Boy band information
Hello friends,
I am telling you about boy bands.
Reader Matt R wanted to know about these wonderful singing children.
Okay, super quick, a band is a group of people who make music together. Some popular bands include the London Philharmonic and Blondie. A boy band is different from those bands in a few ways. Whereas many bands sort of come together naturally, boy bands often start with a producer deciding "okay, a band is going to exist now" and deciding which boys are the cream de la dream. Second, the boys in boy bands usually do a lot of dancing. Third, they usually don't play instruments on stage. These dudes are fully committed to singing and dancing!
The first boy band was the Beatles. Now these guys were popular in their day but by the standards of modern boy bands they suck out loud. They had basically no good dance moves because they were always playing huge guitars and drums, a mistake later boy bands learned from. Also, while many modern boy bands have at least five members, there were only four Beatles, two of whom you have to make huge allowances for historical context to consider cute. After the Beatles the next proto-boy band was the Jackson Five. They sang cute songs and danced around and after 1980 disappeared forever to an island. The musical innovators over in Puerto Rico perfected the boy band concept in the late 70s with the invention of Menudo. They were active from 1977 to 2009 thanks to their rotating line-up. Menudo sent a signal to the world that Ringo Starr had not in fact ruined everything for everybody and that boy bands were a viable concept.
Once everybody knew it was finally time for boy bands, they started getting cranked out like crazy:
New Kids on the Block - this was the first English language challenger for Menudo's blood throne. They are pretty before my time but I know they spawned Donnie Wahlberg and are therefore responsible for Mark Wahlberg, and therefore responsible for the Transformers movie where they go out of their way to explain loopholes in age of consent laws. I think I've mentioned this before in the newsletter but I very passionately believe the Transformers should not be used in this way.
NSync - when I was just a small little boy, this was the Coca Cola of boy bands. Every 45 year old producer who decided to lasso some affable teens into a studio in the late 90s did it after seeing NSync. Everyone on the planet Earth knew that NSync was the name of the main boy band. Dads in uncontacted tribes in the Amazon were gently ribbing their daughters about having a crush on NSync. Their members included Justin Timberlake, Joey Fatone, JC Chazez, Lance Bass, and one other guy who did not manage to do anything to earn a place in my memories. Out of them, Justin Timberlake is the one who got to still be famous after they split up. Personally I think it should have been Lance Bass who as a gay man obsessed with going to space is significantly more interesting.
Backstreet Boys - they were the Pepsi of boy bands: slightly less popular, but better tasting and more fun. They are the only band wise enough to have a theme song, which announces to the still-forming brains of it's target audience that Backstreet's Back, Alright! This establishes that the Backstreet Boys are not a new band, but rather part of the natural order of things. There has always been and will always be Backstreet. Backstreet went away and you, lucky listener, are alive during the part of history where it is back. They were also the only boy band to have partnered with Stan Lee to make a comic book where they're all superheroes with powers and costumes that they very clearly had a lot of input on. "Were there flash animated webisodes and tie-in toys at Burger King of these super powered Backstreet Boys?" Yes, of course. Don't ask me if I had all of them because context has already answered that question.
Hanson - these three brothers sang a song called MMMbop and were for a short time more popular than the color red and the beverage called water. They burned briefly and brightly and seem like they grew up pretty normal despite all.
LFO/98 Degrees/O-Town - this is the place where I memorialize all of the pretenders to the throne, the Shasta boy bands. They all made fifty million dollars and they all grew up to either own fast casual dining chains or be Pizzagate guys. The most on the nose one is definitely Ireland's "Boyzone", which just reeks of being formed as a dare. The one that put in the most effort for the least result was Dream Street, which was all like 11 year old boys and had a super long infomercial-style commercial that would air on Nickelodeon and served as essentially the opposite of the song Backstreet's Back.
One Direction - These boys are from England! They were formed after all competing separately on Britain's Got Talent and have had a Sonic the Hedgehog amount of fanfiction written about them. Maybe I wasn't aware of it due to being li'l, but it seems like they have a lot more grown up adult fans than your N*Syncs and your Boyzones did in their day. So far they are all still pretty famous, even the one who seems like he wants to sell you a certified pre-owned Kia Optima.
BTS - these boys are global phenomenons from Korea, the pop capital of Earth. I saw them perform on the Saturday Night Gang tv show and they danced so crazy! I bet these guys could build a house in 3 minutes if you made building a house into a dance. I probably wouldn't want to live in that house but it would still be impressive.
Thank you for reading my huge boy band email! If you would like to find out about something, tell me and I will try to already know about it.
Love,
Ryland Duncan