A-Z of Music: B is for... boy bands

Boys in the band: (clockwise from top left) Westlife, The Beatles, One Direction, Jackson 5, BTS
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Jochan Embley19 May 2020

What makes a boy band? It varies, but there are a few key ingredients. First and foremost, they’re made up of boys rather than men — at the dawn of their 20s at the oldest. They’re fashionable and, crucially, marketable, often thanks to the industry bigwigs behind the scenes pulling their strings. They sing, they dance, and they deal in crossover pop, drawing in the biggest sounds of the day — even if they don’t write their own stuff. Their sexuality, at least on the face of it, is toned-down and vanilla, but it’s unmistakably straight: these lyrics are wholly hetero, aimed squarely at the hearts and minds of young women and girls.

It’s a formula that’s been tinkered with for decades. Where it all began is up for debate, but most critics agree that things started in the 1960s with four mop-topped lads from Liverpool. Although they would go on to far surpass their earlier selves with all their later-career experiments, The Beatles laid the blueprint for the modern boy band. Smartly dressed and similarly haircutted, they first gained popularity doing covers of hit songs, and attracted a particularly rabid, female-heavy fanbase.

From then on, a broad line can be traced through the decades — and it involves a lot of copying. Motown boss Berry Gordy clocked the success of Beatlemania and wanted in, so in 1968 he signed a promising young band of brothers, The Jackson 5. Gordy and a team of musicians penned a number of the group’s best known hits, including I Want You Back and ABC, which set a trend for faceless songwriting conglomerates.

Then, in the 80s, it was the turn of Maurice Starr. The former musician happened upon a fledgling group called New Edition and, inspired by the Jackson 5, tried to repeat the trick. They had moderate success, but nothing like Starr knew was possible, so in 1984, he created New Kids On The Block.

“I honestly believe that if they'd been white, [New Edition] would have been 20 times as big,” Starr said in 1990. He may well have been right: New Kids On The Block were all white, and they were massive. By the dawn of the 90s, the five-piece were making more money than Michael Jackson.

New Kids On The Block were pivotal for another reason. They were the first ever group to be widely known as a boy band — up until then, the phrase hadn’t really existed, and it created a new breed of pop acts on both sides of the pond. Take That and East 17 were assembled in the UK, and Boyzone followed a couple of years later, formed by manager Louis Walsh. He famously put out an advert looking for an “Irish Take That”.

Boy bands in the UK took a battering towards the end of the 90s, as the in-your-face authenticity of Britpop exposed these groups’ supposed superficiality, but their popularity continued to rise. As things moved into a new millennium, Westlife were one of the biggest groups on the planet. Around the same time, back in the States, Backstreet Boys and NSYNC were dominating the charts.

One thing shared by all these groups is the fervency of their fanbase. There’s something about boy bands in particular that stokes these devotions — sure, their lyrics are designed to do exactly that, but with more than one person in the act, fan loyalty is split and competes against itself. It only makes things more intense.

Everyone had a favourite of Paul, John, Ringo and George, and it’s all still happening today — possibly to an even greater extent. Staff at GQ received death threats in 2013 when some One Direction fans took offence after the magazine revealed five different covers featuring each member. BTS, the K-Pop titans, have a worldwide fanbase, passionately supportive online, but also quick to attack in their droves whenever they detect a bad word against the band.

As a group, though, BTS seem bigger than all that have come before. They’ve had Korean-language songs at the top of the US charts, and sold out Wembley Stadium twice over. In South Korea, their latest record sold more copies than the other top 20 albums of 2020 combined, times two. Wherever they go next, one thing is clear — the boy band is here to stay.

Listen: Step By Step by New Kids on the Block

Watch: I'm In A Boy Band (documentary)

Read: Kill The Boy Band by Goldy Moldavsky

A-Z of Music: So far

B is for... boy bands

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