzling audiences with sleek visuals and snappy group choreography and enjoying the support of an ever-expanding, relentlessly passionate fanbase dubbed ARMY. You could call it kismet, then, that three years later, V can now consider his hero a duet partner, their voices coming together over generations and lifetimes on a revamped version of “White Christmas” — fashioned out of an extremely rare recording found in Crosby’s extensive personal archives, voice-isolating technology and redone instrumentals — that dropped Friday (Dec. 6). There are many, scattered moments in the story of how the new “White Christmas” came together that could be considered the starting point, from V’s numerous posts about loving Bing over the years to Primary Wave’s discovery of the recording, a necessarily intimate 1950s radio performance that had only been released on limited physical products in the past — and could be perfect for recreating the magic of Crosby and David Bowie’s 1977 era-bridging “Little Drummer Boy” duet, with the help of a new modern star.

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