If the past week has proved anything with Liam Payne’s untimely death, it is that love for boybands has always, and will always, burn with the fire of a thousand suns. Could Liam ever have reached such stratospheric heights of fame and worship had he struck it alone without being sold as part of the One Direction package? In the absence of a reverse crystal ball, we will never know. But no one can ignore the irresistible pull of a boyband in the young malleable heart of a teenage girl, who will cherish a small part of that love forever, long after her musical tastes have evolved into something far more high-brow.
What’s so great about a boyband?
What is it about boybands that give them all this unyielding power over teenage girls? Before we dive deep into the murky world of bubble-gum pop, it is necessary to define just what, exactly, constitutes a boyband. For anyone who grew up in the nineties and studied the collective works of the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync with the rigour of a PhD student, there can be no question easier to answer. Hint: it is not Coldplay or Oasis or even The Beatles with their samey-haircuts. For a start, not only are all these individuals Men as opposed to Boys, they also know a thing or two about music. (When you are in a boyband, it is far more important to leave the art of music to the real people in charge, like your manager or record label.)
As every millennial knows, a boyband is an entity that travels in packs of four or five and consists of young male things singing about their undying love. Think Boyzone, Westlife, 98 Degrees, and yes, Backstreet Boys and their arch nemesis ’N Sync. If you have ever flicked through a boyband calendar (yes, we have borne witness to such a thing) or had a casual relationship with MTV in the days of yore, you will know that boyband members are mandated by law to be beautiful. They have access to the most gifted of hair stylists. They do not always know how to button their shirts properly.
Musical competence is nice to have but not required. The more beautiful members are thrust at the front to sing the melodies. It is a job reserved for Nick Carter or Brian Littrell of the Backstreet Boys, whilst the slightly more ugly ones remain out of focus in the background to harmonise as required.
If you were Team ’N Sync, singing the melodies was the job for JC or Justin Timberlake. That’s the other thing: if you hailed from the nineties, it was crucial that you pick a side, or how would you ever build a personality? You could not possibly love both Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync. It was one or the other. It did not matter that their songs followed an identical pattern, right down to the final key change. What mattered was that you swore allegiance to I Want It That Way, and not It’s Gonna Be Me. (Or vice versa – I am no longer one to judge.)
Escapism at its finest
Speaking of I Want It That Way or its cohort It’s Gonna Be Me, much like musical competence, lyrical prowess is also not necessary. Grammar is not the forte of boybands (although on reflection in this day and age of social media captions, good grammar may not be the hill to die on). Consider the linguistically cunning opening verse in I Want It That Way, the number 1 Backstreet Boy hit of 1999:
You are my fire
The one desire
Believe when I say
I want it that way
A couple of verses later, all this talk of fire and desire naturally segues into this:
Am I your fire?
Your one desire
Yes, I know it’s too late
But I want it that way
Such moving poetry is enough to send your average teenage girl’s heart racing. She, after all, is stuck under her parents’ rule. She has to obey their nonsense about what time she has to be home. She has to study for exams she does not care for and complete homework she despises. In this regimental, restricted life, when a beautiful blond man tells her that she is his fire and his one desire, who is she to still her beating heart? Equally, when Justin Timberlake tells her:
Baby, when you finally
Get to love somebody
Guess what
It’s gonna be me
How can she not fall head over heels after this declaration of undying love? Especially when Justin manages to make ‘me’ rhyme with ‘may’? Is this not the purest form of escapism? To be whisked away by someone waxing lyrical about fire and desire and getting to love somebody? If anyone is in any doubt, in The Big Bang Theory, Penny is enmeshed in a fantasy about her husband Leonard, where he utters the sickening lines, “Your love is like a river, peaceful and deep. Your soul is like a secret that I never could keep.” Fantasy Leonard did not manufacture this poetry on his own, but was, in fact, quoting God Must Have Spent A Little More Time On You, yet another hit ’N Sync song. A swooning Penny can barely contain herself.
An organic evolution
Penny’s love for ’N Sync may burn forever, but for some of us, the boyband mania dies down when we reach adulthood. We turn to more sensible music and are taught a hard lesson when our children perform the biggest eye roll imaginable when they listen to it in the car. Which is ironic, considering their unwavering devotion to the various offerings of BTS and Stray Kids.
Do we say anything to them? Of course we do, because it is our job as parents to sneer at our children’s unrefined taste. Our children, in turn, sneer right back at our musical choices, which in their eyes hail back to the Dark Ages. Such is the circle of life. After all, if eye-rolling parents had successfully managed to end boybands of the nineties, we may never have got It’s Gonna Be Me, and in turn, the greatest meme the twenty-first century has given us: Justin’s grinning visage popping up every year on April 30 bearing the legend ‘It’s gonna be may.’
Without Justin and his boyband history, we would never know when May is around the corner, and for that, we should offer the sincerest of thanks.
