Episode 36: A (Brief) History of Boy Bands
Episode 36 explores the idea of a “boy band” and takes a look back at where the form originated and what it looks like today. I also try to recapture some music history that has been scrubbed from the narrative that has become common consensus. The Sex Pistols best selling song was the post-Rotten “Friggin’ in the Riggin”; the most popular band in the world in the mid-1970s was the Bay City Rollers; and the three biggest sellers of the British Invasion in America were the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, and Herman’s Hermits. All of them were boy bands…
Tracks played are:
“Pop” by *NSYNC
“Do Your Thing” by *NSYNC
“Summer Girls” by LFO
“I Feel Fine” by The Beatles, recorded live at Shea Stadium August 15, 1965
“Apple Scruffs” by George Harrison
“Catch Us If You Can” by the Dave Clark Five
“A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles
“Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets
“Pretty Ballerina” by the Lefte Banke
“Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles
“Dandy” by Herman’s Hermits
“(Theme from) The Monkees” by the Monkees
“Help, I’m a Rock” by Frank Zappa
“49 Reasons” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash
“Listen to the Band” by the Monkees
“For Pete’s Sake” by the Monkees
“Ditty Diego (War Chant)” by the Monkees
“Porpoise Song” by the Monkees
“I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5
“One Bad Apple” by the Osmonds
“Fools Paradise” by the Sylvers
“Break Your Promise” by the Delfonics
“Stop the Love” by the Jackson Five
“Down by the Lazy River” by the Osmonds
“Bye Bye Baby” by the Bay City Rollers
“Puppet on a String” by Sandie Shaw
“Remember (Sha La La La)” by the Bay City Rollers
“Bay City Rollers We Love You”by the Tartan Horde (Nick Lowe)
“Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers
“Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones
“Steppin’ Stone” by the Monkees
“Steppin’ Stone” by the Sex Pistols, performed live at the Chelmsford Prison on September 17, 1976
“Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols
“Friggin’ in the Riggin’” by the Sex Pistols
“Public Image” by Public Image Ltd
“Girls on Film” by Duran Duran
“Is There Something I Should Know?” by Duran Duran
“Voulez Vous” by Menudo
“Sera Por Que Te Amo” by Los Chicos (please click through to see the Greatest Boy Band Video Of All Time)
“Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky, Mike, Ralph and Johnny (Word to the Mutha)!” by Bell Biv Devoe
“Candy Girl” by New Edition
“Cool It Now” by New Edition
“Step by Step” by the New Kids on the Block
“I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tiffany
“Looking for a New Love” by Jodi Watley
“You’ve Got It (the Right Stuff)” by the New Kids On the Block
“The White Stuff” by “Weird Al” Yankovic
“If You Go Away” by the New Kids on the Block, recorded live on February 5, 1992
“Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by the Backstreet Boys
“We’ve Got It Goin’ On” by the Backstreet Boys
“Wannabe” by the Spice Girls
“I Want You Back” by *NSYNC
“Freak on a Leash” by Korn
“I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys
“Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by the Backstreet Boys (released May 17, 2018 and 20+ years later BSB is still killing it! Check out the video!)
“All the Small Things” by Blink 182
“This Ain’t A Scene, it’s an Arms Race” by Fall Out Boy
“Year 3000 (It’s About Time)” by the Jonas Brothers
“Live While We’re Young” by One Direction
“I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys, socially distanced 2020 pandemic version
Welcome to Filmi Girl’s Idol Cast. Hit it!
Our opening song today was NSYNC’s “Pop” taken from their PopOdyessy tour DVD recorded live on tour during the summer of 2001. If you haven’t listened to NSYNC since you were in middle school (or if you’ve never listened to them) take a moment to pause here and go buy their fourth and final album Celebrity, released July 21, 2001, and listen to it. I’ll wait.
The album is a pop masterpiece. I vividly remember when it came out and not because I was a teenybopper pasting pictures of Joey Fatone in my locker. In 2001, I was in the middle of my audio engineering degree and my audio nerd friends and I were geeking out over how well crafted it was. Celebrity was produced by well known “electronica” artist BT and songs like the album cut “Do Your Thing” sparkled like jewels, each individual sound slotted perfectly into place. I mean, BT was the guy known for time correcting rain… perfection was the baseline! And that precision sound combined with the very human voices and passions of the five NSYNC members led to an album of the highest quality pop. Truly a masterpiece of the era.
Notice I didn’t say the album was a boy band masterpiece, although NSYNC are considered a boy band, and that’s because in today’s episode I wanted to dive a little deeper into Boy Band studies and expand a bit on the post I wrote a few weeks ago that attempted to untangle the differences between western-style “boy bands” and Asian idol groups and why there is such confusion when it comes to classifying and contextualizing these groups in general and BTS in particular. In this episode I’ll attempt to shine a light on the boy band construct and help separate the hysteria from the music, good, bad, and crushingly mediocre.
To kick off the episode, let’s start with basic definitions. What is a boy band? Here’s my definition: if the band members marketed in such a way that their first names appear with an exclamation point on the cover of magazines like Tiger Beat and teen girls are encouraged to paste pictures of Paul (exclamation point) or Les (exclamation point) in their school notebooks and hang pin-ups of Johnny (exclamation point) or Simon (exclamation point) in their lockers, then congratulations, you’re a boy band. To be a boy band is to participate in the teen girl economy, hit at the right time with a generation of young teen girls and reap the benefits for at least 2-3 years, no matter the actual quality of the music. From Beatlemania to Bandom, it’s simply a fact that teen girls love 1) cute guys, 2) cute guys who are friends, and 3) cute guys who are friends who also play music together. And honestly, who can blame them.
I emphasize the exclamation point names because despite the attempts of copious boy band svengalis, boy band members are not plug and play. The charms of each individual member of a boy band are extremely important. If your group doesn’t have a Joey (exclamation point) or a Davy (exclamation point) then it will be destined for the scrap heap. Try and try and try as they might, there’s a reason that the rotating member concept pioneered by Menudo svengali Edgardo Diaz never truly caught on. Girls don’t want any old pretty face hanging on their bedroom wall, they want Davy Jones’s specific pretty face and woe be upon any boy band manager who doesn’t get this.
And speaking of svengalis, let me just take a moment right here to state up front that most of the boy band managers I’ll be mentioning in this episode have had allegations of sexual abuse, financial mismanagement, and many other things leveled against them. These are serious crimes and I want to make sure that listeners know that while this episode will not be dwelling on these charges, I am very aware of them. If you’d like more information, the articles, the tell-all memoirs, and in some cases even the court documents are available and make for some truly harrowing reading.
Another thing to keep in mind through all of this is that many of the “boys” in these bands came from very modest upbringings and worked their asses off to earn their places on stage. Country boy Kevin Richardson had been working two jobs to support himself, including, infamously, playing Aladdin at Disney World, when he joined the Backstreet Boys. Mike Nesmith had shown up at the LA casting call for the Monkees fresh from Texas with little but his guitar and his attitude to his name. The boys in the New Kids and the Bay City Rollers, were from blue collar, working class families. Many of these boys were thrust into high pressure situations (financial and otherwise) completely outside of their (or their parents’) experience.
Additionally, many of them were also very young when they started out. Joey McIntyre was 12 when he started with NKOTB. Michael Jackson younger than that when his father was taking him and his brothers to play four shows a night in Chicago. While you were worried about whether or not you’d pass 8th grade English, these boys had major financial stakes and sometimes even their families wellbeing resting on whether or not they could master a piece of choreography or learn to mime playing the drums convincingly. These are pieces of the puzzle that are often lost when discussing these bands, so I wanted to flag them up front.
