Midnight at the Oasis: Staying Up Late With the Backstreet-Besotted

Back - Index - Submissions - - What is RSS? Date: Nov 22, 2000 Source: Inside Music Submitted By: Treasa By Alex Pappademas Tuesday , November 21 05:51 p.m. By 10:30 p.m., the temperature outside Tower Records' Lincoln Plaza store in Manhattan is down to a balmy 43 degrees. As the night wears on, it will drop lower. But to the 200-odd Backstreet Boys fans who've gathered this Monday evening to purchase the band's third album, Black and Blue, the second the clock ticks past midnight, this does not matter. Some of the assembled faithful huddle under blankets, but most of them are up and around, bouncing, chattering, ebullient. The wind may be whipping at their flared jeans and biting through their thin bubble parkas, but they glow like they've been mainlining Progresso. Periodically, grumpy Tower staffers emerge from the store to herd everyone into a single-file line, possibly concerned about the store's liability in the event of a spontaneous outbreak of joyful crowd-surfing. The fans respond to this hall-monitoring the way you'd expect -- they comply, but with the giggling deference young girls reserve only for the truly clueless. Like, don't they know what day it is? The Backstreet Boys will not be here tonight. They've spent most of the week leading up to Black and Blue's release in the air, spanning the globe by chartered jet to promote the new record, touching down periodically for personal appearances in places like Japan and South Africa. On Friday, they were at the MTV Europe Music Awards, accepting their trophies in matching three-quarter-length shearling coats, looking like the world's handsomest goat-herders. But on Tuesday, they'll be back in the States, just in time to perform on MTV's Total Request Live. They're also giving a special homecoming press conference, at which they may or may not discuss their popularity as compared to that of Jesus. Fans who buy the record early Tuesday will get wristbands admitting them to the press conference, which is why the excitement level outside Tower tonight falls somewhere on the graph between Really Really Excited and Really Really Really Excited Omigod; the fans have gathered not only to get their hands on Black and Blue, but for a chance to get thisclose to the Boys themselves. As Jennifer, 16, puts it, ''I can always download the record from Napster or something. But to meet them, or see them in person -- priceless.'' To come here, the fans have blown off work, ditched school in the middle of midterms (''A big chunk of my grade is going to go out the window,'' one girl sighs). They may not have come from the four corners of the Earth, but they've come from many different parts of New Jersey, and from Harlem and Long Island, and from as far away as Syracuse and Indiana and Texas. There are fans as young as 12 here, and a great many fiftyish ladies old enough to be moms, even though many are here on their own. Michelle, 41, says she became a fan after listening to the group's 1998 album, Millennium, with her 4-year-old son, who's back home in Michigan. ''I was going to prove to him the evils of these manufactured boy bands that are put together by these evil producers, but I just fell in love with every song on the CD.'' You can count the number of men present on one hand. They're mostly there supporting wives, sisters or girlfriends; appropriately, they stand around like husbands in a maternity ward, waiting for the blessed event, still unsure how they got here in the first place. Most of the fans in attendance have camped out for Backstreet-related events before; the release of Millennium, the group's appearances on TRL or CBS's Early Show, club dates by A.J. McLean's wacky country side project ''Johnny No-Name.'' When the Boys performed at VH-1's ''Men Strike Back'' concert at Madison Square Garden a few months ago, Kristen, 14, waited for hours in the pouring rain. ''We had jeans on,'' she explains, ''so they wouldn't let us in, so we ran through Penn Station, went down to Kmart, threw our clothes away, changed into an outfit there, ran back, they let us in and we had third-row -- I went to see them when they were on CBS, and I started to cry because they were, like, 10 feet away from me and I couldn't, like, touch them or grab them. But I'm going to grab them tomorrow. You can count on that.'' When tickets for the Boys' Nassau Coliseum show went on sale, 16-year-old Maria, from Westbury, Long Island, waited in a thunderstorm to get second-section tickets for the show, then paid a scalper $650 for front-row seats. Maria holds up a cornflower-blue baby-tee with the date of the Nassau show -- September 27 -- spelled out in iron-on lettering, along with the dates of all the other Backstreet events she's attended. Maria's nails are painted with black and blue swirls. This is how it goes for most of the night -- a spirit of friendly competition underscores the camaraderie. One girl boasts of waiting out in the rain, so another announces that she waited in a thunderstorm, or during a plague of locusts or a meteor shower. When one self-proclaimed ''obsessive'' brags that she knows everything about Brian Littrell, right down to the time he was born -- ''1:37 a.m. He's 11 years, 8 days, 19 hours and 11 minutes older than me'' -- another volunteers Littrell's birth weight (8 pounds, 11 ounces. But you probably already knew that). Sireeda is 19 and goes to Tufts. She cleaned out her savings account to buy a bus ticket to get here, leaving plenty of schoolwork back in Massachusetts, but she's not concerned -- this matters more. ''If we think back to our parents,'' she says, ''my mom would sit here and wait for -- I don't know about the Beatles, she wasn't into the Beatles that much, but, like, the Jackson 5, she'd sit around and wait outside to see a Jackson 5 show. I guess what makes it different is everyone's, like, 'Oooh, boy band,' and everyone's, like, 'Ugh.' The Beatles weren't considered a boy band, but they were! They were the king of boy bands. None of our parents are over the Beatles at all, and it's been, like, over 30 years.'' ''It's something good to look back on when you get old,'' Jennifer agrees. ''You can be, like, 'Oh yeah, I used to sleep out for 10 hours -- ' '' ''We lived in the era of the BSB-'N Sync rivalry, we were there,'' Sireeda says. ''And our children will be, like, 'Oh my god, you talked to Nick Carter?' And I'll be, like, 'Yeah, yeah, I said hi to him! I'll be 40. He'll