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You're listening ad free on Amazon Music.
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Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One Series. On our last episode we walked through the history of the boy band. From its early rock and R B roots in Frankie lyman and the Jackson 5 through the 1980s heyday of New Edition and New Kids on the Block, we're now entering the late 90s. Hanson has swung the charts back toward pure pop and a new generation of millennial boy bands named Backstreet Boys and NSYNC are about hypercharge the top 40 one of the great ironies of boy band history is that the two best selling acts, Backstreet Boys and NSync, rival groups that leap to listeners minds the instant you say boy band, were both created by the same shadowy Svengali slash con man. That man was Louis Perlman, who was inspired to get into the boy band game by New Kids on the block. In the 80s, Perlman ran a business chartering blimps and private jets. When manager Maury Starr chartered a jet in 1989 for his proteges, the New Kids, Perlman realized how absurdly lucrative boy bands could be and he moved his business to Orlando, Florida. To tap the Disney town's wealth of talent. Perlman formed the Backstreet Boys. First, he named them after an Orlando flea market, the Backstreet Market, where teenagers hung out. The five good looking and vocally adept young men, Nick Carter, Howie Durrow, A.J. mcLean and cousins Brian Luttrell and Kevin Richardson, signed with Perl in 1993 and released their first single, We've Got It Going on in 1995. We touched on Backstreet's history in our Hit Parade episode on Britney Spears and Max Martin, the Swedish songwriting mastermind who was behind much of 90s American teen pop and who by the way, as of 2024 now possesses more Hot 100 number one songwriting credits than anyone save for Paul McCartney. Max Martin Co wrote We've Got It Going on with his mentor Dennis Pop, and it sounded like two Scandinavians approximating the sound of American R B. In Europe, where pure pop always did better. Backstreet's debut single was a hit. We've Got It Going on went top five across the continent and even in the UK. But in Backstreet's homeland, boy bands in 1995, half a decade after the peak of New Edition and New Kids were nowhere We've Got It Going on peaked on the Hot 100 at number 69. This backstreet backstory is vital to understanding how different the group's reception was two years later. By 1997, with the millennial generation entering their teen years, American radio was shifting away from Generation X, alt rock, new jack swing and gangsta rap towards shinier teen pop. After Hanson's number one hit mmm Bop, the airwaves were safe for boy bands again. The Backstreet Boys finally broke through on the Hot 100 with Quit Playing Playing Games With My Heart, co written once again by Max Martin. It turned out that mid tempo balladry, not the wannabe R and B of We've Got It Going on was an easier sell for US audiences. Quit playing games peaked at number two in the late summer of 97 just as the Backstreet Boys self titled debut album finally reached US Music stores. The album spawned a second hit right away with the similarly romantic as Long as yous Love Me. This radio only track reached number four on Billboard's Radio Songs chart. As we discussed in our Great War against the Single episode of Hit Parade, Backstreet's label records was looking to sell as many full length CDs as possible. It wasn't until Backstreet's third U S top 40 hit that they scored with their original white R B sound while offering their own entry into the history of self referential boy band songs. Everybody Parentheses Backstreet's Back was a head scratcher for American audiences. Wasn't this group on their debut album? What was Backstreet back from? The song was written by Max Martin and Dennis Pop, largely to hype up Backstreet's international fans who'd given the group multiple hits in 1995 and 96. But the song felt incongruous on Backstreet's 1997 US debut. Which is why Jive Records president Barry Weiss didn't want to release the tune as a single. He even initially kept it off the US Album. But when Canadian radio stations and some nearby US Stations started playing Everybody Backstreets back on their own, Weiss relented. He added the song to a 1998 reissue of the American Backstreet Boys CD. As a single, Backstreet's back reached number four. Four on the Hot 100 in May of 98, a sign that the Backstreet Boys were now established hit makers approaching their imperial peak. It was around this time that Backstreet got their first serious competition from that aforementioned other boy band also launched by the wily Lou Perlman it's tearing up.
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My heart When I'm with you when we are apart I feel it too.
