Love Me Tender

Boy bands are back, baby

Boyzone was my favourite boy band. They had a pleasant boys-next-door vibe and sang songs that touched my 16-year-old heart. When they sang, Don’t love me for fun girl, let me be the one girl, love me for a reason, let the reason be love, I sang along as I felt exactly the same about the boy I liked at the time.

They were the boys who would never let me down; they always knew exactly what to say. They stood by me as I grew up, their good-looking faces smiling down from life-size posters on my wall, their songs taking me through heartbreaks and falling-in-love moments. And even though I knew millions of girls liked them, it often seemed they were meant only for me.

My friend Samidha Sharma, who grew up with me, shunned the cute Boyzone boys for the funkier Take That and N’Sync. “Justin Timberlake and the gang were edgier than the rest,” she says. “It’s such a teenage fantasy to want to be with those boys.”

Maybe that’s why the boy band has returned in full swing over the past two years or so—because teenage girls everywhere need a bunch of good-looking boys singing to them about how beautiful they look when they smile. They need boys to fantasise about when nothing is going right.

The boy band phenomenon may have started with the Jackson 5 or The Beatles (who weren’t really boy bands as we know them today), but it really kicked into high gear in the 90s with Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Take That, N’Sync, All-4-One, Boyz II Men and Westlife. In the 2000s came 98 Degrees and Blue, among many others, and by the end of the 2000s, the Jonas Brothers came on the scene. As of 2013, there are two boy bands ruling the roost—One Direction and The Wanted.

The Brit boys of One Direction are reported to have sold 19 million singles and 10 million albums. In 2012, speaking at a conference, Nick Gatfield, chairman and CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, UK, was quoted as saying that One Direction represented a $50 million business empire. The band was also named 2012’s ‘Top New Artist’ by Billboard.

The Wanted, an English-Irish band, also found success that year, topping UK charts and selling almost 3 million copies of their hit single Glad You Came.

In March 2012, The New York Times published an article about boy bands becoming hot again after One Direction’s debut album went straight to the top of the Billboard charts, becoming the first Brit band to achieve this distinction.

The article described the transition of the boy band: ‘the definition of a boy band seems to have changed somewhat.

Neither One Direction nor The Wanted uses choreographed dance moves like those American bands of a decade ago. And The Wanted has laced its songs with references to partying and sexual hookups, putting a new spin on the usually wholesome formula.’

That’s one way of putting it. If the boy bands of the 90s were quintessentially good boys, the boy bands of today are more vocal about wanting to kiss you or hold you. But though they talk about drinking the night away or having a one night stand, they are essentially doing what their predecessors did—playing to please their young female audience.

One direction—composed of Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson—just missed winning X Factor, the reality talent competition originally started in the UK by Simon Cowell, but were signed by Cowell right away.

All five band-members are good looking in that skinny, sneaker-wearing, floppy-haired, teenage way.

Look at the lyrics of their hit What Makes You Beautiful:

If only you saw what I can see, / You’d understand why I want you so / desperately, / Right now I’m looking at you and I can’t believe, / You don’t know-oh-oh, / You don’t know you’re beautiful, oh-oh, / That’s what makes you beautiful.

Or sample this from a song called Little Things:

I know you’ve never loved the crinkles by your eyes, When you smile, / You’ve never loved your stomach or your thighs, / The dimples in your back at the bottom of your spine, / But I’ll love them endlessly.

Their videos usually show the boys singing to the camera with pink pouts and intense eyes reaching out. There isn’t a girl alive who won’t fall for that.

Samuel Berlie of The Other People, a Mumbai-based retro cover band which performs What Makes You Beautiful as part of their set, says: “Boy bands never really went out of [style], because their audience has always been consistent. Young teenage girls will never stop wanting a boy band. This song puts a girl on a pedestal, and girls like to hear those kind of lyrics. Also, like Backstreet, which had their own sound, or any other boy band, One Direction has a sound that’s completely theirs, and new. Hence, it works.”

One Direction has just released a documentary about themselves called This is Us. Director Morgan Spurlock, who hung out with the band at home and on the road, has been quoted as saying: “Part of the reason they’ve been so incredibly successful with their fans is that they are so incredibly grounded and normal, and that’s what comes off in the movie… You see five guys who are the same five guys they were three years ago.”

The Wanted has a racier image. They are beefier and have a bad boy vibe. The video for their massive hit Glad You Came shows bikini-clad girls on the beach and in a dark nightclub dancing suggestively with the boys. The lyrics are also suggestive:

Turn the lights out now,/ Now I’ll take you by the hand,/ Hand you another drink,/ Drink it if you can,/ Can you spend a little time,/ Time is slipping away, / Away from us so stay, / Stay with me I can make,/ Make you glad you came.

But when it comes down to it, it’s once again about making the girl sitting across the TV or listening to the radio fall in love with you. In I Found You, they sing:

I found you, in the darkest hour,/ I found you, in a pouring rain,/ I found you, when I was on my knees,/ And your love pulled me back again.

Bobin James of Rolling Stone magazine says, ‘Sometimes it’s not even about the songs they sing—it’s all about the image. Packaging and marketing are what make a boy band successful.’

Whatever the reason, as long as there are teenage girls in the world, boy bands will continue to thrive, singing romantic tunes that can make even a hardcore cynic bop to the beat. They are like temporary and perfect ‘boyfriends’ for all the girls in the world—they can do no wrong, and they will always be around in one way or another. It’s a match made in heaven.

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