There are many things from childhood that are timeless—pizza, farts, and dirty jokes, for example, can be enjoyed well into adulthood. Boy bands are not one of these things.
In fact, they may be the least evergreen modern musical phenomenon: While even Christmas music is appropriate a couple weeks every year, boy bands are relevant exactly once per individual lifetime. They exist by feeding on that early, very specific point in a musical life cycle when we’re too young and wide-eyed to make critical decisions about the culture we consume, but are old enough to talk our parents into buying things for us. We get caught in the joyful grip of boy bands before we’ve developed any sort of cultural suspicion, and no matter how much we’d like to return to those days of wide-eyed innocence, we cannot. It’s not something that can happen twice in any given lifetime, nor can it align disparate generations of cultural consumers. For this reason, the epic convergence of two generations of boy bands, under the cleverly constructed acronym/portmanteau NKOTBSB, fails.
New Kids On The Block and the Backstreet Boys, following the recent release of a collective greatest-hits album with two new collaborative studio tunes, are on a co-headlining supergroup tour that’s stopping at the Wells Fargo Center this Sunday, June 5. NKOTBSB is an attempt to unite two generations of boy-band fans, but the idea of some transcendental nostalgia reservoir underlying both Generations X and Y is fundamentally misguided. As a way to make a few million bucks, sure, it works. But I’m not going to rush out to the stadium to hold hands with a just-hit-drinking-age former Backstreet Boys fan and sing “I Want It That Way.” Because I am a NKOTB fan, and I loathe BSB.
Like many members of my generational cohort, my first encounter with NKOTB was the group’s sophomore record, 1988’s Hangin’ Tough. As a 9-year-old, I went fucking bananas when the title-track first single came out. They seemed so cool, sexy, and tough—three characteristics deeply antithetical to “9-year-old boy.” But I desperately aspired to them anyway. I wanted to be Donnie the badass and Jordan the romantic, simultaneously. I wanted to enter the chain-link gates at my rural neighborhood’s public pool and make Rebecca swoon and Charlie tremble. I wore a goddamn NKOTB T-shirt, for Christ’s sake, and taped a speaker to the frame of my bike so I could blast the cassette on my Walkman while pedaling to 7-Eleven for bubble gum and Gatorade. I was their No. 1 fanboy.
Now, as a 32-year-old music writer, I see it’s all too clear that this was all an elaborate ploy by Columbia Records to make over Jordan, Jonathan, Joey, Donnie, and Danny after the failure of their debut album two years earlier. Success required them to maintain their boy-poet interior, but also to couple it with a wild, bad-boy exterior. So they borrowed some details from the Beastie Boys—whoseLicense To Ill was destroying as NKOTB was flopping—both in wardrobe (leather jackets, ripped jeans) and sound (“urban” beats, electric guitars, various moves from the Rick Rubin playbook). They were posers, a marketing gimmick; and they represent the first time little, naïve, 9-year-old me got punked by a major-label branding conspiracy.
Even knowing this, I can still enjoy NKOTB, and I’m glad to have been along for the ride. NKOTB allows me to recall my pre-cynicism self, easily swept away by something that now, as a jaded old monster, I scoff at: the idea of music as harmless entertainment. Directly following my boy-band years came the most influential moments of my music-listening history and my evolution as a critical consumer. Albums like A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory, Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, EPMD’s Business Never Personal, Public Enemy’s Apocalypse 91 ... The Enemy Strikes Black, and Nirvana’s Nevermind taught me to be skeptical of the music I consumed, and to despise many of the previous products I enjoyed—namely, NKOTB. I could appreciate the group in the sense of a meaningful mile-marker on my musical trajectory, but by the time the Backstreet Boys emerged, there was no possibility I’d be seduced again.
My first experience with the Backstreet Boys came when I was 18, with the hit single “Quit Playing Games With My Heart” off 1997’s Backstreet Boys. My 8-year-old twin brothers went fucking bananas for A.J., Brian, Howie, Nick, and Kevin, exactly as I had for NKOTB nine years earlier. The tiny, naïve suckers flailed around the living room with their duped friends singing “Deep within my soul I feel / Nothing’s like it used to be / Sometimes I wish I could turn back time,” oblivious to the grand sham.
I wish I felt nothing for Backstreet Boys at the time, but I was filled with hate. By then, I knew with the certainty of a teenager what boy bands and the major labels were up to, and it angered me to see my little bros sucked into it. Their boy-band love also uncomfortably recalled how I’d been tricked by the same hype less than a decade earlier, and that put me on the defensive. “But you liked NKOTB when you were younger,” parental figures said when I tried to articulate the corruption and manipulation at the dark heart of the Backstreet Boys.
But it was tough to argue that without feeling like a hypocrite. When I was younger I did like NKOTB, who are practically identical to the Backstreet Boys. What’s the difference? But now, I see that “But you liked NKOTB when you were younger,” not as a counter-argument, but as a sort of support for my hatred of BSB. Yes, I liked NKOTB. They came at a specific moment, and while they’ll never appeal to me in that same pure way again, I can still get a nostalgia buzz remembering. But even though I can watch as younger generations tap into the exact same joy I once felt for NKOTB through the Backstreet Boys or the Jonas Brothers, it’s closed off to me—my innocence is lost.
NKOTBSB is asking those who were duped by NKOTB to hold hands with those who were duped a decade later by the Backstreet Boys, as we crawl together back into the culture-womb. I cannot abide this; further, I couldn’t reclaim that musical innocence if I wanted to. Karl Marx said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” For me, and others of my generation that are the target audience of this tour, NKOTB was a tragedy, and BSB was a farce; now NKOTBSB sings the siren song of nostalgia, telling us that we should just forget all the unpleasant things we’ve learned since childhood. “Weren’t things better when you were 9?” they ask. “Don’t you miss the purity of your love of music back then, before you ever heard the words ‘Clear Channel’ or ‘A&R’ or ‘sellout’?”
