It Came From Orlando

Back - Index - Submissions - - What is RSS? Date: Jun 28, 2000 Source: GQ, July/2000 (with Mark Wahlberg on the cover) Submitted By: Jenniex0x@aol.com From page: 57, 58, and 60, with picture inset of Backstreet Boys, caption reads: ARTISTS OF THE YEAR?! That's what Rolling Stone anointed the Backstreet Boys. Yep, these guys are ready to take on Springsteen. Author: David Kamp (GQ's editor-at-large) Thanks to malls, Mouseketeers and beautiful Orlando, Florida, teenybop pop is all the rage---and a bland breed of boy bands is topping the charts. "We'd been waiting for the next phase in pop music since Nirvana. What we didn't realize is that the boy bands had already given it to us." WHAT'S THE NEXT big thing? Pop music had been holding its breath for a long time, waiting for the answer to this question. Since about the mid 1990's, in fact. That's when the grunge boom died down and it was presumed that some equally exciting movement would coalesce and give us----remember this phrase?---"the new Seattle." But it didn't happen. Though hip-hop chugged neither Britpop nor electronica nor neo-ska caught on as it was supposed to, and pop, much to the consternation of record-company executives and MTV programmers, entered a sustained, morale-busting period of flaccidity and patchy alterna-murk. How peculiar, then, that just as people seemed to stop looking, an untouted, uninvited next big thing reared up right under everyone's nose. Last year the Backstreet Boys' third album Millennium, stunned the music industry by moving a million-plus units in its first week of release, becoming the fastest-selling LP of all time. Not quite a year later, Millennium's feat was obliterated by 'NSync's No Strings Attached, which sold two million-plus within a week of its March release. Factor in the multiplatinum sales of the girl popsters Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, along with those of such lesser boy bands as 98 Degrees, and a disquieting home truth took shape: Teenybop pop, whatever your opinion of it, is the most cohesive American musical movement since grunge, and the boffo-selling boy bands are its leading lights. As this news has sunk in, there's been a palpable attempt to...make sense of the phenomenon (at least by those of us who aren't enthralled 13-year old girls). Unsurprisingly, a good deal of the reaction has been negative---knocking the Backstreet Boys and 'NSync for the sheer froth-factory ridiculousness: Oooh, A.J., you're so hard with your tattoos and shades! Postpubescence isn't wearing too well on you, is it, Nick? Nice 'fro, Justin! Interestingly shaped head, Lance! But the much stranger, more notable response has come from the other extreme: people who really want to like the boy bands, to ascribe artistry and vast talent to them. Could you ever have envisioned, the first time you saw the Backstreet Boys prancing around in tank tops in a video, that they would become Rolling Stone's reader-selected artists of the year, as they did this past January? Could you have imagined that Rolling Stone would become a leading voice of boy-band apologia, arguing, "Boy bands, guy rock---what's the big diff?" in defense of the Backstreet Boys' receipt of this honor, and asserting that 'NSync's songs, "like their labelmate Spears', aren't just sappy, lovelorn ballads, they're sappy, lovelorn ballads brimming with the pent-up tension of teenhood"? Popularity, evidently, is a big persuader. The New York Post's music critic, Dan Aquilante, was recently moved to declare that the members of 'Nsync are "talented young men [who] have taken the modern male choir to the next level," as if they were singing Debussy. I can only credit this sort of delusional overpraise to awe at the groups' market force. It's happened before; in the early 90's, one critic unflinchingly described New Kids on the Block album Step by Step as "their Sgt. Pepper." But in that era, the last significant high-water mark of teenybop, groups such as New Kids and Color Me Badd were widely considered a joke; the smart, thrashy art-punk band Faith No More regularly included a mocking cover of the New Kids' "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" in its set, and this action pretty much summed up the rock firmament's attitude toward bubblegum. Today, by contrast, no one even remarks upon the remarkableness of the Backstreet Boys' sharing a stage with Sting and dangle---bona fide artistes!---in VH1 's Men Strike Back concert. (D'Angelo and the Backstreet Boys---it's like if Marvin Gaye had duetted with Bobby Sherman!) Are the boy bands really this good, this likable? Well, they're not without a certain cornball appeal. " I Want It That Way," the Backstreet Boys' monster hit from last year, is a first-rate prom song, with an insinuating refrain worthy of Goffin and King, even if its lyrics are baffling. (Why does the male narrator say Believe when I say, "I want it that way" and then admonish his girl I never wanna hear you say "I want it that way"? Is he some kind of contradictory psychopath?) And there's a genuinely schoolboyish innocence to the boy bands that sets them apart from their more cynically hustled counterparts across the gender line. Whereas Spears, Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, and Mandy Moore are straight-up sex sells, unbuttoned, pushed-up and shrink-wrapped to promote their barely legal shagability (or in Moore's case, illegal shagability), the boys win junior-high hearts nore through their singing and charisma than through their looks. Between the two leading groups, only Kevin Richardson, the broodiest Backstreet Boy, could be considered conventionally handsome. Indeed, the boy bands' very motleyness adds to the fun. It invites fans to identify their favorite members and offer vigorous defenses of their choices: Backstreet's preening Nick Carter, because he's jockishly cute; 'NSync's paisano homeboy Joey Fatone, because your mom would love him and because he'd help your dad fix the car; 98 Degree's pumped-up Nick Lachey, because he's hunky in a kind