Hit Parade: We Want It That Way Edition Part 2

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4.2 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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	Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine
0:16.4	about the hits from Coast to Coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst,
0:20.9	pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why is this song number one series.
0:25.2	On our last episode, we walked through the history of the boy band,
0:30.8	from its early rock and R&B roots in Frankie Lyman and the Jackson Five, through the 1980s
0:38.6	heyday of New Edition and New Kids on the Block. We are now entering the late 90s. Hansen has
0:46.4	swung the charts back toward pure pop and a new generation of millennial boy
0:52.1	bands named Backstreet Boys and In Sink are about to
0:56.9	hypercharge the top 40. One of the great ironies of boy band history is that the two best-selling acts,
1:07.0	Backstreet Boys and In Sink, rival groups that
1:15.0	the instant you say boy band were both created by the same shadowy
1:18.0	svangali slash con man.
1:21.0	That man was Lou Perlman who was inspired to get into the boy band game by new kids on the block
1:30.3	In the 80s Perlman ran a business chartering blimps and private jets,
1:37.0	when manager Maori Starr chartered a jet in 1989 for his protegegés, The New Kids,
1:44.4	Perlman realized how absurdly lucrative boy bands could be,
1:49.8	and he moved his business to Orlando, Florida to tap the Disney town's wealth of talent.
1:57.0	Perlman formed the Backstreet Boys first.
2:01.0	He named them after an Orlando flea market, the Back Street market, where teenagers hung out.
2:09.0	The five good-looking and vocally adept young men, Nick Carter, Howie Duro, A.J. McLean, and cousins Brian
2:17.6	Lottrell and Kevin Richardson, signed with Perlman in 1993 and released their first single,
2:25.8	We've Got It Going On in 1995.
	...

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