How we answer these questions could determine the course of human history. Sadly, we’re unable to see what’s really going on—our eyes are fixed on nine men between the ages of 31 and 42, who are dancing, singing, and having the time of their lives.
In fact, they may be the least evergreen modern musical phenomenon: While even Christmas music is appropriate a couple weeks every year, boy bands are relevant exactly once per individual lifetime. They exist by feeding on that early, very specific point in a musical life cycle when we’re too young and wide-eyed to make critical decisions about the culture we consume, but are old enough to talk our parents into buying things for us. We get caught in the joyful grip of boy bands before we’ve developed any sort of cultural suspicion, and no matter how much we’d like to return to those days of wide-eyed innocence, we cannot. It’s not something that can happen twice in any given lifetime, nor can it align disparate generations of cultural consumers. For this reason, the epic convergence of two generations of boy bands, under the cleverly constructed acronym/portmanteau NKOTBSB, fails.
New Kids On The Block and the Backstreet Boys, following the recent release of a collective greatest-hits album with two new collaborative studio tunes, are on a co-headlining supergroup tour that’s stopping at the Wells Fargo Center this Sunday, June 5. NKOTBSB is an attempt to unite two generations of boy-band fans, but the idea of some transcendental nostalgia reservoir underlying both Generations X and Y is fundamentally misguided. As a way to make a few million bucks, sure, it works. But I’m not going to rush out to the stadium to hold hands with a just-hit-drinking-age former Backstreet Boys fan and sing “I Want It That Way.” Because I am a NKOTB fan, and I loathe BSB.
Like many members of my generational cohort, my first encounter with NKOTB was the group’s sophomore record, 1988’s Hangin’ Tough. As a 9-year-old, I went fucking bananas when the title-track first single came out. They seemed so cool, sexy, and tough—three characteristics deeply antithetical to “9-year-old boy.” But I desperately aspired to them anyway. I wanted to be Donnie the badass and Jordan the romantic, simultaneously. I wanted to enter the chain-link gates at my rural neighborhood’s public pool and make Rebecca swoon and Charlie tremble. I wore a goddamn NKOTB T-shirt, for Christ’s sake, and taped a speaker to the frame of my bike so I could blast the cassette on my Walkman while pedaling to 7-Eleven for bubble gum and Gatorade. I was their No. 1 fanboy.
Even knowing this, I can still enjoy NKOTB, and I’m glad to have been along for the ride. NKOTB allows me to recall my pre-cynicism self, easily swept away by something that now, as a jaded old monster, I scoff at: the idea of music as harmless entertainment. Directly following my boy-band years came the most influential moments of my music-listening history and my evolution as a critical consumer. Albums like A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory, Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, EPMD’s Business Never Personal, Public Enemy’s Apocalypse 91 ... The Enemy Strikes Black, and Nirvana’s Nevermind taught me to be skeptical of the music I consumed, and to despise many of the previous products I enjoyed—namely, NKOTB. I could appreciate the group in the sense of a meaningful mile-marker on my musical trajectory, but by the time the Backstreet Boys emerged, there was no possibility I’d be seduced again.
My first experience with the Backstreet Boys came when I was 18, with the hit single “Quit Playing Games With My Heart” off 1997’s Backstreet Boys. My 8-year-old twin brothers went fucking bananas for A.J., Brian, Howie, Nick, and Kevin, exactly as I had for NKOTB nine years earlier. The tiny, naïve suckers flailed around the living room with their duped friends singing “Deep within my soul I feel / Nothing’s like it used to be / Sometimes I wish I could turn back time,” oblivious to the grand sham.
I wish I felt nothing for Backstreet Boys at the time, but I was filled with hate. By then, I knew with the certainty of a teenager what boy bands and the major labels were up to, and it angered me to see my little bros sucked into it. Their boy-band love also uncomfortably recalled how I’d been tricked by the same hype less than a decade earlier, and that put me on the defensive. “But you liked NKOTB when you were younger,” parental figures said when I tried to articulate the corruption and manipulation at the dark heart of the Backstreet Boys.
But it was tough to argue that without feeling like a hypocrite. When I was younger I did like NKOTB, who are practically identical to the Backstreet Boys. What’s the difference? But now, I see that “But you liked NKOTB when you were younger,” not as a counter-argument, but as a sort of support for my hatred of BSB. Yes, I liked NKOTB. They came at a specific moment, and while they’ll never appeal to me in that same pure way again, I can still get a nostalgia buzz remembering. But even though I can watch as younger generations tap into the exact same joy I once felt for NKOTB through the Backstreet Boys or the Jonas Brothers, it’s closed off to me—my innocence is lost.
NKOTBSB is asking those who were duped by NKOTB to hold hands with those who were duped a decade later by the Backstreet Boys, as we crawl together back into the culture-womb. I cannot abide this; further, I couldn’t reclaim that musical innocence if I wanted to. Karl Marx said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” For me, and others of my generation that are the target audience of this tour, NKOTB was a tragedy, and BSB was a farce; now NKOTBSB sings the siren song of nostalgia, telling us that we should just forget all the unpleasant things we’ve learned since childhood. “Weren’t things better when you were 9?” they ask. “Don’t you miss the purity of your love of music back then, before you ever heard the words ‘Clear Channel’ or ‘A&R’ or ‘sellout’?”
How we answer these questions could determine the course of human history. Sadly, we’re unable to see what’s really going on—our eyes are fixed on nine men between the ages of 31 and 42, who are dancing, singing, and having the time of their lives.
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