Boy Bands & the Evolution of Manufactured Music
Created | Updated Oct 8, 2002
With the dawn of the industrial age the skills of the individual craftsman became obsolete in the face as mechanisation and mass-production. The invention of the television nearly wiped out the ancient institution of the theatre and the dominant studios of Hollywood smothered their independent competition to flood the nascent cinemahalls with their formulaic tales of materialism.
In the disorienting cyclone of change that was the twentieth century it seemed that the one cultural pillar that would withstand the relentless march of capitalist progress was that of music. Perhaps the oldest of human achievements, music had been lauded as the language of love and the bodily expulsions of the gods themselves.
A BRIEF LESSON IN MUSICAL HISTORY: In the earliest days mankind had occupied his tiny pre-historic mind by banding the bones of the animals that he hunted and gathered against rocks, trees and the heads of his fellow cavemen much to the delight of all. In later times man discovered that various materials produced more pleasing sounds than others and began to fashion crude musical instruments such as the first drum by stretching animal skin over a vessel such as an animal skull and striking it repeatedly with an animal bone (the animal motiff being big at the time). Armed with his drum, prehistoric man amused his fellows as they dodged glaciers to his dull and incessant beating of the primative instrument. We know this from evidence in the form of a hunter-gatherer male found preserved in glacial ice high in the alps clutching just such a drum and bearing evidence that his skull was caved in from behind, most likely by one of his companions (possibly the world's first music critic).
Things had changed a great deal by the time of the Middle Ages and Europe in particular resounded to the tune of minstrels who travelled the land spreading songs of courtly love and devotion towards the female gender and bloody death and retribution for the male (provided they were not white and/or Christian, that is) in a most chivalric of ways. In this age the musical instrument had evolved a great deal also. Gone were the days of instruments crudely fashioned from animals in place of ones crafted by the most skilled artisans of the day from the finest animal products that could be had.
Leaping on to the age of reason the world of music had changed once more. Gone were dour religious chants and odes to the ampleness of one's lady and her bousum. These had been replaced by sweeping works of staggering magnificence and subtle emotional power. Composers such as Motzart and Beethoven composed works for the huge orchestras of the time and their music fired passions, even sparking riots in the streets of some European captials at their priemiere performances. But innovation and genius was not the only path to be followed in Europe by any means. Some years later the fashionable upper-class parasites of London town were enchanted by the retro-chic of the Scottish highlands made popular by Sir Walter Scott and his pot-boiler novels. It was quite the done thing for the foppish Londoner of the time (most of whom had been no further north than Watford Gap at any time in their lives) to gad about in tartans to the sounds of the highland bagpipes in the manner of the Scottish clansman. This fashion was made all the more convenient as there were no actual Scots in the highlands at the time due the highland clearences and thus the Londoners had no problem obtaining whiskey, shortbread and porridge whilst wearing other people's tartans and pretending to understand the poetry of Robbie Burns.
THE 1960's & THE BIRTH OF THE PROTO-BOYBAND: Not much happened in terms of music until the mid-part of the twentieth century when an American redneck wrote a popular song about doing a contempory dance around a timepiece in the late evening and invented rock and roll in the process. But still most prominent at this time was the solo artist with the masses adoring such names as Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and his hypnotic dancing pelvis and Bobby Darin (whoever he was).
It was left to the stalwart British to really kick-start the Boy Band revolution and show their American cousins how it should be done. With the advent of the 1960's the British staged an invasion of the American musical mainland to which there could be offered no resistance. The Beatles wowed US audiences with their upbeat tunes, rythmic swaying and amusing accents to such an extent that a group of record-label executives (being the devout capitalists that they were) put their heads together and came up with the Monkees in response to the drawing power of the lads from Liverpool.
In the past record labels had experienced problems from artists who came from a "traditional" musical background and demonstrated problematic tendencies such as independent thought and moral or artistic integrity. The Monkees did away with these problems by virtue of the fact that they were wannabe actors rather than musicians in the strictest sense of the term (i.e. being capable of playing a musical instrument of some kind) and rather than wasting time and money in giving them musical training the "band" mimed along to their songs whilst pretending to play their instruments.
