'Boy Bands' get bounced

Anastasiya Gorshkova, a Ukrainian Student at Pfeiffer University, was just like many other teenage girls in the late Nineties: hanging posters of the Backstreet Boys on her wall. She was a huge fan of the so-called labeled ‘Boy Bands.’ “I liked them when I was 13 – 14, so when you’re at this age, you dream about all those guys falling in love with you and you’re going crazy. Their songs are so romantic and you dream about a romantic guy and all the things they sing about in their songs.” However, when her parents renovated her room, instead of putting up ‘Boy Band’ posters, she was taping Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, and Nickelback ones to the wall.

When ‘Boy Bands’ came out, although the teenage girls fell in love with them, a lot of males despised them. Richard Kane, a DJ at The Chimes in Kent, England doesn’t like them because, “There’s absolutely no soul in anything they do. If you’ve heard one ‘Boy Band’, you’ve heard them all. It just seems like they recycle the same song over and over again, which the next ‘Boy Band’ then goes and copies, just changing the lyrics a little to claim it as their own.”

A lot of people in the late Nineties were either fanatics or enemies of the teen frenzy known as ‘Boy Bands,’ but in 2004, it seems that the once famous ‘Pop Groups’ are a dying cause. All of them have either called it quits, are on a break, or were canned by their labels. Regardless of the reasoning, the fact remains that they are no longer on mainstream television or radio.

There are many factors as to why ‘Boy Bands’ are no longer dominating the airwaves. Jessika Smith, Pfeiffer Student, says, “At first, they were ok, and all of us girls fell in love with them. But then, too many of them came out and they lost their appeal. They seem so clich now.” John Morrison, co-owner of BaloolaPalooza.com, agrees with what Jessika says, but brings up another issue of why the ‘Pop Groups’ are becoming extinct. “Number One, there was over saturation of the market; there was too much at once and people grew tired of it being largely the same thing. At the same time, the underground rock and punk scenes have thrived, especially among college students. The labels have seen this and have basically started to shift their marketing to things in this vein as something people in punk culture (or those who want to be) can relate to. Artists like Avril Lavigne have taken the spot of the Backstreet Boys because it appears to have all the edginess and rebellion of the underground. The only difference is it’s the same thing as before, with the same people writing the songs, and pulling the strings. It’s all about image. People got tired of the pretty boy image and they wanted something rebellious.”

Elysa Gardner, a journalist for USA Today, acknowledged this action back in July 2001. She writes, “Five years after the Backstreet Boys’ first album launched the latest bubblegum-pop conquest of radio and MTV, a number of teen-‘zine-friendly acts are having a more difficult time either cultivating a mass audience or following up promising debuts. A CD released by 98 Degrees was one of last year’s biggest commercial disappointments; in recent weeks, heavily promoted albums by the rising young group LFO and Mandy Moore, a blond baby diva who has been likened to Britney Spears, entered the Billboard chart at No. 87 and No. 35, respectively. And Backstreet is suffering some grown-up trauma of its own, with member A.J. McLean currently in rehab for depression and alcohol abuse.”

“I think we’re in a phase right now where there’s no question that the bloom is off the teen-pop rose,” says Alan Light, editor in chief of Spin. “Superstars like ‘N Sync and Backstreet and Britney and Christina (Aguilera) can still sell records, but they’ll face a challenge even if their sales start to dip a little … if there’s any sense that they’ve peaked,” he told USA Today in July 2001.

It’s clear that a big role that could contribute to this is inactivity and a decreasing amount of record sales. The two most famous ‘Boy Bands’ would probably be the Backstreet Boys and N’SYNC. Their highest achievements ever would never be matched by a long shot. The Backstreet Boys’ 2000 Studio Album, “Black & Blue” sold 5 million copies fewer than their 1999 studio album, “Millennium.” N’SYNC’s 2001 compilation, “Celebrity,” couldn’t even sell half the amount of units that their 2000 effort did, “No Strings Attached” (selling over 11 million copies). Since then, the members of both bands have gotten older and haven’t made a new album since.

Whether or not this is a phase, the popularity of ‘Boy Bands’ is dropping at a rapid pace. It doesn’t matter if it was cool to love them or cool to hate them, one no longer has to worry about that because they are no longer in the spotlight. Now, there are more people like Anastasiya who are starting to take posters and photos of the Backstreet Boys off their walls.

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