Boy bands and their fans have been unfairly maligned since the dawn of the genre. Critics turned off by the hysterical fans or unable to understand the appeal of like a really cute guy singing a song to you dismiss anything with even the slightest whiff of “boy band” about it as garbage music.
In order to counteract this critical disdain, in recent years there has been an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the much maligned “boy band”. The prevailing counterargument is one part poptimism, one part 3rd Wave feminism, and one part PR flack flattering fans that actually teen girls have excellent taste in music and didn’t you know that rocktivist critical darlings the Beatles were a boy band? Please like and subscribe!
Personally, I think both takes are wrong.
One of my favorite anecdotes I came across in researching for this episode was when the Monkees got Jimi Hendrix to open for them on a nationwide stadium tour. Whatever you think of “dad rock”, Jimi Hendrix was an incredible guitarist and performer--which is why the Monkees invited him to tour with them. But when Hendrix played “Foxy Lady” in front of the hordes of Monkees fans, they just shouted back “Foxy Davy”.
Obviously, just because teen girls like a band doesn’t mean the band (or music) is bad but the teen girls who flock en masse to boy bands are not doing so because of the music. That’s an important distinction to make. To fully appreciate a boy band means being able to put yourself in the hormone-soaked shoes of a 15-year old girl who is feeling a lot of really heavy Capital F feelings which require a safe outlet. It means giving yourself over fully to Dionysus and drinking deep of the erotic cocktail provided by these handsome young men, their tight trousers, and their hip thrusting choreography.
In the classic 1987 book Re-Making Love written by Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, the authors revisit Beatlemania and try to give voice to the young fans and the romantic appeal of a male idol. For young women in that restrictive pre-Free Love era, a real world romance carried with it a heavy element of danger, of navigating strict social conventions around purity, of being trapped into marriage and motherhood before you were ready. When you were in love with a male idol, all of that fell away. As the authors explain it: quote “The star could be loved noninstrumentally, for his own sake, and with complete abandon. To publicly advertise this hopeless love was to protest the calculated, pragmatic sexual repression of teenage life.” And as a bonus: quote “There was the more immediate satisfaction of knowing, subconsciously, that the Beatles were who they were because girls like oneself had made them that. And the louder you screamed, the less likely anyone would forget the power of the fans. When the screams drowned out the music, as they invariably did, then it was the fans, and not the band, who were the show.”
Love and power, the fundamental ingredients of the erotic cocktail served up by boy bands.
Obviously as times have changed, the forces that teen girls are rebelling against have changed but I believe that Ehrenreich et. al. hit the nail on the head with the underlying diagnosis. These are boys we love with complete abandon and our screams are both a celebration of that love and the weapon we wield to control them.
Here is the thesis I want to put across: while many all male singing-dancing music groups can be considered boy bands, it’s not the act of singing and dancing that makes them boy bands. Singing and dancing makes them pop groups. It’s the marketing and the way fans interact with them that makes them boy bands. That love with complete abandonment.
When you’re inside the bubble, it’s impossible to objectively judge the quality of the art being produced because the quality doesn’t matter to the fans in the moment. It doesn’t matter if it sucks, it doesn’t matter if they’re making groundbreaking pop masterpieces--what matters is that right here, right now, young fans feel that the music is meaningful to them personally. And that is something which cannot be captured in an objective music review.
To quote K-punk himself, Mark Fisher, in a post from 2004 discussing the then-current drought in pop music, “A year or so down the track, when the gleam of success and publicity and shiny contemporaneity has left the records, when Time performs a reverse alchemy, transforming commercial dominance into unsaleable carboot sale fodder, that is when the error of our ways is revealed.”
To go back to my example at the top of the episode, NSYNC were a boy band, yes, but they were also an excellent pop group who were constantly pushing the boundaries of what was possible in bubblegum and taking their fans with them. A song like “Bye Bye Bye” remains a classic pop song not just because of middle aged nostalgia but because it was a well crafted song with catchy visuals and NSYNC nailed the emotionally charged performance. NSYNC were both a boy band and an excellent pop group.
The Beatles film, A Hard Days Night has stood the test of time as a comedic masterpiece and also a huge part of its appeal is how cute and funny the Beatles were in 1964. The Beatles were a foundational rock group and many of their screaming female fans could not have cared less what they were playing. It’s when the dust clears and the teen girls move onto college that we find out who will be discarded in carboot sales… or (to throw it back to episode 24) who ends up in the Sugar Ray Section of the used CD store.
So, let’s start with the Beatles and the 1964 British Invasion. Despite the retroactive rewriting of the British Invasion to highlight critical darlings like the Kinks and the Rolling Stones, the three biggest sellers of the British Invasion in America were the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, and the Dave Clark Five. All three were boy bands.
The Beatles are now widely regarded as the “first boy band” and for good reason. The previous generations of teens had dreamboat solo stars like Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra but there were four Beatles, which meant you could pick your favorite and debate the pros and cons of marrying each one with the girls in your first period class. Trust me. Having been a teen Beatles fanatic (albeit 35 years or so after the initial wave of Beatlemania) I have an intimate understanding of the group’s appeal. John Lennon, the snarky one with hidden emotional depths, Paul McCartney, the cute romantic one, George Harrison, quiet and earnest the dark horse choice for girls who were a little offbeat, my fave, natch, and then loveable Ringo, for girls who couldn’t resist an underdog.
Here’s the bare bones recap of the group’s history for the uninitiated. The Beatles were a cheeky skiffle band-turned filthy hot R&B bar band from Liverpool who moved to London and were cleaned up and re-packaged into a cheerful guitar group for wholesome mainstream teen consumption. They became popular in their native England in the early 60s and then in 1964 rode a wave of shrieking teen hysteria to America and beyond. By 1966, exhausted and increasingly aware of their own exploitation by the industry, they exited the teen dream and retreated to the studio, started their own record label, bickered over their creative direction, made some true masterpieces of 60s rock, passive-aggressively bickered some more, and then broke up.
It was a combination of market forces, timing, and the Beatles own chemistry that sparked their boy band boom. Rock’n’roll hysteria had been bubbling under for a few years, with Bill Haley and his comets sparking teen riots in the late 1950s with the rebellious sounds of “Rock Around the Clock.” Add in the skyrocketing market of cheap 45 rpm singles perfect for teenagers with limited pocket money, a boom in teen-oriented rock radio, and a nation looking for a cheerful distraction in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy and the groundwork was perfectly laid for the cheeky, super cute, super exotic moptops from the UK to conquer America--and from there, the globe. Their irreverent and humorous responses to dumb questions from the media were breathlessly transcribed. Their long hair and suits were copied and parodied from coast to coast. TV shows of the era feature plenty of outraged or simply baffled adults in the face of shaggy haired groups called things like “The Bugs” singing unintelligible lyrics while girls screamed wildly.
What’s remarkable about the Beatles is that their real impact on popular music happened despite the fact that they were a boy band, not because of it. The Beatles (with producer George Martin) helped usher in one of my favorite eras in pop music in the mid to late 1960s, the blending of high octane rock with classical music, the pioneering use of the new multi-track recorders which allowed for a crisper and cleaner soundscape that simply hadn’t been possible when Phil Spector was working on his wall of pop soundscapes a few years earlier. Bands used to record essentially “live” in the studio but the Beatles pioneered and popularized recording techniques that really broadened the idea of what was possible.
