By Jamil Oakford/se news editor
People are drawn to music artists for various reasons, be it sound, lyrics or overall look and/or feel.
Now, it’s obvious that some artists have, by the grace of their good looks, reached a level of fame that doesn’t reflect their talent all that well.
And the artists that get blamed for having more beauty and less talent are usually boy bands.
Yes, the collective exhausted sigh that fills the room at the mention of boy bands can be heard a mile away. But are boy bands really that terrible? I don’t think so. In fact, some of the most successful artists came out of boy bands.
Michael Jackson started in what fits perfectly into the definition of a boy band in the ’60s. Justin Timberlake hailed from the famed boy band ’N Sync during the late 1990s. Even Paul McCartney and John Lennon started their careers in a pop-style boy band.
But somehow, publicly professing one’s simple interest in One Direction earns an eyebrow raise and an instant judgmental, glassy-eyed stare.
Boy bands are always seen as a musical garbage disposal for an industry hell-bent on exploiting teenage girls’ hormones. But it’s not like the idea hadn’t been tapped before.
The Beatles thrived off the hysteria of teenage girls that followed them and surely annoyed a lot of people who thought their earlier music was bubblegum pop.
’N Sync was viewed the exact same way in its infancy and prime stages as well as the Backstreet Boys. That’s not to say ’N Sync and Backstreet Boys in the end made timeless music that could be played 20 years down the line and be seen as insightful and deep and meaningful, but what young boy band could say that?
And given the right amount of gestation time in the music industry, one can trace musical development. The Backstreet Boys made a comeback with far more mature themes in their music and sound all the better for it. The same could be said for The Beatles. Once they grew up a bit, so did their sound. And the resulting music stands as some of their most popular songs to date.
The beauty of music lies in the fact that there isn’t just one kind of way to make it, and boy bands are only an extension of that philosophy.