So even as far back as that there were manufactured bands with no real musical talent or ability, but there were still stumbling blocks along the way. The bands of the time were predominantly boys and some were even more fake than Pamela Anderson's assets. But some still played their own instruments and wrote their own material (or at least kept up the illusion that they did), over the next thirty years things would have to change.
THE 1970's KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY: The byword of the seventies was experimentation. People dropped acid to expand their minds, explored the mysticism of the East and generally commited crimes against fashion that still make you wince to this day. Music was in no way exempt from this impetus towards freaking out and going psychadelic on a regular basis. Bands of the time championed the counter-culture and lifestyle of the day in a decade that revelled in Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells at one end and rebelled with Punk Rock and the Sex Pistols at the other.
But all that was happening in the UK. The US was another story altogether as a band of goofy-toothed brothers emerged from the musical wilderness and into the shining city of pop stardom. The Osmonds, as they were known to the inhabitants of the planet Earth, were as far away from the drop-outs and loved-up hippies of the time as they could be and served up a wholesome array of musical delights.
Not to be outdone by Mormon Middle-America, the Rn'B scene also thrust upon the world a band of brothers who stole the hearts and minds of their audience. The Jackson Five (an ingenious name seeing as how each member was called Jackson and there were exactly five of them), as they were known, were so popular in their native land that they were given their own cartoon series which was also a hit despite allegations in the tabloid press that it was in fact a sinister attempt on the part of their record label to replace the group with celluloid duplicates which would never age, need to be fed or give them back lip in contract negotiations. Luckily these allegations proved not to be true and the Jackson Five made a mint and launched the youngest member Micheal on his quest to transform himself from a young and talented black guy into a middle-aged white guy with a habit of self-immolation.
All in all while it might be true that the seventies set the cause of the manufactured boy bands back a step due to the prevolance of groups that consisted of siblings and the amount of teeth involved in anything concerning the Osmond family, the fact remained that bland music had been pushed to the fore and legions of teenage girls had vowed to take their own lives in the event of their idols in these bands even hinting that they were involved in a serious relationship with a member of the opposite sex.
THE 1980's, ME FIRST MUSIC FOR THE ME FIRST DECADE: The eighties were in many ways a knee-jerk reaction to the seventies. Free love and grooviness were out as capitalism reared its pug-ugly head and materialism and personal greed became the buzz-words of the new generation. Always quick to move with the times, the music industry dropped the wholesome bands of brothers like a bad habit and invested in the beautiful people to shift records.
The UK airwaves resounded to the strains of Wham in the ealry eighties, who while not strictly a boy band in the purest sense as there were only two of them, they wrote origional material and had some facial hair, were camp enough to fill the gap for a while. Later in the decade the country would be treated to the wonder that was Bros who bent the rules by having two members who were brother and one that was no realtion to the others whatsoever. Bros were perhaps the first boy band to cash in on the "bad boy" image with leather jackets and ripped jeans. Their songs asked probing philosophical questions of an uncaring world such as "when will I be famous?/when will I see my picture in the paper?" (answer to the former: not for any great length of time, answer to the latter: nowadays only under the headline "guess who's flipping cowparts at McDonalds for a living").
Meanwhile the US had hit on what seemed like the perfect formula when New Kids on the Block were unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. They were young, they were good looking (apparently) and they were "street" (even though they looked like nice white boys from an upper-class neighbourhood) and not one of them was seen to play a musical instrument of any kind...ever. They sang songs with titles like "Hanging Tough" and wore baggy clothes even though they hardly conjured the image of a hard-bitten street gang from downtown Los Angeles. Not that it mattered to the masses of young girls that bought their records.
THE 1990's, THE DECADE OF THE BOY BAND: Now the industry had the formula refined the formula and placed the boy band firmly in the collective unconscious, the time had come for complete saturation with the ultimate goal of global domination. The first crack squad of boy band commando's to be parachuted dropped into action was Take That who stormed to sucess in the UK and were headed up by Gary Barlow. After a few years at the top the group imploded and the various members persued solo careers with varying degrees of sucess (i.e. Robbie Williams=Superstar while most other members have faded into relative obscurity).
