Here a boy band, there a boy band, everywhere a boy band...



There has been a lot of concern lately in the news about girls maturing earlier than ever - 8 year olds getting their periods and wearing B cups is not unheard of anymore. There has been much speculation over what is causing this phenomenon, be it chemicals in foods, too much R rated TV, etc., but I think I have found the answer. One day while flipping through the channels, I came across the Backstreet Boys concert right at the point where one of the Boys, clad in a tight mesh tank top and tight leather pants screamed to the young girls in the audience "Hello, to all my sexy women in the hoooouse!!!" Right then, 40,000 girls' ovaries shot into motion. It is my theory that this rapid influx of boy bands, including the likes of Backstreet Boys, N'Sync, 98 Degrees, 5ive, Boyzone, O-Town and BB Mak, is the cause behind these cases of early onset puberty.

Yes, there have always been boy bands - The Bay City Rollers, Menudo, New Kids On The Block, but never this many at one time. Having been quite a fan of NKOTB, I can tell you that Jordan Knight did indeed make my uterus turn flips. I would beg my mom to buy me teeny bopper magazines so I could rip out the pictures of Jordan and put them on my wall next to my pictures of Kirk Cameron. While actors like Kirk also made girls swoon, it was the musicians that always reap the most havoc on females since they sing about love and dance around the stage.

So while I understand this facination with boy bands (girls want them, guys want to be them), I take offense to the fact that these bands seriously consider themselves musicians. In my opinion, there is a grand difference between being musically talented and being entertaining. The boy bands may indeed be entertaining, gyrating their pelvises in perfect sync and wooing young girls by serenading them from the stage and I have more than once caught myself tapping my foot to one of their songs because of a catchy beat, however, most of their music is superficial slop.

"I'm sick of you little boy and girl groups,
All you do is annoy me,
So I have been sent here to destroy you." - Eminem

Bono once contrasted rock and pop music by saying: "The difference between pop and rock is that, in pop music, they try and tell you everything is OK in the world, and in rock music, they tell you it's not OK, but that's life." This is probably the reason why pop music is so popular with younger crowds. They don't know much about the darker aspects of life. They only know butterflies and puppy dogs. Older crowds like to identify themselves in the songs and find little to identify with in lyrics like "Backstreet's back and we'll always be around." And since generally boy bands don't write much of their own music, the lyrics or melodies that aren't slop should give credit to the team of people behind the bands that actually write the music, not the bands themselves.

So, if these boy bands aren't writing their own lyrics and they don't play their own music, what is it exactly that they do? They look sexy, they stand sexy, they dole out sly winks to fans, they portray a star quality, they fit an image that is not their own, but one predetermined by a dozen old men in a board room who decide to invest in them. I can just see these men in their fancy suits, frantically pouring over poll results of Teen Beat readers to decide what would elicit more sales...A.J. with long sideburns, or A.J. with short sideburns...Brian with tan chinos or Brian with khaki chinos...Justin with or without the jeri-curl perm... Therefore, these boy bands are merely corporate products with no musical integrity. Hence the reason for the successful BSB Burger King and N'Sync McDonalds commercial spots - one corporate product selling another. But neither the burgers nor the bands are true musicians.

"There's nothing wrong doing something you believe in, but to do something just for the money - that's the downfall of the art." -- The Clown, MuchMusic USA

Not to say that if I was offered a multi-million dollar contract to wear nice clothes, drive nice cars and chill with the rich and famous, I wouldn't consider it throughly, but if I accepted, I doubt I would consider myself a real musician. I'd probably more likely have the attitude of Jerry Springer, who on countless interviews, has explained that even he wouldn't watch his show, cause it's a bunch of white trash acting like morons, although he doesn't mind collecting the enormous pay check at the end of the day. Robert Smigel of SNL said about Jerry "You really can't make fun of the man. He knows what his show is - pure human garbage - and he's fine with it!" While self-effacing, this is honest and more respectable to me than him playing like he's the King of the Talk Show Interview, up with the likes of Oprah or Barbara Wa-Wa. Apparently Rob Sheffield, writing for Rolling Stone magazine, had a similar idea of boy bands when they recently wrote an article stating that boy bands are nothing but "young men who slave away the golden hours of their youth performing music they wouldn't be caught dead listening to." Good, so I'm not the only one to sense the hypocrisy here.




I have a similar sense of the female stars of pop, namely the Brittney Spears', Christina Aguilleras', Jessica Simpsons', Mandy Moores' and Spice Girls' of the world. However, I think there is a definate schism in the population regarding this topic. I have found that there are generally two types of people in the world: the Brittney fans and the Christina fans. I say this because I personally think Christina Aguillera has definate music talent while Brittney Spears is an entertainer. Brittney has a mediocre voice and doesn't play or write the music, instead choosing to rely on her fair dancing skills and large implants to make you "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." This is why I cringe when I see her being interviewed, saying she hopes one day to be the next Madonna. Please, girl. However, the she did attempt a sorry cover of the Rolling Stones classic "Satisfaction!" while Madonna did a sorry cover of Don McLean's classic "American Pie," and I've heard recent rumors that Brittney and the Material Girl may be joining forces to duet on a CD, so maybe there are some similarities. If she would just admit to being an entertainer instead of a musician, it would not annoy me so. There is room in this world for all kinds of people. But calling herself a musician...HA! One day, Brittney is going to pop an implant and gain a few stretch marks from having her and Justin Timberlake's child and she'll have no musical talent to fall back on. Her only return to MTV will be on "Where Are They Now." However, until then, boys across America like my little cousin, (and sadly 40 year old men as well), will continue to fawn over her as they do now, popping out individual chest hairs with each glimpse at her dancing in her skimpy clothes.

Christina Aguillera, as annoyingly dimwitted and slutty as she comes across in interviews, has most definitely got an incredible voice. It's a wonder of physics how they got that 400LB gospel singer stuffed into her 98LB body. And while she is currently relying on formula-based pop success: (trotting around in low slung, painted-on pants and midriff-baring, cleavage-enhancing strips of material she calls tops, pronouncing her last name 'A-gee-ler-a' at first then 'A-gee-lerrrrrr-ra' when Latin music was becoming more popular, singing mostly superficial lyrics, giggling like she's on crack during every interview), she can indeed belt it out with the best of them. She has also mentioned more than once that she prefers an edgier sound, more R&B, but was told by her executives she must do it poppy if she wanted to be signed. Now with her success, she has claimed that she is planning on doing things her way for her next album and gaining back some of her musical integrity. If I had to bet on any of these teeny boppers for future success, my money is on her.

As for the other boy bands and pop girls out there, because the audience is so fickle and fads so fleeting, these dated bands will one day go the path of NKOTB and fade away, returning years later when no one remembers them to make equally fleeting solo attempts such as Jordan Knight and Joey McIntyre of NKOTB and Ricky Martin of Menudo. Hopefully their decline will happen sooner rather than later. One can only take so much butterflies and puppy dogs before they go postal.

"It's a Backstreet Boys world and I want to kill myself." - Billy Corigan, Smashing Pumpkins



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