I want to emphasize this point because I think it gets lost when well-meaning critics attempt to claw back the Beatles as just another boy band. If you look at the teen magazines of the mid-60s when the Beatles were at peak boy band, it’s immediately clear that the Beatles were only one of a horde of popular boy bands. The two other top sellers Herman’s Hermits and the “DC5” in particular gave the Beatles real competition for teen girls’ hearts. The Beatles “love tragedies” and “1001 facts you didn’t know” migrated from the front covers of 16 and Dig and into the sober classic rock history section of the book store because the Beatles deliberately broke from their teenybopper image. They took a gamble with the groundbreaking album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and it worked. Their artistic impact would live on far beyond “boy band,” even if it was the “boy band” adoration that originally made them superstars. Meanwhile if you want to know Herman’s Hermits love secrets, then you have to read the December 1965 issue of 16 where they remain buried alongside “50 Flipped Out Pix”.
That’s not to say that Herman’s Hermits and the DC5 didn’t have some killer bops because they did but fairly or not, both groups remain consigned to the boy band garbage heap, written out of the British Invasion, and erased from popular memory.
As the Beatles were attempting to shed the vestiges of their teenybopper image, over in Hollywood, California, the first attempt to manufacture a “boy band” was getting underway. The idea was to create an American, TV-based version of the Beatles-style screwball comedy that had won girls hearts in A Hard Day’s Night. It would be targeted at kids who were too young for the scent of marijuana wafting off the Beatles new songs. This new band would advertise the songs through their show and advertise the show through their song. Plus all there was all of that delicious boy band merchandising just waiting. This was going to be a groundbreaking exercise in cross-promotional marketing.
The casting call went out: “"Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll musicians-singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys, age 17 - 21. Want spirited Ben Frank's-types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.”
A reference long forgotten, Ben Frank’s was a diner on Sunset Strip known for being a hip hangout spot for the kind of young people who needed a cup of coffee and a groovy place to like have a rap session at 2 am. Legend has it that Buffalo Springfield formed in the parking lot of Ben Frank’s. Frank Zappa used to hang out there.
Of the four members of this new manufactured American Beatles, two were show business ringers--Davy and Mickey, who would end up as the main vocalists--and two were “Ben Frank’s” types--Pete and Mike, both actual musicians.
Davy Jones, the pint sized English dreamboat, had been nominated for a Tony Award for his performance as the Artful Dodger in Oliver, another now forgotten product of the British Invasion, and actually made his debut on the Ed Sullivan show on the very same episode as the Beatles did in February 1964. Davy was charming, with a big toothy smile and a soft brown proto-Cassidy shag haircut. The twinkle in his eye could and did slay all women within a 50 foot radius.
Mickey Dolenz was another former child star, but of television rather than stage. He had warm eyes, a goofy sense of humor, and an expressive, soulful singing voice that added just the right amount of teen angst to proto-punk songs like “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone”. Mickey radiated “approachable friend of your older brother” energy and it’s no surprise that he and Davy were the most popular members while the show was on air.
Peter Tork, an intellectually minded banjo player well known around the Greenwich Village folk scene was recommended to the Monkees producers after his friend Stephen Stills--yes, that Stephen Stills--was turned down for not being cute enough for television. “We’re looking for somebody like you but cuter,” they told him. He gave them Peter’s name. And Peter Tork was cute. He had shaggy strawberry blond hair and a winning boy-next-door smile. His role on the Monkees was as the dopey and perpetually stoned but good hearted goofball. The Shaggy to Mike Nesmith’s Fred, if you will. Peter was the Monkee whose stage persona was probably the furthest away from his actual personality.
And then there was Mike Nesmith, tall, dark, handsome, with a honey sweet Texan drawl and perpetually seen wearing a woolen hat. Mike was both the brains of the fictional Monkees on the television show and the loudest agitator for creative freedom behind-the-scenes. While most of the group’s material was written by a stable of extremely talented songwriters--Neil Diamond, Boyce & Hart, Goffin & King--from the beginning Mike was always pitching songs and, to his credit, was responsible for quite a few b-sides and album tracks as well as writing for other quote unquote serious groups like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Mike was the thinking-girl’s favorite Monkee.
Unlike the Beatles who spent A Hard Day’s Night trying to escape from their hordes of fans, the fictional Monkees were underdogs, beach bums always hunting for their big break. The Monkees played Sweet 16 parties and auditioned for big wig producers on television, in real life, they were selling out arenas.
Given the nickname of the “Prefab Four”--a take on the Beatles nickname as the “Fab Four”--the Monkees would never escape their manufactured roots. Despite their great personal charms as entertainers, their top quality discography, and the fact that they could actually play their own instruments, thank you very much, the Monkees would be ridiculed and unfairly made a punchline for decades after the television show went off the air. The reasons for this are the same as those which faced boy bands to follow--critics simply don’t understand the talent it takes to be the Monkees.
The Monkees used the same session musicians, the same songwriters, the same producers as groups who have been retroactively canonized as rock legends like the Byrds, but the Monkees were never able to shake that manufactured boy band gloss. And not for lack of trying. The Prefab Four demanded and received artistic freedom after the initial burst of success but the alchemy that held together the Ben Franks side with the old fashioned show biz razzle dazzle began to fray. The sharp teen pop of their early albums gave way to the meta-meanderings of Head and the Monkees project eventually collapsed in on itself. Much to the relief of all the members, I’m sure.
Rather than attempting to re-claim the Monkees as a serious rock band, they should be remembered for being incredible entertainers and makers of influential pop art. The television show remains extremely watchable and holds up far, far better than recent attempts at the genre, such as Nickelodeon's Big Time Rush. The Monkees are cute and they have great comic timing, a knack for slapstick, and always deliver at least one killer jam per episode. They were completely authentic in their inauthenticity, putting a hell of a lot of heart and soul into a band whose primary function was to sell sugary cereal to kids.
Unlike later and much campier television bands that followed in their immediate wake, the Monkees were not only aware of their status as a “fake band” but actively tried to reclaim it. That their pivot to pop art ended up fizzling out doesn’t mean that it was a worthless experiment. We wouldn’t remember the Monkees today if they actually were the puppets on a string they’ve been unfairly stereotyped as all these years. It’s no mistake that one Mr. David Jones (no relation to Davy) namechecked the Monkees when creating his own “plastic band”-- David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars.
As the 60s turned to the 1970s, the next big thing in boy bands was a mini boom in family bands led by, yes, the Jackson 5. The five Jackson brothers burst into both the pop charts and teen girls' hearts with a string of number one hits produced by the Motown team known simply as the Corporation. Starting with “I Want You Back”, the Jackson 5’s R&B bubblegum pop with the signature funky walking bass line was like nothing white America had heard before and launched a sea of imitators, including the Osmonds, a white family band from Utah, who got their big break with a Jackson 5 cast off in late 1970.
Other popular family groups included the DeFranco Family from Canada and the Finger 5 aka the Tamamoto family from Okinawa and the Sylvers, who were the Jackson 5’s main rivals in Black teen magazines.
The Jackson 5 were brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Michael with littlest brother Randy added a few years later. The J5 began life as an R&B vocal group in the vein of a group like the Delfonics.