But even though the formula had been established, there was still the odd boy band that broke the mould. Take for example East 17. Here you had boy band composed of young men from the Walthamstow area of London (in the E17 postal area, hence the name of the band) who looked like nothing more than a bunch of ruffians and ne'er-do-wells rather than the clean cut image that most other groups cultivated. It can be posited that East 17 tapped into the same vein of danger that had fuelled the appeal of Bros before them, and it has to be said that they would have encountered great adversity had they attempted to present the image of a group of intellectuals and dilletantes. Apart from their rough image, East 17 also exemplified another strange element of the typical boy band in that they had around five members but only two of this number were ever noted to actually sing without the other four to provide vocal harmony. Whether or not these human spare parts could actually sing (or even talk) was never revealled and led to the contempory joke: "How many member of East 17 does it take to change a light bulb? Five. One to hold the ladder, one to screw in the bulb and three to point at them while they do it."
Through the course of the nineties many boy bands came and went, but things became really interesting when in the Irish decided to get in on the act. Having many times won the Eurovision Song Contest, the Irish music industry had a great deal of experience when it came to producing music that was bland and palatable only to the stone deaf. The first Irish boy band to make it big was Boyzone whom many claim inherited the position once held by Take That at the top of the pile. Once more the group had five members who were unnable to play an instrument, write a song or sing on their own. But then Boyzone could always fall back on their secret weapon; their romantic Irish accents. While staggeringly non-descript in all other ways, Boyzone always turned on the blarney and drawlled away in interviews much to their own benefit. But much like Take That before them it soon became apparent that certain members were destined for greater things and that others were little more than chaff in the wind and the group dwindled and finally disbanded at the turn of the century.
2000 AND BEYOND, A BRAVE NEW MILLENIUM: The more things change, the more banal and annoying boy bands get. As the rest of the world looked forward to the promise of the first new millenium in a thousand years the music industry was busy hatching out a whole new brood of boy bands to torment the music-bnuying public. The US was treated to the delights of *NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys and O-Town and had a wonderful time playing a game where the aim was to tell the three boy bands apart.
Meanwhile the demise of Boyzone had far from spelled the end of the Irish boy band and soon the music charts were filled with the sound of a group with one of the strangest names yet: "Westlife." Managed by Irish pop-supremo Louie Walsh, Westlife came to embody the hallmarks of the stereotypical boy band that it had taken so many decades to refine and perfect. They were bland in both image and material. They sang what others told them to and did a line in cheesy covers. They appealed to teenage girls and gay men. They demonstrated no apparent intelligence when interviewed and when performing sat on stools, the climax of their perfomance being the moment when they stood up in unison for the final chorus of one of their banal tunes.
While the general public seemed by this time to be perfectly aware of the fact that the boy band was a totally manufactured and throw-away phenomenon of modern consumer-driven society, this did little to dim the apetite that they exhibited for the groups and their music. In the early years of the twenty-first century a new idea was hit upon in the light of the fact that television-viewers at the time were lapping up the "docu-soap" format of fly-on-the-wall documentary where the film-makers followed the trials and tribulations of various individuals as they went about their daily lives. The warts and all style of these programmes was used to great effect when a show with the imaginative title of "Popstars" was comissioned that followed the process of creating a manufactured band from scratch. The show spared nothing from the eyes of the viewer, taking them from the initial auditioning of countless (and often hilariously hopeless) wannabes right through to the final band's battle to take the "coveted" Christmas number one slot in the music charts. While Hear Say, the band that was put together, was a mixed band the show was important as it laid bare the entire process and presented a group that from it's very genesis was nothing more than a product of the selection process. It came as no great suprise to many commentators that the band fell apart recently after less than a year together due to the fact that they had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Not that the concept was totally new, that is. The US group O-Town were the subject of the show "Making the Band" that saw sindication around the world. But a new series of Popstars dubbed "The Rivals" is to follow the first where there will be two bands created rather than one. One band will be composed of "girls" and the other of "boys" chosen from a shortlist of ten by telephone vote. The ultimate aim is for the two bands to then compete for the Christmas number one (rather arrogantly ignoring the fact that they will certainly not be the only artists to release tracks to this same end). Whether or not the viewing public will respond to the same old tricks for a second year running remains to be seen, but then they have been lapping up the same formulaic and rehashed musical format for the best part of the past forty years without qualm or complaint. The more things change the more they stay the same.
