Boy Bands

As manifested in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the boy band formula is to combine somewhere between three and six (typically four or five) young, singing and dancing males; to have each represent a distinct personality type; to carefully choreograph their (individual and band) images as closely as their dance steps; and to mass-market them to an audience consisting mostly of preteen and teenage girls. Such bands often play a unique role in the lives of preteen and young teen girls, serving as a bridge between childhood and adolescence. The “boys” in the band (although often significantly older than their tween and young teen fans) may provide “safe” crushes for girls to fantasize about.

New Kids on the Block, New Edition, the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, 98 Degrees, O-Town, Menudo, the Monkees, and the Beatles rank among the most famous and successful boy bands of all time. Although they don't fit the standard formula of having been manufactured by an impresario such as Pearlman, the Beatles are considered by many to be the precursor to the modern boy band, notably because of their frenzied reception by teenage girls enamored not only of their music but also of their hairstyles, looks, and unique personalities.

Although the evolution of boy bands can be traced back to the Monkees (and, some would even say, to the doo-wop groups of the 1950s), the modern boy band formula was pioneered in the 1980s by Boston-based music producer Maurice Starr, who at one point managed and discovered (although he did not create) the highly successful New Edition in the early part of that decade. http://MTV.com calls New Edition the forefathers of the boy bands of the 1990s. The group, all teenagers originally from the predominantly African American Roxbury section of Boston when they hit it big, soon fired Starr when they left his small Streetwise label to sign with MCA. After splitting initially in the early 1990s, the members of New Edition, including Bobby Brown, Johnny Gill, Ralph Tresvant, and the group Bel Biv DeVoe, went on to highly successful projects, while Starr went on to create New Kids on the Block.

Attempting to recreate his New Edition success, Starr created a new group, this time with white teens. The new group, New Kids on the Block, like their boy band successors, appropriated and adapted African American performance, vocal, and dance styles. Moreover, the New Kids' success was a function of MTV exposure, which provided a visual venue by which to market musical acts who might not have been able to get by on questionable musical talent alone. The New Kids sold millions of albums in the late 1980s and very early 1990s. While their fame was short lived, they left behind the formula for boy bands of the 1990s. The late 1990s were the heyday of boy bands. They dominated the charts and MTV airplay and received extensive media coverage.

Seeing the success of New Kids and recognizing the money to be made by managing such an act, Florida-based entrepreneur Louis Pearlman, arguably the best-known boy band manager, held open auditions in 1993 for the group that was to become the Backstreet Boys. After the group had toured small venues such as high schools and Sea World for 2 years, Pearlman sent them to Europe, where they became a huge hit, with Top Ten singles in almost every European country. Returning to the United States in 1997 with the re-release of their debut album Backstreet Boys, the band hit it big. The album, which came in at number three for the year, went on to sell 27 million copies and spawned five hit singles. Released in the summer of 1999, the Backstreet Boys' second U.S. album, Millennium, debuted at number one, selling over a million copies in its first week alone.

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