Motown boss Berry Gordy’s big innovation in the 1960s was to simplify and straighten out the R&B beat to sell to quote young america unquote aka white america. Motown vocal groups like the Temptations and the Supremes held their own against white vocal groups like the mamas and papas and the Association on the mainstream hit parade. When Berry Gordy took his template into the 1970s, he turned the J5 into the first and only black boy band to have really won the hearts of uh “young American” teen girls.
What set the J5 apart from previous Motown acts is that they were packaged and sold like a boy band, on their image and personalities, rather than as a pop group. Like the Monkees, the J5 were a “band” who used session musicians. I will never forget my bass teacher telling me about the day he found out Jermaine wasn’t actually playing those sick bass riffs--that would be Wilton Felder of the Jazz Crusaders--it was like finding out Santa Claus wasn’t real. The J5 story was mythologized. The members--like the Beatles and Monkees before them--played versions of themselves in the public eye and further blurring the line between reality and fantasy, there was even a Jackson 5 cartoon fictionalizing their home life. (And as an aside, the cartoon by Rankin and Bass, followed boy band tradition by trading in some extremely horny-in-plain-sight double entendres. Michael has a pet snake, which is pink. Uh-huh.)
The J5 songs and performances were top notch but the boys themselves (except for charming youngest brother Randy who joined the group later) were stiff and awkward on camera and it became harder and harder to uphold the chaste, wholesome brotherly love boy band edifice as 1) the oldest boys married and had kids and 2) Michael was being groomed to go solo. By the time the group was venturing into early disco in 1974-75, while they were still an active pop group, their boy band days were pretty much over. Tiger Beat doesn’t feature DILFS.
Still, the legacy of the J5 lives on today. Their lite R&B sound as well as the choreographed dancing popularized by the Jackson brothers became the standard template for pop vocal groups moving into the disco era and beyond. But one thing I found interesting watching old interviews with the Jackson 5 on Soul Train is that not only were the J5 fighting against the same boy band stereotypes as a group like the Monkees but they were also called to account for their popularity with uh young america. This passive-aggressive 1973 question from a Soul Train audience member is very telling:
Was there a bigger insult to one's street cred than being compared to the white bread, never tasted skim milk, rosy cheeked Osmonds? It’s a reminder that while the J5 have been rescued from the bubblegum pop scrapheap by critics, the reality at the time was much more complicated.
Also, the Osmonds kind of rule.
As the sun sets on the J5 photo spreads in the pages of Tigerbeat, a new boy band dawns. From the council flats of Edinburgh, Scotland comes… the Bay City Rollers!
Tartan Mania swept the globe like only the Beatles had before them. The gimmick was simple--combine the erotic appeal of a group of rough and tumble young men in tight trousers with the infectious pop of legendary veteran songwriters Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, the team responsible for the song that became the first UK winner of Eurovision in 1967.
The result was electric.
Like the Beatles, the BCR were an actual band before they became a boy band. The group began life as the Saxons, a popular local bar band out of Edinburgh, Scotland. They snagged themselves a cooler, American sounding name--the Bay City Rollers--and a major label record contract but the group of 20-something rockers languished in middling popularity until singer Gordon “Nobby” Clark left the band and manager Tam Paton replaced him with baby-faced 18 year old lead singer Les McKeown and bought in even younger 17 year old guitarist Stuart Wood to join brothers Alan and Derek Longmuir (bass and drums respectively) and guitarist Eric Faulkner. The result was boy band magic.
The new BCR exploded onto the UK singles charts in 1974 with “Remember (Sha la la la)”, an easy-breazy pop song written by Martin and Coulter that leaned heavy into the then ultra-trendy 50s rock nostalgia boom--a sound that now seems impossibly dated but trust me was all the rage at the time. And the lyrics are pure Eurovision camp in the best way possible, with the immortal opening line “Shimmy shammy shong” fitting very comfortably alongside Sweden’s winning 1984 entry “Diggi Loo Diggi Ley”, the Netherlands’ 1975 winning entry “Ding-a-Dong”, and the UK’s own 1969 winner “Boom Bang-a-Bang.”
Watching performances from mid-1970s BCR is like trying to make sense of a fever dream. The hysteria generated by the five tight trousered, tartan wearing, feathered haired men feels completely at odds with the midtempo bubblegum rock music they’re playing. In true boy band fashion, the songs didn’t matter to the fans--all that mattered was Erik Alan Derek, Les and Woody...
The BCR had enough drama, trauma, and in-fighting in those years when they were the most popular band in the world to fill a dozen episodes of VH1’s Behind the Music. The guys argued about everything from who received the most fan letters to who was the most talented and lead singer Les--the only Roller to actually perform on the recordings--was at the center of the raging jealousy. The bubble finally burst during a 1978 tour of Japan when Les, convinced the band was starting songs in the wrong key to fuck with him, got into a physical altercation with Woody.
The sad coda to the BCR story is that much like other boy bands who would follow in their wake, the “boys” at the center of Tartanmania were left with nothing to show for it except empty pockets. All their money vanished; they would receive no royalties. As the girls hung up their tartan jumpers and mufflers in the back of their closets and took down their BCR posters from their bedroom walls, so too would the BCR vanish from popular memory. But their legacy lives on in an unexpected way--
Legend has it that Dee Dee Ramone was inspired to write the famous “Hey Ho Let’s Go” chant that opens “Blitzkreig Bop” after hearing the Rollers mega-hit “Saturday Night.” And that’s not the only punk connection. When the kids raised on the ear wormy, super simple garage rock via the cereal box sung with youthful sass by guys like session vocalist Joey Levine and, yes, Monkee Mickey Dolenz, grew up and started their own bands, they may have been singing about doing drugs and fucking shit up but their sugary influences were never far from the surface.
Yes, that’s right. The Sex Pistols were assembled by Malcolm McLaren to be the Bay City Rollers, but, like, a counterculture version. Do you think it’s a coincidence they wore all that tartan?
McLaren himself admitted to modeling the Pistols on the Rollers in 1980 as the whole project was falling apart. Leaving aside the Eurovision-adjacent music sung by the Rollers, what McLaren was after was the enthusiasm of BCR’s young teen audiences. He wanted hordes of teens dressed not in their plaid Roller trousers from the local high street but in plaid Pistols trousers from his boutique Sex. Unfortunately for McLaren, in selecting lead singer John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten, he ended up with a talent far more like the razor sharp and combative Monkee Mike Nesmith than the starry-eyed, golden voiced Roller Les McKeown. Like Nesmith before him, Rotten led the fight for the group’s creative freedom and then later over the band’s image, as well as in absolute classic boy band fashion, suing McLaren for not paying them fairly.
The original Sex Pistols--pin ups not available in Tigerbeat but soon to be available in teenybopper music rag Smash Hits--were the aforementioned vocalist Johnny Rotten, handsome bad boy guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook, and bassist Glen Matlock, who would eventually be swapped out for bassist Sid Vicious who could not in fact play the bass but who was sexier and fit the band much better than Matlock who Rotten claimed saw the group as a quote “camp version of the Bay City Rollers” (fair enough, mate) and who unforgivabely had been heard sticking up for the least cool Beatle, Paul McCartney.
After gaining a cult following by word of mouth, the unruly boys snagged a major label contract with EMI in 1976 and then broke through into the public consciousness after the national tabloids spent days gleefully making hay of an incident where the punk rockers swore on television.
Is there anything so appealing to young teens as a band that annoys the fuck out of every authority figure? And it didn’t hurt that Johnny Rotten wrote excellent tunes.