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And no matter what I do NSync were started by Perlman back in 1995 when he was waiting for Backstreet to find an audience. Perlman figured that if Backstreet were successful, they'd have competition, so why not create a Backstreet rival himself? He connected with Orlando college student Chris Kirkpatrick, who wanted to start his own singing group and backed by Perlman, recruited four more members to NSync. Justin Timberlake and J.C. chazzet, who'd both briefly been cast members on Disney's The New Mickey Mouse Club alongside fellow future teen idols Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and budding Orlando singers Joey Fatone and Lance Bass. NSYNC rehearsed, recorded and performed for two years before their self titled debut came out first in Europe in 1997, then in America in 1998. Tearin Up My Heart, an eventual number 15 US radio hit, defined NSync's sound. Co written once again by Max Martin and his Swedish colleagues, it was a bit more R and B forward than Backstreet sound, but paired easily with the new shiny boy band style. When NSYNC finally issued their debut retail single, I Want you Back, no relation to the Jackson 5 Classic, it scaled the Hot 100 alongside the Backstreet Boys, peaking at number 13.
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So tell me what to do now you.
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Then later that year, as we discussed in our Britney Spears episode, both Backstreet and NSYNC were given a major boost by MTV. In the fall of 98, the video channel merged two of its prior daytime programs, Total Request, a daily video countdown of clips requested by viewers, and MTV Live Live, a daily broadcast from the channel's Times Square headquarters in New York City. The new after school show with the portmanteau title Total Request Live, or TRL for short, hosted by 25 year old Carson Daly, was a countdown on live TV steroids. Screaming teenagers would pile into Times Square either inside MTV's fishbowl like studio or or out on the street shrieking for favorite pop stars and their videos. And the boy bands were instant attractions.
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Please welcome in they're performing the number one video on Total Request Live.
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Here's NSYNC doing Tearing up my heart guys, between NSYNC and Backstreet Boys, plus the new teen sensation Britney Spears, whose debut single Music Baby One More Time launched nearly simultaneously with trl.
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My loneliness is killing me and I.
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Must confess I still Believe Team Pop had a hammerlock on the program both on the dial MTV Countdown and in their Times Square studio. Not long after TRL launched, NSYNC scored their first first ever US top 10 hit with the ballad God Must have Spent a Little More Time on you which peaked at number eight. By then the boy band pool was getting crowded. A four man vocal group from Los Angeles by way of Ohio, 98 Degrees had made their chart debut a year before TRL. Their single Invisible man peaked at number 12 in the summer of 1997. But after TRL, 98 degrees, fronted by textbook non threatening boys Nick Andrew Lachey became regular denizens of Billboard's top 10. Their late 98 single because of youf climbed to number three on the Hot 100. This presence of second tier megastars like 98 Degrees indicated that America was nearing peak. Boy Band. That peak really kicked off in the spring of 1999 when the Backstreet Boys readied the release of their second US and third European album Millennium. Anything Backstreet put out in the wake of their chart explosion was bound to do well, but the group stacked the deck by leading the album with one of Max Martin's greatest and most nonsensical pop songs. Rolling Stone later called I Want it that Way a genre transcending classic. Other critics agreed even as they poked fun at Max Martin's inscrutable lyrics. Martin and his Swedish co writer Andreas Carlsson never revealed what that is, but the sterling melody overcame those quibbles. I Want it that Way not only routinely ranks as Backstreet Boy's most beloved song, and it often makes the upper reaches of polls of the greatest boy band songs and even greatest pop songs of all time. What way? That way.
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I never wanna hear you say I want it that way.
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Because Jive Record elected not to issue I Want it that Way as a retail single in America, the song peaked at a fairly modest number six on the Hot 100 in the late spring of 99. But withholding the single ensured thousands of Backstreet Boys fans would be compelled to buy the full length CD instead. This gambit worked massively. Backstreet Boys millennium opened to 1.1 million copies in its first week, the largest week for any album ever to that date. The huge launch of Millennium kicked off one of the fizziest pop summers in Hot 100 history. Backstreet presided over a 1999 hit parade consisting of English language Latin American pop from Ricky Martin, More sensual teen pop from Christina Aguilera, Emulating hip hop flavored R B from Destiny's Child, Agro Dude Bro rap rock from the likes of Limp Bizkit, who often went head to head with the boy bands on the daily TRL Countdown, And even third tier boy band pop from the short lived Light Funky Ones or lfo. Summer Girls. Their dopey ode to New Kids on the Block, Bad Chinese Food, and Young Ladies who Wear Abercrombie and Fitch peaked at number three.
