Hit Parade: We Want It That Way Edition Part 1

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🗓️ 13 April 2024

⏱️ 61 minutes

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Summary

When you hear “boy band,” what do you picture? Five guys with precision dance moves? Songs crafted by the Top 40 pop machine? Svengalis pulling the puppet strings? Hordes of screaming girls? As it turns out, not all boy bands fit these signifiers. (Well…except for the screaming girls—they are perennial.) There are boy bands that danced, and some that did not…boy bands that relied entirely on outside songwriters, and those that wrote big hits…boy bands assembled by managers or producers, and quite a few that launched on their own. From Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers to New Kids on the Block, the Monkees to the Jonas Brothers, Boyz II Men to BTS, New Edition to One Direction, and…yeah, of course, Backstreet Boys and *N Sync, boy bands have had remarkable variety over the years. (In a sense, even a certain ’60s Fab Four started as a boy band.) Join Chris Molanphy as he tries to define the ineffable quality of boy band–ness, walks through decades of shrieking, hair-pulling pop history, and reminds you that boy bands generated some of our greatest hits, from “I Want You Back” to “I Want It That Way,” “Bye Bye Bye” to “Dynamite.” Help him “bring the fire and set the night alight.” Podcast production by Kevin Bendis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, hit parade listeners, what you're about to hear is part one of this episode.
0:06.0	Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month.
0:10.0	Would you like to hear this episode all at once, the day it drops?
0:13.9	Sign up for Slate Plus.
0:15.8	It supports not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts.
0:22.0	Just go to Slate.com slash Hit Parade Plus. You'll get to hear
0:26.6	every hit parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus, hit parade The Bridge
0:32.4	are bonus episodes, with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and pop chart trivia.
0:40.0	Once again, to join, that's Slate.com slash hit parade plus.
0:45.2	Thanks and now please enjoy part one of this hit parade episode. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from
1:07.2	Coast to Coast.
1:08.2	I'm Chris Malanfi, Chart Analysts, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series on today's show
1:16.4	25 years ago in April of 1999 a five boy, five man vocal group from Orlando, Florida debuted on Billboard's Hot 100 with what would become their most famous song,
1:33.7	a confection co-written by Swedish pop mastermind Max Martin.
1:38.8	All five members of the group
1:41.2	had vocal showcases on the track,
1:44.1	fulfilling the crushes of their most ardent fans.
1:47.9	They called themselves the Backstreet Boys,
1:51.0	and Max Martin called this lyrically inscrutable ditty I want it that way.
1:57.8	What way that way?
1:59.6	But I want to be that way.
2:05.0	Tell me why it ain't.
	...

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