Tabla de contenidos para Boy Bands en Boy Bands

Xenia, Ohio, a small city nestled in a rural part of the state near Dayton, is hot and sticky on this particular August night. The Pop 2000 tour—headlined by the early-’00s boy band O-Town and co-hosted by two respected pop veterans, *NSYNC’s Chris Kirkpatrick and 98 Degrees’ Jeff Timmons—is set up in a lush park; it’s a cornerstone event of Xenia’s summer concert series. Before the show, several dozen fans gather near the artist green room for a meet-and-greet with Kirkpatrick. Due to a power outage at the venue, the concert is running a bit behind, and workers tell the crowd that the event is going to be a very quick greeting. The news hardly fazes the assembled faithful, who range in age from elementary school on up to their…

The evolution of ’40s pop into ’50s and ’60s rock took place against the backdrop of the post-war baby boom and the emergence of television as a mass medium. Elvis Presley crooning “Hound Dog” to an actual canine on The Steve Allen Show and British Invasion groups like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, Shindig!, Hullabaloo, and The Smothers Brothers Show helped popularize those acts in the U.S. Television and pop music were a potent force, leading to bands fabricated specifically for the medium. The first were The Monkees, a Fab Four knockoff put together by TV producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider for a sitcom that aired on NBC from September 1966 to March 1968. The premise: four guys trying to…

Devotion may be a given, but it has always taken a kind of fearlessness to love boy bands. From Beatlemania on, fans have been dismissed as silly hormonal twits with terrible taste in music. These days, feminist fourth-wave writers and fans like Maria Sherman, author of Larger than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS, are recognizing the power, positivity, and community of boy band stans. “One thing the chauvinists fail to recognize or respect,” she writes, “is the baseline self-determination that liking a boy band introduces within its predominantly female audience.” Harry Styles is on board. In April 2017, he told Rolling Stone, “How can you say young girls don’t get it? They’re our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the…

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Some adoring fan has undoubtedly looked at every boy band ever, from The Jackson 5 and the New Kids on the Block to Menudo and One Direction, and thought, “They’re so cute, they ought to be illegal.” A century ago in New York, they were. The Gerry Society, founded in 1875 by stern moralist Elbridge Thomas Gerry and formally known as the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, persuaded New York legislators to pass laws that prohibited any child under 16 from singing, dancing, juggling or performing acrobatics onstage. The practical impact of these laws was to make criminals of children like the young Buster Keaton, who had been performing since he was 3. Through the lens of history, though, the fact such laws were deemed…

Ever since the pop invasion of the ’60s, U.S. ears have tuned in to the screaming pandemonium of British pop. From the rough-and-ready street cred of The Stones to the Liverpudlian charm offensive that was The Beatles, bands have seen success in the States as a rite of passage. But then came the British boy band phenomenon kicked-started by the New Romantics scene of the ’80s. Where the decade before crashed and burned in the torrid avalanche of spite and vitriol that was punk, now pop stars were crimped, primped, and adorned in makeup, harking back to the glam movement that made stars out of David Bowie and Bryan Ferry. All-male groups like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and Adam and the Ants were riding the MTV wave onto American televisions.…

The U.S. debut of K-pop supergroup BTS in July 2014 was a tiny sample of some very big things to come. The underdog South Korean septet was in California making a reality show, American Hustle Life. Their first album at the time—2 Cool 4 Skool—was mostly in Korean. They offered free passes to 200 fans for their Show & Prove Concert at West Hollywood’s Troubadour, a pocket-sized club that has helped launch legends like Joni Mitchell, Elton John, Guns ’N’ Roses, and Radiohead. As reported by the fan site KultScene, BTS devotees queued up a day before the show and, in a peek at the cooperative power BTS fans are known for, organized themselves with a written list of ticket hopefuls ordered by each person’s arrival in line. The boys…

There’s a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis where a sharp-eyed Colonel Tom Parker, played by a heavily made-up Tom Hanks, witnesses first-hand girls squirming in their seats, then screaming uncontrollably, to the swiveling hips and thrusting pelvis of Austin Butler’s young Presley. The old carnival promoter had visions of dollar signs dancing in his head, and was soon to be rewarded, managing Elvis Presley for most of his career, quite successfully until a late-period falling-out. It is a scenario that catapulted the record industry to its initial shake-your-money-maker heights with Elvis followed by manufactured teen idols like Pat Boone, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian, before The Beatles proved what boy bands were capable of, maturing artistically as their audience grew into adulthood. They set the template for the TV-fueled The Monkees…

There’s a reason why the climax of animated hit film Turning Red, about a teenage girl who turns into a gigantic red panda whenever she gets too excited, is set at an arena gig for her favorite boy band. As director Domee Shi told the Los Angeles Times in March 2022, “It just felt right that Mei’s ultimate goal in the movie was not to save the world but to go to her first concert with her best friends. That felt so 13 and so character specific and perfect.” Of a project that drew upon her own childhood obsessions, Shi told Slate that a story about hormones and puberty for girls, especially ones that grew up in 2002 when Turning Red takes place, could not be complete without a believable…