In the disorienting cyclone of change that was the twentieth century it seemed that the one cultural pillar that would withstand the relentless march of capitalist progress was that of music. Perhaps the oldest of human achievements, music had been lauded as the language of love and the bodily expulsions of the gods themselves.
A BRIEF LESSON IN MUSICAL HISTORY: In the earliest days mankind had occupied his tiny pre-historic mind by banding the bones of the animals that he hunted and gathered against rocks, trees and the heads of his fellow cavemen much to the delight of all. In later times man discovered that various materials produced more pleasing sounds than others and began to fashion crude musical instruments such as the first drum by stretching animal skin over a vessel such as an animal skull and striking it repeatedly with an animal bone (the animal motiff being big at the time). Armed with his drum, prehistoric man amused his fellows as they dodged glaciers to his dull and incessant beating of the primative instrument. We know this from evidence in the form of a hunter-gatherer male found preserved in glacial ice high in the alps clutching just such a drum and bearing evidence that his skull was caved in from behind, most likely by one of his companions (possibly the world's first music critic).
Things had changed a great deal by the time of the Middle Ages and Europe in particular resounded to the tune of minstrels who travelled the land spreading songs of courtly love and devotion towards the female gender and bloody death and retribution for the male (provided they were not white and/or Christian, that is) in a most chivalric of ways. In this age the musical instrument had evolved a great deal also. Gone were the days of instruments crudely fashioned from animals in place of ones crafted by the most skilled artisans of the day from the finest animal products that could be had.
Leaping on to the age of reason the world of music had changed once more. Gone were dour religious chants and odes to the ampleness of one's lady and her bousum. These had been replaced by sweeping works of staggering magnificence and subtle emotional power. Composers such as Motzart and Beethoven composed works for the huge orchestras of the time and their music fired passions, even sparking riots in the streets of some European captials at their priemiere performances. But innovation and genius was not the only path to be followed in Europe by any means. Some years later the fashionable upper-class parasites of London town were enchanted by the retro-chic of the Scottish highlands made popular by Sir Walter Scott and his pot-boiler novels. It was quite the done thing for the foppish Londoner of the time (most of whom had been no further north than Watford Gap at any time in their lives) to gad about in tartans to the sounds of the highland bagpipes in the manner of the Scottish clansman. This fashion was made all the more convenient as there were no actual Scots in the highlands at the time due the highland clearences and thus the Londoners had no problem obtaining whiskey, shortbread and porridge whilst wearing other people's tartans and pretending to understand the poetry of Robbie Burns.
THE 1960's & THE BIRTH OF THE PROTO-BOYBAND: Not much happened in terms of music until the mid-part of the twentieth century when an American redneck wrote a popular song about doing a contempory dance around a timepiece in the late evening and invented rock and roll in the process. But still most prominent at this time was the solo artist with the masses adoring such names as Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and his hypnotic dancing pelvis and Bobby Darin (whoever he was).
It was left to the stalwart British to really kick-start the Boy Band revolution and show their American cousins how it should be done. With the advent of the 1960's the British staged an invasion of the American musical mainland to which there could be offered no resistance. The Beatles wowed US audiences with their upbeat tunes, rythmic swaying and amusing accents to such an extent that a group of record-label executives (being the devout capitalists that they were) put their heads together and came up with the Monkees in response to the drawing power of the lads from Liverpool.
In the past record labels had experienced problems from artists who came from a "traditional" musical background and demonstrated problematic tendencies such as independent thought and moral or artistic integrity. The Monkees did away with these problems by virtue of the fact that they were wannabe actors rather than musicians in the strictest sense of the term (i.e. being capable of playing a musical instrument of some kind) and rather than wasting time and money in giving them musical training the "band" mimed along to their songs whilst pretending to play their instruments.
So even as far back as that there were manufactured bands with no real musical talent or ability, but there were still stumbling blocks along the way. The bands of the time were predominantly boys and some were even more fake than Pamela Anderson's assets. But some still played their own instruments and wrote their own material (or at least kept up the illusion that they did), over the next thirty years things would have to change.