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New Kids on the Block had a bunch of hits. Chinese Food Makes Me Sick and I Think It's Fly Away for the Summer. For the Summer.
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But the Backstreet Boys lorded overall that summer, selling the most CDs, dominating the TRL countdown, and setting the pace for millennial pop. The Millennium album went on to sell 13 million copies, and it defined the zeitgeist as Y2K approached. We'll be back momentarily. For all the success the millennial boy bands were experiencing, industry politics were roiling beneath the surface. Simply put, Lew Perlman was ripping off both groups he spawned. The members of the Backstreet Boys freed themselves from his clutches first. In 1998, they sued Perelman for fraud, claiming he'd kept most of their money and treated them as, quote, indentured servants. Servants. By 1999, NSync's members followed suit, revealing that Perlman had himself written into NSync's contracts as a sixth member of the group and took the spoils while the five actual members had been living on $35 a day each, even after selling millions of records. The NSYNC case dragged on through 1999, even as both groups were enjoying imperial chart success. Later that year at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards, boy bands were the major attraction. And for the VMAs host, comedian Chris Rock, an easy target. While poking good natured fun at the reigning kings of pop, rock star slipped in a pointed racial critique.
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Same thing always goes on in music. Black man does something, 15 years later, white man does the same thing. It makes a lot more money. That's right. What else going on? Boy groups. NSync, Backstreet Boys, Backstreet Boys. Backstreet Boys. They from the back streets.
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Woo. Ooh.
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I'm scared of that neighborhood Backstreet Boy shit. Why would you want to do that? Didn't you see New Kids on the Block? Don't you know how this movie's gonna end?
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With hindsight, Chris Rock did call the peak before the fall of the Millennial Boy Band. He just called it about a year to a year and a half. Early after NSYNC freed themselves from Lou Perlman, settling their contract and re signing with Jive Records, they had the opportunity to celebrate their freedom while besting the Backstreet Boys with one more chart benchmark. NSYNC recorded this, their second album, no Strings Attached, while they were extricating themselves from their original contract. The album title and cover art in which the five sinkers played puppets alluded to them no longer being under Lou Perlman's control. So did the album's lead single, Bye Bye Bye, which doubled as both a romantic kiss off song and a screw you to Perlman, an instant top five hit By by by let fans behind the curtain on NSync's plight and reminded them just how long it had been since the group had issued a full CD of new material.
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Now I really come to see that life would be much better Once you're going I know that I can't take no more.
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When no Strings Attached finally arrived In March of 2000, it obliterated the sales record set just the year before by their rivals the Backstreet Boys. No strings attached sold 2.4 million copies in its first week, more than doubling Millennium's 1999 sales mark. After Bye Bye Bye peaked at number four, the follow up single, co written by Max Martin himself and his stable of Swedish songwriters, went all the way to the top of the Hot 100 in the summer of 2000. The meme Tastic it's gonna be.
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Somebody, Guess what? It's gonna be me.
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The Backstreet Boys, for their part, were no slouches in 2000. They followed up Millennium straight away with the album Black and Blue in December, Black and Blue opened to 1.6 million in sales in its first week, a number that was would have been mind blowing a year earlier but now fell short of NSync's seemingly unbeatable record. The Backstreet album's lead single, an attempt to recreate the I want it that way magic called Shape of My Heart, topped out at number. Trying to be someone it seemed the air was finally leaking from the boy band balloon. You could tell when TV's two leading primetime animated series both satirized boy bands within eight months of each other. First, south park, with a summer 2000 episode about Eric Cartman's would be boy band Finger Bang.
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Finger Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang, bang, bang, bang, Bang.