of dumb, sweet, guiltless, Joe Dallesandro way. But ultimately I can't make the leap---I can't pretend to like boypop. It doesn't represent the end of Western civilization as we know it, but it's pretty damn parched terrain artistically, and it's disturbing that people want to make more of it than it is. When you hear the Backstreet Boys' A. J. McLean publicly say, "The Beatles…were actually the fist boy band, and then nowadays, in this whole '90s genre, it was us"---well, that sort of thing can't go unchecked. THERE'S NOTHING inherently wrong with the idea of teen pop---that's all that the music of Phil Spector and the Brill Building tunesmiths was ever meant to be, and the results were often spellbinding. So there's reason to believe that the boy bands, operating as they do in the old conveyor-belt tradition---leaving most of the writing, producing and instrument playing to others---could fashion some great singles. The problem is that the generic notion of teen pop has devolved dramatically and horribly since the heyday of Spector, and even since the heyday of Tommy James and the Shondells. Whereas the old-time hit makers imbued even their most throwaway material with a degree of craft, melody and quirk, the music the boy bands make is so bland and predigested, it almost isn't music. All boypop is essentially whitewashed black music; soul and R & B borrowings run willy-nilly through the deflavorizer and set to gleaming, whooshy production. The Backstreet Boys' Richardson has noted that "if we were five black guys, people wouldn't give us as hard a time," and he has a point: None of the black vocal groups that flourished a few years back, such as Boyz II Men, Shai and Silk, were ever saddled with the boy-band label, though their sound was not dissimilar to the current boypop. But this doesn't let the Backstreet Boys off the hook; it merely demonstrates how lame, histrionic, and ersatz-soulful even black teen pop has become. Basically, boypop operates in two modes: the light funk workout, frequently punctuated by blasts of Arsenio-era synth (WHEEMP! Wheemp-WHEEMP!) and the anodyne ballad of greeting-card sentiment (This is a battle we've won/And with this vow, forever has now begun---'Nsync, "This I Promise You"). The teen pop of Tamla-Motown and the Brill Building was almost as formulaic, but it packed real heart and drama within its narrow parameters. Witness that shouted-out Sit down, girl---I think I love you! in the Jackson 5's "ABC" (to cite a proto-boy-band light-funk workout) or that chiming gone, gone, gone in the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Loving Feelin'" (to cite a proto-boy-band ballad). In the entire boypop canon, there isn't a single moment as exhilarating or idiosyncratic; the music just doesn't engage. Boyband apologists are fond of praising the groups for the "supertight harmonies," but in the absence of great songs in which these harmonies can be deployed, the praise is meaningless. Boypop seems to be crippled by a compulsory lameness, an inbred notion that this---Wheemp-WHEEMP!---is what pop music must sound like. It's musical analogue to the malling of America, the process whereby charming, ad hoc Main Streets have been superseded by chain stores, theme parks and enclosed shopping pavilions (and people have considered this a good thing). In Rolling Stone's cover story on 'Nsync, there's a fascinating quote from the mother of Justin Timberlake, the group's putative heartthrob, describing how her son got his start in show business. "After he auditioned at the mall for Star Search," she says, "we went down to Orlando for the show, and that's where he heard about The Mouse Club." The mall. Star Search. Orlando. The Mouse Club. In just this one sentence, an entire universe of plastique pop complacency is summed up. As you've probably heard by now, Timberlake, along with Spears, Aguilera, and his fellow 'Nsyncer JC Chasez, was a star of the early-1990s version of The Mickey Mouse Club---a program that today stands as one of the most influential cultural forces of our time, even though no child or ex-child I know of ever actually watched it. The Mouse Club footage rounded up by VH1 for its Before They Were Rock Stars series reveals the program to have been a less extreme version of the Jon Benet kidsploitation pageants, with the pre- or barely pubescent teenybop stars of tomorrow going through their trouperly paces, boogying to New Jack Swing hits in checked shirts and shortie jumpers. They're farm-raised celebrities, brought to us by the good biotechnicians of Disney; an entirely different breed from the organic, free-range likes of, say, '50s doo-woppers Dion and the Belmonts and Little Anthony and the Imperials, kid acts that were more flavorful but less presentable. Even Today, as sort-of grown-ups, the boy bands remain in Disney's orbit. Members of the Backstreet Boys and "Nsync make their homes in Orlando, Florida, as does Lou Pearlman, the Svengali-manager from whom both groups parted litigiously, and Mandy Moore. Indeed, Orlando, in addition to boasting Disney World and the Epcot Center, has developed an elaborate, extensive cheese-pop subculture, attracting teen hopefuls from across the country who take jobs at the theme parks and theaters in hopes of hooking up with like-minded souls and harmonizing their way (super-tightly) to stardom. Brace yourself: There's going to be a whole new slew of boy bands on the way, presumably with names like Gotcha!, HarMoney and $astin. The Orlando sound: It's the new Seattle! And it shows no sign of flagging. But out of the nice things about pop music is that it has demonstrated a flair for cyclical self-preservation---that just as you're about to count it out, and it's going through a crap period, it slaps itself across the face, wakes up and repents. The Beatles saved us from Pat Boone. Punk saved us from progrock and bad disco. Nirvana saved us from the New Kids and poodle metal. Well, somebody, anybody…Here we are now. Entertain us. Comment on this item. 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