THE 1970's KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY: The byword of the seventies was experimentation. People dropped acid to expand their minds, explored the mysticism of the East and generally commited crimes against fashion that still make you wince to this day. Music was in no way exempt from this impetus towards freaking out and going psychadelic on a regular basis. Bands of the time championed the counter-culture and lifestyle of the day in a decade that revelled in Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells at one end and rebelled with Punk Rock and the Sex Pistols at the other.
But all that was happening in the UK. The US was another story altogether as a band of goofy-toothed brothers emerged from the musical wilderness and into the shining city of pop stardom. The Osmonds, as they were known to the inhabitants of the planet Earth, were as far away from the drop-outs and loved-up hippies of the time as they could be and served up a wholesome array of musical delights.
Not to be outdone by Mormon Middle-America, the Rn'B scene also thrust upon the world a band of brothers who stole the hearts and minds of their audience. The Jackson Five (an ingenious name seeing as how each member was called Jackson and there were exactly five of them), as they were known, were so popular in their native land that they were given their own cartoon series which was also a hit despite allegations in the tabloid press that it was in fact a sinister attempt on the part of their record label to replace the group with celluloid duplicates which would never age, need to be fed or give them back lip in contract negotiations. Luckily these allegations proved not to be true and the Jackson Five made a mint and launched the youngest member Micheal on his quest to transform himself from a young and talented black guy into a middle-aged white guy with a habit of self-immolation.
All in all while it might be true that the seventies set the cause of the manufactured boy bands back a step due to the prevolance of groups that consisted of siblings and the amount of teeth involved in anything concerning the Osmond family, the fact remained that bland music had been pushed to the fore and legions of teenage girls had vowed to take their own lives in the event of their idols in these bands even hinting that they were involved in a serious relationship with a member of the opposite sex.
THE 1980's, ME FIRST MUSIC FOR THE ME FIRST DECADE: The eighties were in many ways a knee-jerk reaction to the seventies. Free love and grooviness were out as capitalism reared its pug-ugly head and materialism and personal greed became the buzz-words of the new generation. Always quick to move with the times, the music industry dropped the wholesome bands of brothers like a bad habit and invested in the beautiful people to shift records.
The UK airwaves resounded to the strains of Wham in the ealry eighties, who while not strictly a boy band in the purest sense as there were only two of them, they wrote origional material and had some facial hair, were camp enough to fill the gap for a while. Later in the decade the country would be treated to the wonder that was Bros who bent the rules by having two members who were brother and one that was no realtion to the others whatsoever. Bros were perhaps the first boy band to cash in on the "bad boy" image with leather jackets and ripped jeans. Their songs asked probing philosophical questions of an uncaring world such as "when will I be famous?/when will I see my picture in the paper?" (answer to the former: not for any great length of time, answer to the latter: nowadays only under the headline "guess who's flipping cowparts at McDonalds for a living").
Meanwhile the US had hit on what seemed like the perfect formula when New Kids on the Block were unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. They were young, they were good looking (apparently) and they were "street" (even though they looked like nice white boys from an upper-class neighbourhood) and not one of them was seen to play a musical instrument of any kind...ever. They sang songs with titles like "Hanging Tough" and wore baggy clothes even though they hardly conjured the image of a hard-bitten street gang from downtown Los Angeles. Not that it mattered to the masses of young girls that bought their records.
THE 1990's, THE DECADE OF THE BOY BAND: Now the industry had the formula refined the formula and placed the boy band firmly in the collective unconscious, the time had come for complete saturation with the ultimate goal of global domination. The first crack squad of boy band commando's to be parachuted dropped into action was Take That who stormed to sucess in the UK and were headed up by Gary Barlow. After a few years at the top the group imploded and the various members persued solo careers with varying degrees of sucess (i.e. Robbie Williams=Superstar while most other members have faded into relative obscurity).