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Followed by the Simpsons with a winter 2001 episode featuring Bart Simpson and his schoolmates in a boy band slash military industrial scheme called the Party Posse. NSYNC provided guest Voices for that Simpsons episode, eager to show they were in on the joke. You might say that was also the premise of what turned out to be a NSync's final album, Celebrity. On its lead single, Pop, the group took aim at their critics who were debasing the boy band for their populist music. Sang Justin Timberlake, quote, sick and tired of hearing all these people talk about what's the deal with this pop life and when is it gonna fade out? We got to get some melody.
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We're gonna bring it till the end, man. Come on now.
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The fade out was already happening. In the summer of 2001, celebrity opened to 1.7 million in starting sales, but it was out of the number one spot in just one week. The pop single stalled at number 19 on the Hot 100 and the CD never produced a chart topping hit. On their way to the exit, NSYNC set up Justin Timberlake as a breakout star and a credible R B singer. The soul ballad Gone did almost as well on Billboard's R B chart as it did on the pop chart, peaking just outside the top 10 on the both charts. And the album's final single, Girlfriend, featuring rapper Nelly, was a legit hip hop dance track. Celebrity's biggest single, Girlfriend, made the pop top five and number 23 on the R and B chart. And then the millennial boy band moment was over. Both of the leading bands went on hiatus. Backstreet boys for about three years. NSync, seemingly permanently in 2002, the same year Justin Timberlake dropped his solo debut, Justified. To no one's surprise, Timberlake picked right up with the R B forward sound NSYNC had been refining on their final singles. In the 2000s, the charts did a hard pivot from teen pop to hip hop. The few harmony groups that did well in the early aughts barely resembled teen pop. For example, 112, an R B quartet on Sean Combs's Bad Boy label that had been scoring hits since 1996, scored their biggest hit in 2001 in the wake of the boy band implosion. Peaches and Cream, a number four hit, gave boy band energy, but was far more ribbled and laced with innuendo than anything by NSync, A quartet that evolved out of the former kiddie band Immature and featured the vocals and show stopping dance moves of heartthrob Omarion, topped the Hot 100 in early 2003 with the playfully edgy Bump Bump, Bump. The Latin pop world was also producing its share of top selling pop troops in the gap between menudo and reggaeton. The Dominican American group Aventura, led by future bachata king Romeo Santos, infused American R B Into Bachata on Heart 6 Singles like Observation. And as in the mid-70s heyday of the Bay City Rollers, certain mid aughts rock bands were marketed as de facto boy bands. Emo pop stars, Fall Out Boy were frequent denizens of MTV's TRL Countdown and inspired a similar frenzy in the years after Backstreet and NSYNC left the scene. Ultimately, it was a different kind of pop rock combo that finally filled the boy band gap in in the late aughts. And like the Jacksons, the Osmonds and Hansen before them, they sprung organically from a musical family. The Jonas Brothers Kevin, Joe and Nick Jonas were raised in Woff, New Jersey by a former ordained minister father and a mother who homeschooled them. Youngest brother Nick Jonas had even done some Broadway acting. After signing to Columbia Records, the label put them on tour with acts like the revived Backstreet Boys, but like Hansen, the Jonas Brothers played instruments. Their 2006 debut album, It's About Time generated a top 40 hit in early 2007 with a cover of the UK pop hit Year 3000. But the Jonases also generated some of their material in house. Nick Jonas was a budding songwriter with contributions from Kevin and Joe. Later in 07, the Jonas Brothers first top 20 pop hit, SOS was entirely authored by Nick. By 2008 fandom for the Jones Jonas's had reached a frenzy fueled in part by the TV fame of Joe Jonas, who'd acted alongside his brothers in the Disney Channel movie Camp Rock. The brothers became teen beat obsessions for everything from their dating exploits. Joe was briefly an item with a teenage Taylor Swift to their pious backgrounds and wearing of purity rings and abstinence totems. When the Jonas Brothers dropped their album A Little Bit Longer in the summer of 2008, it debuted at number one with over a half million in first week sales, remarkable at a time post Napster when CD sales were down across the board. Its lead single, Burnin up, co written by all three Jonas Brothers, debuted at number4.5 on the Hot 100 and sold nearly 2 million copies on iTunes. The rise of the Jonas Brothers, who would continue scoring hits both together and solo into the 2010s, showed how the vertically integrated music business had advanced in the 21st century. Even since the era of Backstreet and NSync, it was now possible for an organic band of boys like the Jonases to be worked through the nexus of iTunes, downloads, targeted TV shows and pop merchandising. But could that system build a boy band from scratch? In 2010, famed music impresario and reality TV personality Simon Cowell was about to test that premise out on the British edition of his music competition franchise, the X Factor, where Simon was wowed by a teenage Harry Styles. How are you?
