ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT – MUSIC-US: Kiddie-Pop Rises from the Ashes

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jun 8 1999 (IPS) - Like the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes, one feature renews itself magically on the US musical landscape every few years: bands comprised of fresh-faced, teenage boys singing sensitive love songs.

The last time the trend burned out in the early 1990s, Boston boasted the two most popular acts: the African American quintet New Edition and a white quintet explicitly designed to mimic them, called New Kids on the Block.

This time around, the hometown of the clean-scrubbed boys is Orlando, Florida – home of of the equally wholesome Disney World.

Orlando is where impresario Max Martin discovered the two most popular new US groups, the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync. Martin has also added to his fortunes by discovering a girl singer, Britney Spears, who complements the youth bands’ wistful tunes with her own spunky singing.

At the beginning of June, the Billboard organisation – which monitors US record sales – placed the Backstreet Boys’ new album, ‘Millennium’ (on Jive records) at the top of its charts, with Spears’s first album, ‘…Baby, One More Time’ (also on Jive) in third place.

Rounding out the top three was an eponymous solo album by Puerto Rican star Ricky Martin (on Columbia records) – hardly an exception to the rule, given that Martin himself was a member of the Latin boy band Menudo during the 1980s.

For all the public attention in recent years to the nihilistic music of rock stars like Marilyn Manson or rappers like the late Tupac Shakur, the boy-band renaissance shows how popular innocent, dewy-eyed love songs remain for most teenagers.

Indeed, bands like N’Sync and singers like Spears have images so clean that many of them performed at Disney World before becoming pop stars. Many of their songs, like N’Sync’s sickly- sweet ‘God Must Have Spent a Little More Time on You’, are tame even by Disney standards.

The youth bands – including variations like the Latino quarter C Note – all follow some basic rules. They normally comprise four or five boys, of which at least one is icily blonde and a couple are brunettes. Their members include one moody, quiet musician; one streetwise “wild” kid; and at least one sensitive crooner.

Their material is often similar, too: softer variations of the slightly funky soul music that African American boy bands like Boyz II Men and Next have made their trademark.

As a slight contrast to the black bands, however, the white boy bands normally sing about unrequited or lost love, and make sure to voice a few pieties about religion and family (‘Millennium,’ for example, includes a song called “My Biggest Fan,” dedicated to the mothers of the Backstreet Boys).

In many ways, the recurring successes of the boy bands illustrates the time-honoured formula of white pop singers succeeding by softening black artists’ sounds and marketing them to white teenagers with attractive, family-friendly vocalists.

That formula is as old as the 1950s, when Pat Boone based his success on bowdlerised versions of Little Richard’s songs.

The trademark for white boy bands was developed two decades later, when the Osmond Brothers – a family of Mormons from the conservative state of Utah – went to the top of the charts with pale imitations of the funk music of the youthful Jackson Five.

Similarly, a black group like Next – whose songs “Butta Love” and “Too Close” are smooth, but perhaps a bit suggestive for teenagers – gives way to the Backstreet Boys, a quintet who prefer lovelorn songs like “Quit Playing Games (with My Heart).”

As with past waves of boy bands, critics expect the current Orlando-fueled resurgence to die out within the next year or two, with the band members retreating into obscurity.

Yet recent months have shown that even former boy-band members can return to fame and fortune after their youth has faded.

Ricky Martin is one good example: like other Menudo members, he had to leave the group once he hit the cutoff age of 17; but now, a decade later, his first English-language hit, “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” has risen to the top of the pop charts.

Last month, two former New Kids on the Block – Jordan Knight and Joey McIntire – also returned to the pop charts with new songs, almost a decade after their group’s heyday; Knight’s song, “Give It to You,” includes some suggestive lyrics and a disco beat that represent a break from the New Kids era.

Although rare, such comebacks by pretty boys are not unprecedented: Michael Jackson, despite scandals, has held on to the popularity he won as a 10-year-old singer, while British stars like George Michael and Robbie Williams are boy-band graduates.

The world’s most popular girl band, the Spice Girls, may soon boast its own graduate in Geri Halliwell – formerly ‘Ginger Spice’ – who has struck out on her own with an album called “Schizophonic.”

Songs like the brassy “Look at Me” and the more tender “Walkaway” make the almbum diverse. She hjas admitted “I’m not the best singer in the world but I wanted to put out a CD that gives you friendship, comnnection, escapeisim – something.”

If her solo career flops, Halliwell is also a UN goodwill ambassador – proving there is life outside the youth-pop circuit.