The boy-band boom: big, bright, exhausting

From time to time, the world falls in love and/or hate with boy bands.
Record sales soar; the Backstreet Boys alone have sold 130 million. Some girls scream their approval, some guys disagree. Noel Gallagher, of the British group Oasis, called boy bands “the spawn of Satan.”
And then, after a slight pause, it starts all over again.
Now a documentary views a key phase: “The Boy Band Boom of the ‘90s” airs from 8-10 p.m. Saturday (Feb. 8) on CW.
That’s not to be confused with the ‘80s, with New Edition and New Kids on the Block. Or the ‘60s, when Motown was full of Temptations and Tops and such. Or current times, with One Direction and then K-Pop and BTS.
This film starts in the early ‘90s, when opportunities seemed limited. “It was grunge or rap,” AJ McLean said. “That was all there was.”
(All the quotes here are from the documentary.)
McLean was the first person hired for the Backstreet Boys. Its first single peaked at No. 69 on the Billboard chart.
It reached the top-five, however, in five European countries. After two years of overseas success, the group scored big in the U.S.
The “boy band” label offers alliteration (as does “girl group”) without clarity. These are men, not boys; they’re singers, not band instrumentalists.
At the most extreme, the groups were assembled by one man, who held auditions and seemed to go with archetypes – the tough guy, the sweet kid, etc. Lou Pearlman created the Backstreet Boys, O-Town and others, while having a hand in ‘N Sync.
(Eventually, the groups dumped him and he went on to other activities. Pearlman died in prison, after pleading guilty to a Ponzi scheme.)
Many of the groups tried to shed the image of an artificial group. “We really were the exception to the rule,” Nick Lachey of 98 Degrees (shown here in its mature years) said. “We were the band that put ourselves together.”
He and Justin Jeffre had attended the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati. They linked with his brother, Drew Lachey, and moved to Los Angeles to join another Ohioan, Jeff Timmons.
There, they scrambled. “We’d go to Taco Bell and sing for tacos,” Nick Lachey said.
Then came the audition for Motown Records, which signed them quickly. The Motown link gave the group some music credibility; for the first few records, the label emphasized the music, not the cute-guy visuals.
Others wished they could focus on the music. Chris Kirkpatrick insisted ‘N Sync was created “because we loved to sing, not because we wanted to be on lunchboxes.”
But the visuals kept getting brasher, from the shirtless Nick Lachey and Timmons in 98 Degrees to the costumes of A.J. McLean in the Backstreet Boys. At one poing, McLeand said, “I looked like a washed-up magician.”
And the colors kept getting brighter. Some groups, designer Joe Zee said, “looked like an exploded bag of Skittles.”
The promotion efforts kept growing, too. The Backstreet Boys hit an extreme when, via luxury plane, they visited six continents in 100 hours.
Others also seemed to be in perpetual motion. “It’s serious business, being a boy band,” Nick Lachey said.
Video directors and others kept pushing new ideas, he said. “We literally said yes to everything.”
Even to the ultimate video stunt – singing atop the Golden Gate Bridge.
That was impressive and scary; life was busy. At times, Drew Lachey said, he just wished he could “go to a house and sit and watch TV.”
There’s time for that now. Most of the ‘90s boy bands are still around, but there’s less commotion and more time to sit and watch TV.