While the Sex Pistols narrative has been retroactively massaged to end with Rotten leaving the band in 1978, the reality is that the Sex Pistols highest selling single by far was the post-Rotten double A-side “Something Else”/“Friggin in the Riggin” which sold almost 400,000 copies in the UK. In particular, the now incredibly dated sounding “Friggin in the Riggin”, a cover of a traditional pub song, was a schoolyard smash with it’s cheekily naughty nautical lyrics. A lesson to the young ones listening that big sales do not indicate quality, nor do they guarantee a lasting legacy.
The Sex Pistols story I’m telling ends with the meta-boyband film: The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, a mockumentary masterminded by McLaren, casting himself as the great punk rock impressario, swindling fans of their hard earned cash in exchange for a piece of plastic containing--as director Julien Temple later put it quote “Two hit singles and a mountain of crud”. The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was an attempt to make explicit and celebrate the cynical Bay City Rollers roots at the heart of the Sex Pistols project. It didn’t work. John Lydon’s song “Public Image” was the way McLaren’s role in the Sex Pistols would be remembered.
“Public image.
Two sides to every story
Somebody had to stop me
I'm not the same as when I began
I will not be treated as property.”
While the film (and McLaren) ultimately failed at claiming ownership of the Pistol’s legacy, the punk Rollers and their safety pinned tartan trousers left a lasting legacy on pop music as New Wave began its rise in the charts on the backs of those tween fans, soon appearing side-by-side with cartoon-in-real-life boy band Kiss in yes, Tiger Beat but the biggest boy band of them all of this early 80s rock era was Duran Duran.
Duran Duran are the last of the great rock boy bands. Although boy bands that were actual rock bands would live on in zombie form for the next few decades, none would ever reach the giddy, glossy image-over-substance heights of Duran Duran. As John Taylor put it in a 1986 issue of Tiger Beat, “Originally Dura Duran was to have been a cross between the Sex Pistols and Chic but we somehow got overproduced and packaged.” Yes… “somehow.” Duran Duran were the ultimate 80s MTV pretty boy boy band. Truly the Monkees television show walked so that the Pistols Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle could run… and Duran Duran’s music videos could take you back to the hotel to fuck.
Their videos were groundbreaking, mini-films, packed full of exotic locations, action, adventure, beautiful women, and, of course, the extremely handsome members of Duran Duran themselves with their feathered hair, winning smiles, and shoulder pads as wide as the ocean. They were built to fuel the day dreams of romantic teen girls who longed to be swept off their feet and out of their boring suburban lives. And it didn’t hurt that the songs were absolute bops. Johnny Rotten attitude layered on top of Bernard Edwards bass lines. “Girls on Film,” “Rio,” “Hungry Like a Wolf,” these are songs that feel as vital and fresh today as they did when they were released 40 years ago.
In early interviews, Duran Duran come across as regular lads, like your older brother’s super cool friends. The dangerous sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll bad boy image of Duran Duran was just an image in the videos until… it was eventually revealed to be not just an image. And the group took an open ended break in 1984, appearing increasingly out of place and too old for the teen magazines that had nobody to replace them with. That is until five white boys from Boston danced their way into our collective teen hearts.
I will take a brief detour here to mention Menudo, the Puerto Rican boy band, now remembered for two things 1) Ricky Martin and 2) Edgardo Diaz’s rotating member concept in which boys were cast aside when they got too old. Menudo are an interesting case study because they are probably the closest antecedent to BTS in American boy band history.
Menudo were formed in Puerto Rico in 1977 by Edgardo Diaz as sort of an all male version of La Pandilla, the Spanish kids group he had been managing. Menudo became successful first in Puerto Rico and then through Spanish-speaking regions. They even inspired creation of a rival group, the far superior Los Chicos. And as an aside to the aside, let me tell you that the video of Los Chicos singing “SERA POR QUE TE AMO” on long running El Show del Mediodía on Televisión Dominicana in 1983 is one of the greatest pieces of boy band performance ever captured on film. Future Latin superstar Chayanne is unflappable as security tries and fails to hold back the screaming girls. Every few seconds one escapes from the pack to fling herself at him before she’s manhandled off set. He never misses a beat.
But back to Menudo. The early 1980s saw crooner Julio Iglesias have some major crossover success with mainstream (aka white) America and record companies immediately hopped on the bandwagon hoping to uncover the next Julio. This is the era that is responsible for wonderful and genuine crossover Latin pop acts like Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine as well as rock acts Los Lobos. Menudo, on the other hand… well, it wasn’t for lack of trying. They were snapped up by RCA Records who pushed them hard. There were no other boy bands--especially for girls too young for Duran Duran and the other New Wave acts--so Menudo made it into magazines like Tiger Beat and even had a short run television show on ABC. But the campy song-and-dance routines along with the costumes that could have come from the sets of the Brady Bunch Variety Hour just weren’t doing it for mainstream America’s tween girls and Menudo quickly faded from popular memory until Ricky Martin taught us how to shake our bon-bons in the 1999.
Black American teens and tweens, on the other hand, were happily pinning up pages from Right On magazine to their bedroom walls thanks to Boston’s own Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky, Mike, Ralph, and Johnny otherwise known as “New Edition”.
Named because they were the “New Edition” of the Jackson Five, the young teens caught the eye of writer-producer-all time music legend Maurice “the General” Starr at a Boston talent show he hosted and he helped launch the group to stardom with their first single “Candy Girl”, released February 24, 1983. What Maurice Starr did with New Edition and “Candy Girl” was bring “kids music” back to the radio. Teens and tweens are a reliable pop-music loving demographic and Maurice Starr clearly sensed that there was a big opening in the market. The single and the album of the same name were hits, getting to number one on the American Hot Black Singles chart and not doing too shabbily on mainstream pop charts in America and the UK.
“Candy Girl” is essentially a vintage Jackson 5 song updated for 1983. Instead of Jazz Crusader Wilton Felder on bass, it was a (then) cutting edge electric bass synth. And there was even a little rap thrown in for good measure. You can clearly see the influence of the J5 in New Edition’s performance style. They performed high-energy, coordinated dance moves from behind a row of mic stands, inspired not only by the J5 but also great 70s Soul Train regulars like the O’Jays. The biggest difference between NE and the J5 is that NE didn’t even bother to pretend to play instruments. There was no need. NE was all killer no filler.
The group parted ways with Starr after this first album and tour--the possibly apocryphal story is that they received a grand total of $1.87 for their troubles at which point they said bye bye bye to The General. Starr may have had the golden touch but New Edition would do just fine without him. 1984’s post-Starr “Cool It Now” is one of their most fondly remembered songs… at least by me--and the members would continue delivering hits for years to come even after kicking charismatic bad boy Bobby Brown out of the group. Subunit Bell Biv and DeVoe went quadruple platinum with 1990’s Poison. Michael Bivins helped launch Boys II Men. Bobby Brown was… Bobby Brown.
But New Edition played on Soul Train, not on the Tonight Show. They were breathlessly promoted and covered by Right On, not Tiger Beat. So with his New Edition experience in hand, Maurice Starr decided he was going to try again. And this time he would be aiming for Berry Gordy’s “young America”. In a lot of ways, the General’s new group could be considered the true heirs of the J5, popularizing Black music and dance for white audiences.
