Best Song Ever
Boy bands have been a staple in American Pop culture since boys became men. No matter your age, there’s likely a boyband you heard on the radio constantly. From the 1990s to the late 2010s boybands were nearly unavoidable. But now, the boy band as we know it is dead. What happened to the boyband craze?
What Am I
Most people intrinsically know what a boyband is. It can be difficult to put into words what the dividing line is, but you can feel it.
“Fall Out Boy? No, that’s not a boy band. A boy band is like, different,” said Lexi Garsik while talking about her favorite boy bands.
For most people, whether they know it or not, the line in the sand is the same.
A boy band must be all boys that sing, dance, produce catchy songs, and have a clean image. Typically, boy bands also have no lead man, play mostly pop music, and produce songs about girls. Most importantly, the majority of members of a boy band are attractive.
Larger Than Life
The music industry wasn’t always as focused on image in both a reputation sense and visual sense. For a long time, it didn’t really matter how beautiful/handsome you looked or how you acted so long as your music was good.
MTV shook that all up when it got popular in the 80s and 90s. It’s debut broadcast, “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, was indicative of a future to come.
With a newfound focus on the visual appeal of a musician as well as the melodic appeal, the path for boybands started to become clear.
Step By Step
New Kids on the Block were the breakout American boy band. Their first major hit, “Please Don’t Go Girl”, was released in 1988 and reached Number 10 on the Billboards Hot 100. They weren’t alone for long though.
Lou Pearlman, after seeing the success of New Kids on the Block, helped create boy bands that became pillars in American Pop culture. Boy bands like Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and 98 Degrees were wildly successful. Combined, they charted with over a dozen songs and had record breaking sales.
Pearlman also made bands on the MTV television series, Making The Band like Lyte Funkie Ones (LFO) and O-Town.
The idea of a boy band was almost instantaneously entrenched in Pop culture. Maybe too entrenched. Because after a few years and a few scandals, the masses decided the boyband was an oversaturated market, and they moved on to other things.
This Is Our Someday
Pop culture is a cycle, trends ebb and flow but they’re rarely gone. In the late 2000s, the boy band made a resurgence.
Nickelodeon started a search to find the stars for their boy band-themed show in 2007, two years before the show’s premiere. Big Time Rush was not only a TV show, but it was also signed to Nick Records as an official band. The four hockey players from Minnesota story may have been faked, but the songs and the virality were very real.
“Oh emm gee! Big Time Rush! Those are literally my boys, I love them!” one PMHS student said.
The X Factor was a popular TV show that took solo contestants and combined them into different groups to see what stuck. Under the careful eye of Simon Cowell, One Direction formed in the seventh season of the show in 2010. It is by far the most popular band the show produced.
“There’s a video of me from like 2014 just dancing around my kitchen to One Direction.” Kiara Brewer said.
5 Seconds of Summer started with just a few high school friends who had a YouTube channel together in 2011. Their popularity exploded after they opened for One Direction. They may be an Australian band, but they found lots of success in America.
These bands are just a few of the bands that quickly rose to fame in the late 2000s to mid 2010s because of a newly renewed boy brand craze.
One Direction alone sold over 70 million records worldwide. 5 Seconds of Summer sold out Madison Square Garden on their first tour as headliners. Big Time Rush had over 6.8 million viewers when it first premiered.
These bands were on top of the world; it felt like their success would never end.
Night Changes
The 2010s started with a boy band craze and a rejuvenation in pop music, but as the 2020s approached, the winds started the shift. With TikTok becoming a huge platform for sharing and discovering music, the music industry started to change.
People started to want more personalization in their music. They wanted to feel like they could directly and uniquely relate to. On top of that, people wanted to feel like they discovered an artist and that their artist was special to them.
The boy band couldn’t survive in this landscape. It’s popularity has slowly calmed down and now, the same bands that were once on top of the world have now been pushed to the side as so last year.
