Why Boy Bands can't be killed

It appears that once again, the decennial curse of the Boy Bands has afflicted us. Two of them are out there now, (three if you count  Justin Bieber, who obviously isn’t a band but follows the same formula), flying up the charts with their songs of innocent puppy love while pulling PG-rated dance moves that make teenage girls go crazy. One such band, One Direction, performed as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live last weekend, although they didn’t appear to be any more musically accomplished than something you’d see at a junior high talent show.

As much as I disliked New Kids on the Block and N’Sync in their heydays, you couldn’t deny that the members of each had legitimate musical talent and decent dancing chops. By contrast, One Direction was out of tune and their dancing was little more than shuffling around the stage and swinging their arms in vague unison in a performance that brought to mind what the Des Moines Leader’s music critic must have seen when he wrote his review of the Cherry Sisters (“the wailing of damned souls”). If it wasn’t for Lana Del Rey, they’d easily go down as the worst musical performers on SNL this season.

But it still got me to thinking about why this sub-genre seems to pop up every 10 years or so, make millions of teenage girls go crazy for three or four years, and then suddenly returns to whatever musical hell it came from.  This seems to be the case going all the way back to when Menudo and New Edition started the phenomenon back in the early 1980s, and it seems to me that it returns whenever pop music in general is undergoing some kind of change in sound and sensibility.

Take, for instance, those first two bands, Menudo and New Edition, both of which became popular in the early 1980s (and you could throw in the dutchy-passing Musical Youth, too, which was Boy Band-ish at the time, but would not meet the contemporary definition given the way the rules have evolved in the last 30 years). Their popularity came at a time when   pop music was evolving from the disco of the 1970s into the New Wave-influenced pop music and, later, hair metal that came to define the 1980s. A pattern was established here—young girls went crazy, everyone else cringed, millions of records were sold, and then just like that, it was done. New Edition was washed up by the end of Reagan’s first term and Menudo never achieved anything more than novelty act status outside of Puerto Rico.

And the so the rest of the 1980s was blissfully Boy Band free, until 1989, when “General” Maurice Starr, the same man responsible for New Edition, crapped out New Kids on the Block. Following their success came the second generation of Boy Bands—Boyz II Men, Color Me Badd and a few more whose names I mercifully can’t remember. This, too, came a time of a significant change in direction of pop music, as big hair, big shoulder pads and big Zubaz pants gave way to the hard-edged alternative onslaught of acts like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Nirvana.

But as quick as you can say Jordan Joey Jonathan Donnie and Danny, the second wave Boy Bands disappeared and, just as before, the genre went into hiding. Until it came back at the turn of the century, with N’Sync, Backstreet Boys, O Town and, again, a bunch more that I’ve forgotten because if I hadn’t, I’d have killed myself a long time ago. And again, this was at a time when pop radio was switching from ‘90s alternative to the hip hop that would dominate radio airwaves for the aughts decade. And it, too, was short-lived. If you count Hanson’s 1998 debut as its birth, then Timberlake’s first solo release in 1992 marked its death.

And now we come to the latest incarnation of Boy Bands, again at a time when pop music is showing a shift in sensibilities. As hip hop was destroyed by its own rigid creativity-destroying adherence to the principles of street cred, music in the past year has shifted to house-influenced club beats of David Guetta, Pitbull and the rest, and the more traditional pop-rock sounds of acts like Foster the People, Adele, Gotye and fun.

And, just as in past transitions, there’s Justin and One Direction and who knows how many more Boy Bands on the horizon. But why does this happen? Why do Boy Bands return to the fore at the same time radio guts its playlists and pop music ventures off in new directions? I can only speculate. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that each generation of teen girls embraces its Boy Bands every 10 years, which is about the same time their generation rejects its older siblings’ pop music and establishes its own tastes.

But those same girls quickly age and grow tired of their Boy Bands, and the genre becomes so disdained that their younger sisters want nothing to do with cute boys crooning comforting songs of innocent crushes. It loses so much credibility that it takes an entire generation to wash away the embarrassment and it’s not until a whole new group of girls—most of whom weren’t even born during the previous wave of Boy Band hysteria and don’t realize how stale sounding the music is—go crazy all over again with what they think is something new.

There are, of course, outliers and anomalies. For instance, The Jonas Brothers, a Boy Band that was popular when hip hop was still the dominant sound. But it seems that, as stale as the Boy Band sound is, their success seems to signal a time when pop music is about to get interesting again.