Let me set the scene for you before we hear from the five kids from Dorchester. There wasn’t much in the way of pop music for kids in the early-mid 1980s. Music loving kids--like myself--listened to New Wave bands and colorful singers like Cindi Lauper and, of course, Michael Jackson. But sometimes the themes of these songs were too adult or there was too much controversy around them for parents to allow kids to listen. We wanted something cool but also like… not full of things we were too young for like sex and drugs. This was an untapped and growing market and absolutely exploded in 1987 when 15-year old Tiffany went on a tour of suburban shopping malls, doing three 20 minute sets a day to growing audiences of tween fans.
In the wake of Tiffany came Debbie Gibson, a young Kylie Minogue, family band the Jets, Weird Al, and an absolute boom for television’s KIDS Incorporated. MTV debuted Club MTV based on the old American Bandstand for older teens and Disney revived the Mickey Mouse Club for the younger set. And keep an eye on these new Mouseketeers because you’ll be hearing from them later: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and JC Chasez.
But rewinding back to 1984, New Edition kicks Maurice Starr to the curb and he begins assembling his new group in 1985. Donnie Wahlberg, the dangerous bad boy, Danny Wood, lead dancer, Jonathan Knight, the gentle older brother, Jordan Knight, the be-rat-tailed, sparkling eyed, falsetto, and the baby of the group, the secret weapon, the absolutely adorable blond, blue-eyed Joey McIntyre.
A little background knowledge of Boston is useful here. Because of the school bussing laws intended to help reduce segregation in the city’s schools the original four members of the group that would become New Kids on the Block, Donnie, Danny and brothers Jordan and Jonathan, were all bussed from their Irish Catholic neighborhood to a school in the Black neighborhood. They liked and consumed the music of their peers in school, which happened to be groups like New Edition instead of like… Twisted Sister. I think it’s important to emphasize this because the New Kids are often called the Osmonds to New Edition’s Jackson 5 and I don’t think that’s fair. It’s more like… the New Kids were the Jackson 5 to New Edition’s the Sylvers. And I mean no disrespect to the Osmonds when I say they weren’t really a blue-eyed soul act at heart. They were entertainers, professionals who could do whatever genre you threw at them. The New Kids really did grow up listening to R&B.
Anyways, after Starr casts the final New Kid, his “Michael Jackson”, the then 12 year old Joey, the group rehearses and hustles and releases their first album in 1986, aimed directly at the New Edition market. The group’s first single “Be My Girl” is a charming tween slow jam ballad that managed to get to number 90 on the Hot Black Singles chart. But second single “Stop It Girl”, a close cousin to the retro Jackson 5 sound of “Candy Girl” only much lamer and featuring a super lame dad rock guitar solo, vanished. As did the album. The New Kids needed a new sound.
For their second album, they would have a more contemporary, cooler sound, perfectly capturing the rock-flavored R&B that was big at the time and with a super cool title to match: Hangin’ Tough. To put it in context, this was the era of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know”, Prince’s “Kiss”, Jody Watley’s “Looking for a new love”. And as luck would have it, the album’s first single, the devastatingly sugar sweet “Please Don’t Go Girl,” released April 16, 1988, maintaining just a hint of the retro Jackson 5 sound for flavor, crossed over to pop radio. That summer the New Kids supported Tiffany on another Mall Tour. By the fall, when the second single from the album came out, the infectious “You’ve got the (Right Stuff)”, the Kids were a genuine phenomenon. The suburban mall audiences had spoken.
The New Kids would ride their wave of boy band popularity for a few years but despite being a talented blue eyed soul act at heart, they were ultimately unable to pivot away from their bubblegum image and disbanded in 1994 amid declining sales and member Jon leaving to deal with his anxiety disorder. Part of the problem was that the New Kids were never really taken seriously as a pop act. Critics were extremely disdainful of what they saw as garbage teenybopper music, refusing to look past the marketing and screaming tween fans to the solid performance group underneath the hype. They were also seen as deeply inauthentic because they were white men doing R&B. Weird Al captured the mood of the era perfectly with his parody of the Right Stuff titled, “The White Stuff”. Trust me, early 90s middle school kids thought this was an epic burn.
The mood around pop music had curdled after the Milli Vanilli lip syncing scandal played out in 1990 when, after months of rumors, Milli Vanilli finally admitted that they did not sing their own songs, like at all. The floodgates opened on a sea of opportunistic class action lawsuits alleging consumer fraud, especially after Cook County Illinois awarded damages to Milli Vanilli fans. The New Kids on the Block, already figures of ridicule among “serious” music fans, had a target on their backs and the hammer dropped in early 1992, when they were publicly accused not only of lip syncing in performance but of not even providing their own vocals on their recordings.
While it’s certainly possible--if not extremely likely--that there were some additional vocals recorded by studio ringers to help sweeten and fill out the New Kids’ harmonies, there’s nothing remotely unusual or deceptive about the practice. And I don’t think there’s any doubt that the main vocal tracks were all done by the members themselves.
But the seeds of doubt had been planted. The New Kids--then on tour in Australia--rushed back to Los Angeles to make an emergency appearance on the Arsenio Hall show to do damage control, singing ballad “If you go away” completely live with absolutely no vocal support tracks but it was too late. Like the Monkees before them, the New Kids were made scapegoats for using the same industry best practices as their peers. The New Kids were no more or less “fake” than any other vocal act but they couldn’t escape the smear of inauthenticity.
In any case, the tide was turning. Bands were about to come back in a big way. Grunge was bubbling under in America as was the movement about to become Britpop in the UK and the singing-and-dancing of the New Kids was quickly becoming deeply unfashionable. It would be years before the style returned to pop music and when it did, it would be in a completely different form. American teen magazines had tried to make the UK’s Take That--assembled in 1990 as Manchester’s answer to NKOTB--a thing but they made about as little impression in America as Menudo had done a decade earlier. While one could make the argument for Nirvana as a boy band (I can testify to seeing Kurt Cobain’s posters smouldering at me from the inside of quite a few girls’ lockers) I’m going to take this narrative in a different direction for the moment.
While the New Kids were imploding in 1992, inspired by the huge amounts of money that the New Kids were pulling in, former Florida blimp magnate and eventual convict Lou Pearlman decided to put together his own boy band based out of Orlando. How hard could it be? He’d asked himself. Pearlman combined local teens Howie Dorough and AJ McLean with a young kid named Nick Carter (who had turned down a role on the New Mickey Mouse Club) and added the ambitious and hardworking Kevin Richardson, a country boy from Kentucky, and his golden voiced cousin Brian Littrell. Pearlman put the new group under the guidance of former New Kids tour manager Johnny Wright and gave them a name. They would be called the Backstreet Boys.
Perhaps sensing that the dour American grunge-and-gansta rap era would not last forever, a forward thinking executive at Vibe Records encouraged the label to sign the act in 1994 and sent them to Sweden to work with up and coming pop songwriter-producer by the name of Denniz Pop and his young apprentice, Max Martin.
Something to keep in mind is that while American lawyers were making bank on class action lawsuits against fun pop music, over in Europe the good times had never stopped. UK boy bands Take That (as mentioned earlier, Manchester’s NKOTB) and East 17 (London’s Take That) were still topping charts across Europe in the early 1990s, not to mention pop groups like Sweden’s Rednex and, yes, Ace of Base, who had had a blockbuster hit with Denniz Pop. So it made sense to send for Jive to send this promising young vocal group overseas where the market was primed and ready for a group of charming and handsome young guys who could sing.