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Hello.
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Nice to meet you. What's your name?
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I'm Harry Styles.
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Okay.
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Okay, Harry, how old are you? I'm 16. So what are you doing here today? Well, I've always wanted to audition, but I've always been too young.
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Okay. All right. When are you going to sing?
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I'll do Isn't She Lovely by Stevie Wonder.
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Okay. Good luck.
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Isn't she lovely? Isn't she wonderful?
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The story of the formation of One Direction is now etched into boy band legend Simon Cowell and his fellow X Factor judge Nicole Scherzinger literally piece together a boy band quintet out of five solo competitors on the UK X Factor. Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. The show even captured footage of Cowell and his fellow judges assembling One Direction in real time. That looks good.
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That looks great.
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It looks unbelievable.
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That looks great. I like that. That looks great. We've only four already. Okay, Zane, now that is a good idea. Oh, my God.
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That's the category I want to that movie. As inorganic as this process seemed, revealing its workings to the public only seemed to stoke affection for the group that teen fans dubbed 1D. When One Direction lost the X Factor competition in the final round, it even made one D into something of an underdog. Fans now had a stake in in their success. It helped that Cowell, who signed One Direction to his own Psycho records imprint, ensured 1D had top tier material. What makes you Beautiful Beautiful, a 2012 single written by Swedish and American songwriters affiliated with Max Martin studio, topped the UK chart and reached number four in the US remarkable as 1D had been created on the British X Factor, not the American edition, the song expressed a message, according to boy band historian Maria Sherman, that every young girl needed to hear. You don't know you're beautiful. Leaving nothing to chance, the group's management booked One Direction on the Today show for a performance in front of 15,000 screaming fans. That paid off when the single made the highest Hot 100 debut by a British act in over a decade. One Direction went on to dominate boy band pop in the first half of the 2010s. From 2012 through 2014, 1D became the first band in Billboard history to have their first four albums debut at number one Up All Night, which spawned the what makes you beautiful single Take Me Home, which generated the number three Hot 100 hit live while we're young, let's.
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Go crazy.
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Midnight Memories, which generated the number two hit Best song ever, a song influenced by and paying homage to the whole Baba O'Reilly. And the fourth album 4, which produced the anthemic number 13 hit Steal My Girl. One Direction helped keep the boy band arena open in the 2000 and tens and made space for other acts with an exuberant rock leaning pop sound. In 2014, an Australian band that opened for 1D on tour 5 Seconds of Summer made their debut with the single she Looks so Perfect, a frothy rock song that gave what makes you beautiful vibes. The One Direction connection got five seconds of summer or five sos pronounced five Sauce to number one on the Billboard album chart with their self titled debut album. As for 1D, after one more album in 2015, the number two peaking made in the AM which finally broke their streak of chart toppers. One Direction pulled one last top three single with Drag Me down can drag.
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Me down Nobody, nobody, nobody can drag.
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Me down and then announced a hiatus. The break was spawned in part by the departure of Zayn Malik, who went on to a more R B leaning solo career. And of course Harry Styles was ready to spread his wings as a soloist. His debut single, the classic rock ballad Sign of the times, arrived in 2017.
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Just stop you crying It's a sign of the time we gotta get away.