But even though the formula had been established, there was still the odd boy band that broke the mould. Take for example East 17. Here you had boy band composed of young men from the Walthamstow area of London (in the E17 postal area, hence the name of the band) who looked like nothing more than a bunch of ruffians and ne'er-do-wells rather than the clean cut image that most other groups cultivated. It can be posited that East 17 tapped into the same vein of danger that had fuelled the appeal of Bros before them, and it has to be said that they would have encountered great adversity had they attempted to present the image of a group of intellectuals and dilletantes. Apart from their rough image, East 17 also exemplified another strange element of the typical boy band in that they had around five members but only two of this number were ever noted to actually sing without the other four to provide vocal harmony. Whether or not these human spare parts could actually sing (or even talk) was never revealled and led to the contempory joke: "How many member of East 17 does it take to change a light bulb? Five. One to hold the ladder, one to screw in the bulb and three to point at them while they do it."
Through the course of the nineties many boy bands came and went, but things became really interesting when in the Irish decided to get in on the act. Having many times won the Eurovision Song Contest, the Irish music industry had a great deal of experience when it came to producing music that was bland and palatable only to the stone deaf. The first Irish boy band to make it big was Boyzone whom many claim inherited the position once held by Take That at the top of the pile. Once more the group had five members who were unnable to play an instrument, write a song or sing on their own. But then Boyzone could always fall back on their secret weapon; their romantic Irish accents. While staggeringly non-descript in all other ways, Boyzone always turned on the blarney and drawlled away in interviews much to their own benefit. But much like Take That before them it soon became apparent that certain members were destined for greater things and that others were little more than chaff in the wind and the group dwindled and finally disbanded at the turn of the century.
2000 AND BEYOND, A BRAVE NEW MILLENIUM: The more things change, the more banal and annoying boy bands get. As the rest of the world looked forward to the promise of the first new millenium in a thousand years the music industry was busy hatching out a whole new brood of boy bands to torment the music-bnuying public. The US was treated to the delights of *NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys and O-Town and had a wonderful time playing a game where the aim was to tell the three boy bands apart.
Meanwhile the demise of Boyzone had far from spelled the end of the Irish boy band and soon the music charts were filled with the sound of a group with one of the strangest names yet: "Westlife." Managed by Irish pop-supremo Louie Walsh, Westlife came to embody the hallmarks of the stereotypical boy band that it had taken so many decades to refine and perfect. They were bland in both image and material. They sang what others told them to and did a line in cheesy covers. They appealed to teenage girls and gay men. They demonstrated no apparent intelligence when interviewed and when performing sat on stools, the climax of their perfomance being the moment when they stood up in unison for the final chorus of one of their banal tunes.
While the general public seemed by this time to be perfectly aware of the fact that the boy band was a totally manufactured and throw-away phenomenon of modern consumer-driven society, this did little to dim the apetite that they exhibited for the groups and their music. In the early years of the twenty-first century a new idea was hit upon in the light of the fact that television-viewers at the time were lapping up the "docu-soap" format of fly-on-the-wall documentary where the film-makers followed the trials and tribulations of various individuals as they went about their daily lives. The warts and all style of these programmes was used to great effect when a show with the imaginative title of "Popstars" was comissioned that followed the process of creating a manufactured band from scratch. The show spared nothing from the eyes of the viewer, taking them from the initial auditioning of countless (and often hilariously hopeless) wannabes right through to the final band's battle to take the "coveted" Christmas number one slot in the music charts. While Hear Say, the band that was put together, was a mixed band the show was important as it laid bare the entire process and presented a group that from it's very genesis was nothing more than a product of the selection process. It came as no great suprise to many commentators that the band fell apart recently after less than a year together due to the fact that they had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Not that the concept was totally new, that is. The US group O-Town were the subject of the show "Making the Band" that saw sindication around the world. But a new series of Popstars dubbed "The Rivals" is to follow the first where there will be two bands created rather than one. One band will be composed of "girls" and the other of "boys" chosen from a shortlist of ten by telephone vote. The ultimate aim is for the two bands to then compete for the Christmas number one (rather arrogantly ignoring the fact that they will certainly not be the only artists to release tracks to this same end). Whether or not the viewing public will respond to the same old tricks for a second year running remains to be seen, but then they have been lapping up the same formulaic and rehashed musical format for the best part of the past forty years without qualm or complaint. The more things change the more they stay the same.