The BSB’s first single, co-written by Denniz Pop, Max Martin, and Herbie Crichlow, was the supremely catchy “We’ve Got It Going On”, and it set the the classic Backstreet sound. Eurobeat disco overlaid with their pitch perfect gospel harmonies. As soon as you hear that ascending “naaaaaa na na na na na na” you know it’s Backstreet. And with the new popularization of wireless microphones for live sound, Backstreet were able to ditch the mic stands of previous generations and really utilize the whole stage, bringing in all sorts of new formation styles and dance moves to their performances. Their sound and performance style were like nothing American or European audiences had seen before.
With their good looks, even better vocals, and exciting performances, BSB quickly won over audiences in Germany, Austria, Switzerland… then France, who passed the mania along to Montreal and before too long teens across the border in New York were calling up the radio and asking who this new group was.
And then a stroke of good luck. Just as Tiffany’s 1987 Mall Tour led the way for NKOTB, a UK girl group called the Spice Girls brought pop music back to America in 1997 with the earwormy bubblegum pop megahit “Wannabe.” The song unleashed a flood of teen pop in its wake including BSB, teenybopper brother band Hanson, and the white BoysIIMen, 98 Degrees. Almost overnight magazines like Tiger Beat kicked cover boy staples like Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Mark Paul Gosselar off their covers in favor of this brand new crop of hunks.
And the hits didn’t stop there. MTV launched teen pop video countdown show TRL, hosted by Carson Daly, in 1998 and was soon counting down hits from multiple girls groups including Destiny’s Child, rising star Britney Spears, as well as a brand new boy band named NSYNC.
As good as the Backstreet Boys are--and they are good--it’s NSYNC that like Duran Duran before them, represent the high artistic water mark of the genre. They were pop visionaries but the world they crafted wasn’t one of exotic foreign adventure like Duran Duran, it was the meta-fantasy world of celebrity itself.
NSYNC was formed in 1995 thanks to the hustle of acapella enthusiast Chris Kirkpatrick, who had just missed the cut for the Backstreet Boys. He brought in the ambitious, handsome, and talented ex-Mousketeers Justin Timberlake and JC Chasez followed by Chris’s affable buddy Joey Fatone--working as the Wolf Man at Universal Studios, and then the last piece of the puzzle was the baby Lance Bass, a quiet doe-eyed show choir kid from small town Mississippi with a bad haircut and a surprisingly deep bass voice. Much like the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC was put through “boyband bootcamp” in Orlando and then shipped over to Europe to work with Denniz Pop.
The group released a pair of very Backstreet-esque singles in Europe in 1996 and 1997 to great success--“I Want You Back” and “Tearin’ Up My Heart”--and then released them again in America in the wake of the teen pop wave that the Spice Girls had unleashed. They were marketed as Backstreet Jr. for all intents and purposes and that wasn’t a mistake. Lou Pearlman had infamously supported the creation of NSYNC primarily to provide a rival group for the Backstreet Boys. The idea was partially that, as manager Johnny Wright explained in a 1998 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, “...we were going to turn Orlando into the next Motown, but we were going to call it Snowtown – because we weren’t doing it with R&B acts, we were doing it with pop acts.” And partially, in a time honored tactic, to help generate fan engagement. And it worked. A look at the chart of number ones on MTV’s Total Request Live shows a furious battle between the two groups with the number one slot flipping back and forth from BSB to NSYNC from TRL’s beginning in September 1998 until it was broken by Korn’s “Freak On A Leash” on February 25, 1999.
And the animosity between the two groups was quite real at the time for various reasons. BSB felt like NSYNC was trying to usurp their position, snatching away opportunities such as the 1998 Disney Channel special concert which helped break NSYNC to American audiences. The special had originally been offered to the Backstreet Boys who had been forced to decline but it still stung to see NSYNC walking away with the glory.
It was once the two groups started speaking to each other that all of the pieces fell into place and both groups realized that--yes, the classic boy band complaint--neither group was getting paid their fair share of the money coming in. NSYNC, in one of the balliest boy band music business moves before or since, managed to break their contract with Lou Pearlman, sign to a different label as a group with their name, and released a real meta-pop masterpiece album, No Strings Attached. BSB were not as lucky legally, although they did manage to put out a classic album that year, Millennium, which features one of the best known and most beloved pop songs in the entire world: “I Want It That Way”, a song that still ranks as one of the most popular English karaoke songs in Japan to this day.
But Millennium was still very much in the Max Martin/Swedish pop wheelhouse. When No Strings Attached was released on March 21, 2000, NSYNC was going forward with their own sound. Something much more American sounding. Although the two lead singles, “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me,” were both from the Max Martin team, the rest was an interesting and fun mix of styles. Member JC Chasez contributed whimsical pop soundscapes like NSYNC member favorite “Digital Getdown” and this podcaster’s personal favorite “Space Cowboy (Yippie Yi Yay)” featuring the late Left Eye Lopez, as well as the album’s title track, “No Strings Attached,” whose puppet theme and marionette video were inspired by Chris Kirkpatrick's love of campy 70s show the Thunderbirds. The album also included an old Teddy Riley track, a smooth R&B song written by the group’s touring band, as well as a straight acapella number. No Strings Attached was a blockbuster album and it marks the pinnacle of both the teen pop and boy band craze.
While the Backstreet Boys popularity faded as the new millennium began, the BSB project has continued in various forms, including a pre-pandemic Vegas residency that I very much wish I could have attended, and they are still putting out great new material--although not, perhaps, targeted at the American market. NSYNC released one more excellent album--Celebrity, which I mentioned at the top of the episode--before shattering when Justin Timberlake launched himself into solo stardom with a pair of banger of an album called Justified.
Lou Pearlman, on the other hand, discovered that you couldn’t just put a bunch of cute guys together and make them into a successful band. In 2000, in a now very painful-to-watch reality show called Making the Band, Pearlman tried to pull what McLaren did with The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, making himself into the star. The band that resulted from the show, O-Town, was popular with tweens at the time, much as the Pistol’s “Friggin in the Riggin” had been, but… the creative spark was missing. There was no “there” there. The era of the American singing-and-dancing boy band was fading. And this time it was gone for good.
As the new millennium marched on, a new genre was getting mixed in with the bubblegum teen pop and, uh, Korn. Pop Punk.
One of the early vanguard leading the Pop Punk wave was Blink-182. Their videos rarely won against those of NYSNC and the Backstreet Boys on TRL in the late 90s but as vocal groups fell out of fashion it would be Blink-182 and pop punk groups like Sum 41, Good Charlotte, and Simple Plan who replaced them on both TRL and in the pages of teen magazines like Tiger Beat.
Looking back, the writing was on the wall as early as the 1999 video for Blink-182’s song “All the Small Things”, which made a nasty mockery of vocal groups like the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. Much as the New Kids on the Block has faced charges of inauthenticity and fakeness, despite being a great blue-eyed soul group, Blink-182 and pop punk in general moved to position themselves as “authentic” against the then current crop of pop vocal groups. This is despite the fact that Blink-182 appeared in the same teen magazines like Bop and Tiger Beat as these other boy bands and their posters hung in middle school girls’ lockers just like these other boy bands. Despite the fact that singing-and-dancing on a professional level takes arguably at least as much talent and skill as playing rock instruments and that members of these pop vocal groups contributed to the songwriting and production of their tours, it wasn’t enough to save the Snowtown groups from the label of plastic and fake. And so the boy band torch was passed along to a sea of floppy haired emo boys with piercings and tattoos who made a game of dry humping each other on stage. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about the mid-2000s phenomenon known as Bandslash also known as Bandom.