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From here by then the boy band energy had shifted not only away from America and England, but out of the global west entirely. Arguably after One Direction, it never really went back more in a moment through the 90s and aughts, right through the 2010s. While all this boy band froth was going on in America, South Korea was building an entire industry that would take the world by storm. While this podcast episode cannot possibly do justice to the rich history of Korean pop music or K pop, it's worth going back briefly to K Pop's big bang moment in 1992. When the trio so Taiji and Boys performed their single Non Adayo or I Know on a televised talent competition, the country had never seen anything quite like this. A group that sang and rapped, dressed in hip hop fashions and executed breakdance adjacent moves. Consider right through the 70s and most of the 80s, South Korea had banned rock music and most pop that the military government considered non positive the media dubbed Sotaji and Boys the Korean New Kids on the Block and they scored a bunch of hits in South Korea through the mid-90s. This was a eureka moment for the Korean entertainment industry, which barely existed at the time. As Uni Hong, author of the definitive history the Birth of Korean Cool, put it, if Korea wanted a pop music industry, it was going to have to create it for from the ground up, unquote. The business organized itself into a handful of vertically integrated conglomerates that would sign young stars to strict years long contracts, training and evaluating them in everything from singing and smiling for the camera to dancing with lockstep precision. Yoonie Hong points out that compared to Korean pop acts, Western boy band dancers look sloppy and freeform. Speaking of the West, Korean pop only began to draw American and European attention in the 2000s when rain, a chiseled pop star, broke out internationally. Rain even became a running source of bemused fascination on Stephen Colbert's Comedy Central show the Colbert Report. As Uni Hong put it, quote, rain's videos were the first that bore what came to be the K pop stamp. Highly artistic direction, stylized sets as if the video were taking place in the matrix and ingeniously choreographed, unquote. As exceptional as Rain was, however, by the late aughts and early 10? S, the K pop industry relied more on so called idol groups like tvxq, Girls Generation and Super Junior. Still, K pop was essentially nowhere on the US charts until the fluke 2012 success of Psy, whose horsey dance YouTube hit Gangnam Style. We have discussed on several prior Hit Parade episodes peaking at number two on the Hot 100 in the fall of 2012. Gangnam Style prime US listeners to hear Korean lyrics and K pop production styles on the radio and itunes. PSY was atypical of the Korean idol creation model, but there was now space created for a more dynamic group to fill. And this is where the bulletproof boy scouts in Korean BTS came in. As their debut single no More Dreams made clear, BTS did not start out as pure pop. The seven man group who go by the pseudonyms rm, Jin, Suga, J, Hope, Jimin V and Jungkook launched with a sound closer to American gangsta rap. Even the K pop press found BTS unapproachable at first. But more than any other prior K pop act, BTS put in the work to make themselves legible to Western audiences, mounting annual U.S. tours and evolving their sound into a hybrid of bouncy pop and trap era rap. Their devoted fan base, the BTS army spread outside Korea to encompass millions of US K pop aficionados. In 2017, BTS became the first K pop group to crack the American top 40 when a remix of their song Mic Drop featuring New York rapper Designer reached number 28. By 2018, BTS had converted into emohiphop crossed with electropop, and their single Fake Love was promoted by their American record label Columbia Records directly to US radio stations. Sonically, BTS were now light years past what any hit Western boy band had attempted before. Fake Love and its album set several chart benchmarks when they arrived in the early summer of 2018. The album Love Tear, part of a multi album Love Yourself series, debuted at the top of the the Billboard 200, giving BTS K Pop's first ever American number one album. And the Fake Love single debuted at number 10, making it the first top 10 hit by a K Pop group six years after soloist Psy reached the American top 10 with Gangnam Style. As the BTS sound kept evolving, they racked up hit albums and occasionally hit singles, driven mostly by downloads and streams by BTS army fans. In 2019, Boy With Love, a collaboration with the American singer Halsey, debuted on the Hot 100 at number eight. Boy With Love sounded more American friendly than any prior BTS single, but its chart success relied largely on the group's devoted fan base. Both Fake Love and Boy With Luv spent less than two months each on the Hot 100, unable to convert army worship and into widespread radio play or consumption by casual listeners. Even as BTS albums continued to debut at number one, BTs were, you might say, a blockbuster pop act a majority of Americans were rarely or never hearing. In 2020, BTS decided to do something about that. After years of recording almost entirely in Korean, sprinkled