Toronto Star Review: 3/15/00, Toronto, ON

Back - Index - Submissions - - What is RSS? Date: Mar 17, 2000 Source: Toronto Star Submitted By: Ivy C As long as they love you . . . Ride it out Boys, you've earned those shrieks By Ben Rayner Toronto Star Pop Music Critic ``It's 'orrible, really. But they like that, the little girls.'' Danny, the fabulously damaged drug dealer in the movie Withnail And I, was referring to a species of doll that soils itself and thus requires a change of diaper from its young caretaker. But his words apply just as well to the Backstreet Boys experience. Or, at least, the outsider's view of the Backstreet Boys experience. None of the 35,000 wailing and weeping fans at SkyDome who took in last night's lengthy encore presentation of the high-tech, body-armoured aerobic workout (``a lotta lights, a lotta special effects and stuff, a lotta pyro,'' as stripey-haired A.J. ``Bone'' McLean put it during a brief address to the crowd) the Boys last brought to town in November would, I dare say, term it ``horrible.'' And the word is, perhaps, a little harsh: Beyond the maddening emptiness of its pre-fab stable of love songs and ``Backstreet's Back''-style party numbers, when it comes to such oft-overlooked details as stage production, choreography, levitating boogie boards and raising an eyebrow for your closeup on the monitors, the ultra-professional Florida andy-pop quintet is operating on its own level altogether. It can certainly afford to. The Boys - McLean, Kevin Richardson, Brian Littrell, Howie Dorough and Nick Carter - made more money from concert-ticket and record sales (nearly 10 million copies, to date, of their Millennium album) last year than any other act on the planet. The fivesome's choice of Toronto as the ``crazy'' concluding stop on its monstrously lucrative Into the Millennium tour, too, was acknowledgement of early supporter Canada's complicity in its thriving global career. Music writers, bitter that they're paid to spend an evening doing what any number of 13-year-old girls would gladly murder their families to do, despise this kind of phenomenon - especially when the supposedly short-lived career of a disposable boy band so stubbornly refuses to be short-lived - because it confirms the utter lack of faith they've long suspected the public holds in their opinions. Maybe the world really would be a better place if everybody did as they were told and bought Built to Spill albums. But as long as there's an ``As Long As You Love Me'' or an ``All I Have To Give'' out there, we'll never know. And would an obscurist like John Cale ever be so heart-meltingly sweet as to dedicate a song to ``all the mothers out there,'' as the Boys dutifully do each night with ``The Perfect Fan''? Why fight it? ``You might not see us for a while,'' Richardson said at one point, announcing Backstreet would now be going ``back into the laboratory'' to make another album, ``but it don't mean we're not working.'' That's the galling thing. The obvious energy each hyperactive member threw into his sweaty performance was evidence the Backstreet Boys are, indeed, working. What else to do but grudgingly encourage them to enjoy riding this thing out as long as it lasts? They've earned the shrieks. By Ben Rayner Toronto Star Pop Music Critic Comment on this item. 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