This is the part of the story where the boy band narrative shifts away from the music, art, and stagecraft and into fandom. Primarily this is because post-Backstreet and NSYNC, the post-2000 boy bands made very little impression on mainstream culture and existed mainly in closed fandom ecosystems which were moving increasingly online or accessible only through cable television. There were teen music properties with some mainstream footprint during these years--specifically High School Musical and Glee, as well as the soundtracks to the Twilight series of films--but we’re talking about boy bands so just take it as read that I am aware of Zach Efron and his killer smile.
But back to Bandom. The genre was focused around three pop punk cum emo groups My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco, and Fall Out Boy and represents the beginning of a big shift of boy band fans away from traditional media such as teen magazines, television, and radio and towards online communities where they mingled with older fans and fan communities from other genres on platforms like LiveJournal and Tumblr. I strongly suspect the boom in RPF or real person fanfiction, much of it explicit and written about homosexual male pairings, that rose from the fandoms around properties like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and the television show Supernatural helped feed the communities that would become Bandom. These fans were encouraged in their pursuits by both what was called “stage gay” at the time, that is band members doing things like dry humping each other on stage, and fourth wall breaking interactions from the Bandom members themselves who would comment on the stories. Fans wrote their own narratives onto these bands, deepening the connection they felt with every story about Frerard banging.
While the Bandom groups certainly sold a lot of CDs and had a presence in traditional platforms like teen magazines, especially Bandom breakout star Pete Wentz, bass player for Fall Out Boy, ex-husband to lip syncing emo teen popper Ashlee Simpson, their impact on popular culture and on popular music was minimal. I was an active consumer of pop culture and pop music during this era and while writing this I actually had to look up their best selling songs and not a single one triggered any kind of memory for me, musical or otherwise. Bandom’s biggest and lasting impact would be on boy band fandoms.
Meanwhile over on the Disney Channel, the overtly Christian brother band the Jonas Brothers were selling purity rings and squeaky clean pop punk to a generation of young girls too young or not online enough for emo. It’s a concept that can only make sense against the specific American culture war of the mid-2000s. There was a reality show, concert films, cross-promotions with super popular tween favorites like Taylor Swift and Hannah Montanna, and even a sitcom. Oh, and albums, I guess. But the main product of the Jonas Brothers wasn’t music or even teen mania, much like the Bandom groups, the main product was the guys and their story. Kevin, Joe, and Nick were packaged and sold by parents former pastor and Christian musician Kevin Sr. and wife Denise, as aggressively normal boys next door. No flashy costumes or dance moves, no stage gay antics or theatrics. No delightful candy colored bubblegum earworms and no above all, no weird stuff.
This worked for a while but as the Jonas Brothers grew older and attempted to pivot and grow their brand into a more adult one with (extreme secondhand embarrassment) reality series Married to Jonas, across the pond in the UK, boy band mania the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the heady days of the BSB/NSYNC rivalry was about to bloom.
Like the Jonas Brothers, One Direction were another television boy band. They were formed in 2010 by music industry veteran Simon Cowell out of a handful of contestants on his talent show X-Factor. Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson. The boys were cute, charming, had nice voices, and, most importantly, had enough chemistry as a group to catch the attention of Great Britain’s boy band fans. Despite not winning the competition, they had something more important, momentum. They signed with Simon Cowell’s record label as a group and dove head first onto the boy band treadmill and began putting out a string of bland but vaguely catchy Top 40 hits. Not to damn with faint praise but while 1D would never release anything as masterful as “I Want It That Way” or “Bye Bye Bye”, at least songs like “What makes You Beautiful” or “Live While We’re Young” have choruses you can remember and sing along to.
But much like their country-mates the Bay City Rollers, the music and performances are by far and away the least interesting thing about One Direction. Let it be known that One Direction do not dance. Nor do they wear glitzy stage costumes. The group represents the unholy merger of the reality show and “let’s not be too weird” tween mania of the Jonas Brothers with the older fans’ stage gay and RPF of Bandom and, the cherry on top of this fandom sundae: internet voting culture. Directioners of all ages weren’t just pinning posters to their bedroom wall or reblogging gifs on tumblr, they were online whipping votes, combing videos for clues to the “real” relationship between group members Louis and Harry, writing RPF relationship manifestos and 40 chapter OT5 orgy fanfics, and also reblogging gifs and putting up posters.
Where Bandom was a closed ecosystem with fan activities more or less contained to fan spaces, One Direction tore down the walls and invited everyone to take part in previously niche fan subculture activities like shipping. The group’s biggest legacy is hidden in the ship tags on the fan fic site of your choice: Harry/Louis, Zayn/Liam, Niall/Harry, Niall/Zayn, Liam/Louis... It’s one thing to have a laugh about a few thousand girls reading an erotic fanfic about you fucking your bandmate on a dedicated LiveJournal community. It’s quite another to have millions and millions of views on innumerable YouTube videos titled things like “Things that don’t make sense if Larry’s not real part 5” and “Top Ten Heart Breaking Larry Moments”.
1D went on hiatus at the end of 2015--and honestly, I don’t blame them. Judging from the footage in the 2013 tour documentary This Is Us, the members seem extremely unhappy and only minimally engaged with the music and performances. While all of the members have solo careers, the fan-created legacy lives on. One Direction made the news in 2019 because teen drama Euphoria aired an explicit sex scene between members Louis and Harry that was framed as a fantasy of one of the characters on the show. Louis took to twitter to say, “I can categorically say that I was not contacted nor did I approve it.”
And that leads to the final stop on this whirlwind boy band tour: BTS. The seven member unit from South Korea who crossed over from K-pop idol group subculture to become a boy band, with all the baggage that implies. You can listen to my history of K-pop idol groups if you’re interested in the details but the short version is K-pop is an export product from Korea and while there had been previous unsuccessful attempts to target Berry Gordy’s “Young America” in previous years--K-pop girl group Wonder Girls had opened for the Jonas Brothers on tour, for example--what had developed in their wake was a large K-pop subculture, somewhat similar to the anime subculture or even something like the English Premiere League subculture in America. News or trends would occasionally crossover to mainstream media but for the most part, it operated as a closed ecosystem.
What happened in 2016-2017 is that fans pushed BTS out of the K-pop subculture bubble and into the mainstream entertainment spotlight. Despite already being in their 20s, the group was repackaged as a full fledged boy band and their sound pivoted away from the BigBang-esque hiphop tinged K-pop they had been making towards the tween market-oriented One Direction-esque bland but professional American Top 40, culminating last year with their biggest song to date, the song they will probably be remembered for, “Dynamite”, which was written by a pair of songwriters best known for their work with, yes, the Jonas Brothers.
As with One Direction, the fandom is by far the most interesting part of BTS in their form as an American boy band. It combines everything from One Direction, especially the prominence of the older fan demographic, but with the online voting and mass streaming turned up to eleven (as I write this in early April 2021 I can still find fans fundraising thousands of dollars a week to mass purchase “Dynamite” which came out in the fall of last year), institutional support from academics and journalists who rely on the fans for engagement, and a healthy dose of online social justice activism added in.
But the clock is ticking down fast.
And on that note, we’ll close out this mega episode with the Backstreet Boys socially distanced version of “I Want It That Way,” from 2020 which is accompanied by an incredibly charming video that I highly recommend you click through and watch. Talk to you next time, bye bye bye!