Irresistibly catchy, unlawful fake, sexy and you know it. Boy bands are the most fantastic finished products of all music groups. From the staged TV games of the Monkees to the charming proximity of one Direction. As long as there are notebooks from middle school students who can be smeared, there will be groups that offer pop spectacles in its purest, least filtered form.
Just as the music has developed, boy bands have also developed. Their existence is a constant of pop music. But the parameters have always been blurred. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes not. And sometimes they are completely foreign, sometimes they have known each other since their birth. Sometimes they sing texts that they wrote themselves, sometimes they sing the texts of others. But sometimes they are literally boys, sometimes they are twens with a boyish charm.
But like any other art form you can see a boy band when you see it. The most important defining factor? The venues full of screeching fans – always young, mostly girls – who help to make a boy band a cultural artifact that is worth being admired and sung along. Even after their inevitable dissolution or “break”.
75. East 17, “House of Love” (1992)
The Stones to Take Thats Beatles. These four guys from Walthamstow were hard as steel and looked as if they hadn’t slept for weeks. Your debut “House of Love” is a typical example of your work. Maximum, fast -paced and crowned by rousing messages of love and unity.
The songwriter and rapper Tony Mortimer told the magazine M that he “founded the band based on the model of New Kids on the Block”, although East 17 was more musically related to the Stadium House from KLF. Mortimer wrote “House of Love” as an ironic comment on the increasing commercialization of the rave scene. But it is difficult to recognize too much cynicism in lines such as “We got to stop the patin and put the wars on hold”.
Unfortunately, this utopia dissolved in 1997 when lead singer Brian Harvey was released because of his boast about his occasional ecstasy consumption (“how a cup of tea drink”). Mortimer then left the band, citing exhaustion. Harvey later ran over with his own car. And claimed that he had eaten “too many oven potatoes”.
74. Marshall Dyllon, “Live It Up” (2002)
The answer of country music to boy band mania had more with ‘n sync than with Nashville. The group, some of which consisted of participants in the Casting Show Making the Band, who had not made it into the band O-Town, was founded by Boyband-Mogul Lou Pearlman. Two members even grew up in the choir with Lance Bass.
“I decided to leave O-Town because I felt that it wasn’t the way I wanted to go,” said singer Paul Martin. The group’s debut single, “Live IT Up”, which was published on Kenny Rogers’ label, combined the Pearlman pop of the turn of the century with Paul Franklin’s pedal Steel. The song was briefly a top 40 country hit. But “Live It Up”-perhaps affected by his bizarre, clearly not child-friendly western motif-finally flopped, and the young honky-tonk-Ruhm of the group was only short-lived after just one album and an appearance for Rogers.
Nevertheless, “Live IT Up” gives an idea of how an alternative universe could have looked like the omnipresent of country boy bands.
73. Brockhampton, “Sugar” (2019)
The “Boyband” category was always closer than it should have been. And it seemed as if this was done to push acts that corresponded to the most traditional definition in favor of “more serious” music. Brockhampton is highly offset that you have not only accepted the boy band label right from the start. But blown it in so that it always met, regardless of the music style they just tried.
However, Brockhampton’s single “Sugar” from 2019 is perhaps one of her “most traditional” boy band songs. It’s all about singing. And the way the acoustic guitar loop accompanies the rest of the production is reminiscent of the use of the same instrument in “I want it that way” by the backstreet boys.
Above all, “Sugar” is tender and honest. A warm homage full of love, longing and exactly the right pinch of youthful immortality.
72. Bros, “When will I be famous?” (1987)
The Trio Bros from Surrey, England, embodied the steel determination of the young conservatives of the late 1980s. Money, power and success at all costs. The twins Matt and Luke Goss as well as their school friend Craig Logan exhibited fame and fashion about fraternal warmth (the increasingly excluded logan got out and sued the brothers).
The common grade in their texts, their striking brush cuts and bomber jackets as well as their preference to wear Grolsch bottle closures on their shoes made them a popular target for parodies and snappy comments in the press. The former manager of the Pet Shop Boys, Tom Watkins, carefully ensured that this publicity did not remain unused. Bros became so popular that they grew up a huge army of teen fans, the “brosettes”.
Great Britain hadn’t seen anything like that since the Bay City Rollers. “When does i be famous?” is Matt’s best attempt to imitate the squeak and grunny of his idol Michael Jackson. But it is the Casio cow bell that immediately moves you back to 1987.
71. Dream Street, “It Happens Everytime” (2001)
The premise was simple. A boy band with real boys. “At the backstreet boys you can see nine-year-old girls who worship 25-year-old men,” said Louis Baldonieri, co-founder of Dream Street, in 2002. “It’s strange when you think about it.” Dream Street-which also included young Jesse McCartney-were on the best way to survive when the New York Quintet appeared on the scene at the height of the Boy band boom (five months after BBMAK, two months before O-Town).
“It Happens Every Time” was her puberty. A Radio Disney version of BSB from the “As Long As You Love Me” era. In the video, the group of girls is hunted by New York City and dances on the Brooklyn Bridge. The group (which lost its member Chris Trousdale, who died of the consequences of a Covid 19 disease) soon took a gloomy turn when her parents’ founders, because of “behavior and activities that clearly endanger and impair the well-being of minors”.
To paraphrase their best known hit: they were the imperfect dream.