be cracked-out, I don't know.'' ''You're only young once,'' Jennifer says. ''You might as well sleep out a few times.'' About that rivalry: The assembled Backstreet fans are basically unanimous in their belief that Black and Blue will shatter the first-week album sales record of 2.4 million that 'N Sync's No Strings Attached set earlier this year. Many have harsh words for the competition, avowing that 'N Sync owes their success to the Boys, and the bubblegum-pop revival they engendered, and speculating that in a Backstreet-less alternate reality, the members of 'N Sync would be male prostitutes or McDonald's employees. This aside, a number of fans refuse to admit that the rivalry actually exists, because rivalries are for potential losers. Like Yankee fans asked for their take on the Red Sox, these Backstreeters feel that measuring their heroes against 'N Sync is like comparing apples and yucky, fat, phony, copycat oranges who can't even sing. According to Sireeda, her preference for the Boys is ''a respect thing... whenever I listen to their music, it means something to me, versus 'N Sync, where it's like, ooh, cool beat -- for a minute. How much can you get out of 'Bye Bye Bye'? But 'Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely' -- I used that to get over the death of my cousin. If you open my CD player, the first thing you see is Backstreet Boys, 'cause they're the music I listen to when I have issues or problems, or I need to feel happy or better about myself. They're my universal one.'' A little over a half hour before midnight, a spontaneous ''I Want It That Way'' sing-along breaks out at the back of the line. Most of the singers are members of the Mature BSB Fan Club, a Dallas-based organization for Backstreet fans 25 and older. The Mature BSB Fans know each other from the Internet. Some of them have name tags or carry black-and-blue balloons. ''We have a lot of moms,'' explains Lynne Sessions, 33, one of the club's co-founders. ''I was introduced to the Backstreet Boys by my then-8-year-old niece, who made me drive around in the car and listen to ''I Want It That Way'' a bazillion times. I ended up getting on the Internet to find out more about the Backstreet Boys -- I'd never been on the Internet before this, really -- and to find out more about tour dates, and to see if they were even of legal age that I could even think they were, y'know... '' Her fears assuaged, Lynne began frequenting Backstreet chat rooms like the one on Backstreetboys.com, where the club was born. That was about 16 months ago; today, Sessions says, the club has about 1,600 members, in locations as far-flung as Japan and Spain and Australia. Club members travel around the country to attend Backstreet concerts together; in July, the group held its first annual convention, in -- where else? -- Orlando. As a club co-founder, Sessions has been lucky enough to meet all five Boys on various occasions, but is quick to emphasize that getting close to the band isn't the organization's goal. The Mature Fans have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Boys' designated charities; a pair of meet-and-greets for Brian Littrell's Healthy Heart Club Foundation, which Littrell founded after having surgery for a heart ailment last year, brought in over $30,000 apiece. Still, Sessions admits to being a little starstruck the first time she encountered an actual Boy. ''The first time I met Kevin,'' she says, ''I could not speak. I'm a trial lawyer, so I'm usually not at a loss for words. Kevin walks by, and I'm, like, 'Great show!' in this pathetic voice. That was about the extent of my initial interaction with them.'' At midnight, the doors open, and the fans file into the store. There is no shoving, and as they emerge, clutching their Tower bags or eagerly prying open CD jewel cases, they don't scream or jump up and down. The anxious buzz disappears, as slumber-party yammering is replaced by soft, high-pitched coos. One girl shuffles out and has trouble negotiating the sidewalk because her legs won't work. It's not clear if the problem is joy or frostbite. Instead of helping her, the girl's friend jumps back to take her picture with a disposable camera. Jen, 19, skipped work at ''a big car company'' to wait outside the store for a full day; she and her companions are the first in and the first out. ''All my best friends and I and my sisters, it's made us closer as a family,'' she says. ''My mom's also a fan. By doing this, you get to experience it together. You're there for each other -- I saw girls here who I saw last time, and you just hug each other.'' The knock on Backstreet is that they're a pre-fab five, emoting through songs outsourced from Sweden, their every breath as focus-grouped as an Al Gore stump speech. But that critique leaves out fans like Jen, for whom the BSB experience has grown into something bigger than the band itself -- maybe not larger than life, but bigger than commerce. More importantly, the way the Boys keep swinging -- even with legions of cultural commentators lining up to pronounce teen pop dead -- suggests that the fans who testify to BSB's greatness while disparaging the competition may have a point. If boy bands are truly interchangeable, why haven't post-Backstreet contenders like BB Mak, Five and 98 Degrees blown up to similar proportions? Maybe the Boys really do get slipped the best songs and execute them better than the rest, maybe they really are empirically cuter. And if the power-puff girls outside Tower seem almost drunk on the pop-cultural clout they currently wield -- as participants in a capitalist movement that's turned communal despite the snickering of a playa-hating patriarchy -- maybe it's because they know they're right. In other words, regardless of whether there's a Sgt. Pepper's in their future, maybe the Backstreet Boys aren't just a boy band in the same way that the Beatles weren't just a skiffle group. Having emerged from the store, Jen's sister Christine has been struggling, teary-eyed, with the shrinkwrap on her copy of the record. She gets it open and starts paging through the liner notes, reading Backstreet Boy Kevin's thank-yous out loud. '' 'To all the people that stood in line, slept in the rain and cold to see us on TRL or see our show, or bought our records, or just say hi... To all our incredible fans, the world over, I love you and I'll see you soon.' '' ''He knows about us,'' she says. ''He knows about us!'' 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