with brief English phrases, BTS chose to record their first all English single at the height of the COVID pandemic. They wanted their all English debut to be escapist and catchy, and they put the word out through the US label Columbia that they wanted an exciting, tempo driven pop song. The result was a truly global production written by a pair of British songwriters, David Stewart and Jessica Gombar. Shepherded by an American record label and recorded by South Korea's leading pop ambassadors. They called it Dynamite, Expertly riding the wave of neo disco pop a la Dua Lipa and Ariana Grande that was then ruling the charts, Dynamite sounded like it belonged everywhere, including the US airwaves. When Dynamite debuted at number one on the Hot 100 in September 2020, it became not only the first American chart topper for bts, it bested psy's Gangnam Style to be K pop's first US Number one period. In the months that followed, BTS racked up multiple Hot 100 number ones, including Life Goes on, their first American chart topper center sung largely in Korean, And the following year, the propulsive butter, which spent 10 weeks atop the Hot 100 and took the title as Billboard's official 2021 song of the summer. No boy band of any nationality had ever commanded the Hot 100 that long with that many number one hits. In the half decade since BTS's breakthrough, more than a half dozen other K pop actors acts have topped the Billboard 200 album chart, including the boy bands Super M, Tomorrow Together and Stray Kids. These acts have a limited US radio and Hot 100 profile, but they command the charts thanks to a devoted fan base who who buy multiple copies of the ACT's CDs to receive cover art celebrating their favorite band member. In other words, the old boy band ethos of pick your favorite, pioneered in the days of the Monkees and the Jackson 5 is alive and well. And by the way, several of K pop's American album chart toppers are girl groups like blackpink Twice and New Jeans. Which raises the question, what about girl groups? Don't they have a rich chart history? Hold that thought because we'll be covering them in a future Hit Parade episode. As for the Western style boy band, perhaps the most surprising thing about these bands that seem to have built in sell by dates that supposedly become passe before their fans ever leave high school is that they never really go away. In 2019, the Jonas Brothers, now all in their late 20s and 30s, scored their first act ever Hot 100 number one hit with Sucker. The Jonases also scored a number one album that year, as did the Backstreet boys. And in 2023, NSync announced they had reunited to record a song for the Trolls animated movie franchise that has long featured Justin Timberlake as a voice actor. The song from Trolls Band Together titled Better place, reached number 25 on the Hot 100 and even cracked the top 10 on the Adult Contemporary chart because of course, the original NSYNC fan base are now in their 30s and 40s. Will the NSYNC reunion last? It's anyone's guess, but last month when Justin Timberlake released his latest solo album, Everything I Thought It Was, the track that generated the most excitement on social media was paradise, featuring vocals from Justin's old boy bandmates NSYNC even joined Timberlake at a Los Angeles concert for a surprise reunion performing Paradise Plus a medley of NSYNC hits.
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Right here for this moment between you and I.
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And that's the thing about boy bands. They are fused with our happiest memories as music fans. Each generation, really, each half generation, gets a boy band or two to call their own. As with any music that peaks on the charts during our adolescence, nothing, not even aging out of the teen pop demographic, will abridge that fondness. So when the Backstreet Boys tour now, as you might say, Backstreet Men, and they pull out their greatest hit, do me a favor.
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If you know this one, if you know this one, sing it at the top of your lungs for me, okay?
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For just a moment, an audience remembers the time when their pop idol meant the world to them. It's a poster on the wall of our memory palace that can never be taken down. Say what?
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Thank you so much.
- [58:02]
B
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanfi. That's me. My producer is Kevin Bendis. Kevin also produced the latest installment of our monthly Hit Parade, the Bridge shows, which are available exclusively to Slate plus members. In our latest Bridge episode, I talked to author and critic Maria Sherman about her book on the history of boy bands and why One Direction changed her life. To sign up for Slate plus and hear not only the Bridge, but all our shows the day they drop, visit slate.com hitparade + Derek John is executive producer of Narrative Podcasts, and we had help from Joel Meyer. Alicia Montgomery is VP of Audio for Slate Podcasts. Check out their roster of shows@slate.com podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melany.
- [59:33]
A
My fire the one Put your fingers in the air Desire you are, you are everybody wait till you sing it.