Larger Than Life

CHAPTER ONE

ON THE ORIGIN OF BOY BAND SPECIES

WHY DO FOOLS FALL IN LOVE: BOY BAND ANTIQUITY

MOST PEOPLE WITH a cursory understanding of boy bands will inform you that the phenomenon begins with the Beatles. If they’re feeling boastful, they’ll mention Beatlemania, a term coined in the early ’60s to describe the absolute frenzy the coiffured foursome inspired within their female fan base. Those people, who I’m sure are super smart and cool and attractive and well meaning, could not be more wrong.

Like anything that’s highly contested and old as hell, the origin of the boy band is not actually linear, but it is possible to get pretty close to a chronology. Personally, I believe the sensation that begat the melodious cutie-pie group was not the Beatles and their Beatlemania, but Franz Liszt and Lisztomania. In the mid-1800s, the Hungarian composer was essentially Justin Bieber; his very image was enough to make grown women faint to the floor. As Alan Walker wrote in his three-volume biography, Franz Lizst: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847, “Liszt once threw away an old cigar stump in the street under the watchful eyes of an infatuated lady-in-waiting, who reverently picked the offensive weed out of the gutter, had it encased in a locket and surrounded with the monogram ‘F.L.’ in diamonds, and went about her courtly duties unaware of the sickly odor it gave forth”—behavior strikingly similar to the monument erected in the spot on the side of Route 101 in Calabasas, California, where One Direction heartthrob Harry Styles threw up after a night of partying and a day of hiking in 2014. No wonder Beatlemania would share a suffix with Lisztomania a century later. If 1D came to fruition in a time when vintage misogyny was still hyped in pop-rock, it’s likely “Directionmania” would’ve caught on.

But Liszt was one man, and boy bands require multiple members to fulfill meticulously crafted archetypes. Outside of the Christian religion, and its gospels and spirituals meant to venerate God, the secular male vocal groups that most resemble modern boy bands arrived in the form of barbershop quartets. In the 1930s, these were adult men who adorned uniform looks and sang exclusively a cappella. In the late 1940s, love-song-obsessed doo-wop, the result of black youth creating their own sound following World War II, transformed the group-of-dudes-singing blueprint with new rhythms and instruments. (Around this time, too, Frank Sinatra became the object of teen girl affection, a population referred to as “bobby soxers.”) That music gave way to the popularization of rock and roll in the 1950s with artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Elements of the hip-swinging genre date back to 1920s blues, but things really took off with rockabilly Elvis Presley, his female following itself very Lisztian, and other white artists who performed historically black music. Appropriation shapes much of pop culture, and it rears its ugly head in boy bands throughout the decades.

Elvis, of course, was also just one guy. You could argue that the boy band thing really kicked off in 1956, when multihyphenate rock-and-roll-rhythm-and-blues vocal group Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers released “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” a song so perfectly lovelorn it manages to masquerade its horniness, making it proto–every boy band, ever. How far off is “Love is a losing game / Love can be a shame / I know of a fool / You see / For that fool is me” from the Backstreet Boys’ “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart),” really? And what a coincidence that Lymon wrote the song when he was thirteen years old, the same age Nick Carter was when he joined BSB.

The 1950s birthed superstars, but it did not create a group of equal members with boy band–branded ubiquity. Think about it: Bill Haley was the star of Bill Haley and His Comets, and they weren’t called Nick Lachey and the 98 Degrees. Lymon and his guys arrived too early in history, as geniuses so often do, to be considered the first-ever boy band. That is in part because the decade marked one of the first real eras of the teenager, a postwar economic and generational divide that had never happened before. Young adults had money to spend on their own interests for the first time ever, and they would soon define popular taste.

With a chunk of change in their shallow pockets and iconoclastic impulses in tow, teenagers transformed everything in the ’60s when the Beatles became widely recognized as the world’s very first boy band (also the biggest pop group the world has ever seen, but whatever, those titles are one and the same; as soon as there were teens, there were teen girls hand-selecting what pop art was worthy of immortality). John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were a force, distinct personalities and talents that would go on to establish the modern boy band paradigm. Most pivotal, however, was that they had their Beatles fans, an organized population so ravenously dedicated that they ushered in a new word.

Beatlemania (a term that has been weaponized by the media to pathologize young women for going wild, screaming that decibel-shattering scream, and having a blast—imagine if anyone called male sports fans an “epidemic”) marked the most vital shift of power in the boy band schema. The way the band has been described publicly is so intrinsically tied to their fans’ ceaseless passion that they became one and the same, and Beatlemaniacs wielded their power freely. Their underwear-throwing, red-in-the-face, teary-eyed hollers for John, Paul, George, and Ringo were an extension of the 1960s sexual revolution, a real rebellion of gendered oppression, which journalists like The New Statesman’s Paul Johnson infamously misunderstood and thusly clocked as foolish, writing a deeply misogynistic screed: “Those who flock around the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures.” In retrospect, he was out of line, a real dolt, but the description does confirm two things: First, teens had taken control over pop culture, beginning in the 1960s and with the Beatles, as they would forever after. Second, boy band fans, specifically those who are women, were disparaged for their gusto, as they would be forever after.

The Beatles offered a framework that boy bands could build upon: John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s unstoppable, joyful melodies (especially when dealing with love and not sex, at least, coded carnality in their early days) were at the heart of every song, as were their matching suits and mop-top bowl cuts. They broke records and produced hit after hit, without waning in quality and with exhaustive speed. They offered young people an image of autonomy that differed from other celebrity at the time. They were devilishly boyish. They were unafraid of meddling with traditional gender and genre structures; their music blended the blunt force of 1950s rock and roll with the outrageously addictive harmonies of girl groups like the Supremes. In fact, the Beatles worshipped those girl groups and aspired to be like them. What’s more boy band–like than adoring women? The Beatles became extremely monetizable, their faces plastered on products and magazines and movies across the globe. Their influence was so immense that it would eventually create competition for themselves in the form of copycat acts. That, too, would prove to be a common thread throughout boy band history.

The Beatles’ 1964 flick, A Hard Day’s Night, made an impression on two wannabe filmmakers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, inspiring them to develop a series about four young lads in a global pop band. (Sound familiar? They were not subtle.) After a series of rejections, their concept sold to NBC, and their quartet, the Monkees, formed in 1966. The group was frequently referred to as the “Prefab Four,” a parody of the Beatles’ “Fab Four” nickname, and they enjoyed a five-year run, maintaining popularity even after their show was canceled in 1968. The comparisons didn’t end there: the Monkees disbanded in 1971 (with reunions to follow), one year after the Beatles went their separate ways in 1970.

The 1960s were also the golden age of Berry Gordy’s Motown, the Detroit-based Hitsville studio that produced hit single after hit single, combining soul, disco, R&B, and pop. As great critic Nelson George described it, Gordy created “a triumph and a contradiction… a testament to the power of black music.” After a decade of timeless tunes and a path forged by the Four Tops and the Temptations, Motown’s ’70s were earmarked for boy band domination in the form of the Jackson 5. Even though Gordy’s groups are rarely referred to as “boy bands” in the modern sense, the pieces were there: cute boys now with choreography, matching clothes, and seriously catchy hooks. Across the pond, Scotland attempted to release their own Beatles, the Bay City Rollers, and in Latin America, pulling from both Motown and the Beatles before them, Menudo became Puerto Rico’s Monkees. Boy bands, long before the term was used, were diversifying.

At the end of the decade, in 1978, New Edition came into existence. The R&B group of youngsters, with the help of American producer Maurice Starr, became the first contemporary