1,663,200 minutes and counting
The Backstreet Boys' fame is stronger than ever
by KIERAN GRANT -- Toronto Sun
Sunday, March 12, 2000
Source: http://www.canoe.ca/Jam/home.html
Backstreet Boys have been passed a magical torch that hasn't dimmed since the fall of New Kids On The Block. They continue a proud tradition that dates back to such luminaries as Menudo and The Bay City Rollers ... Only five minutes until the next sensation."
-- Toronto Sun, Jan. 6, 1997
So I wrote in these very pages the day after the Backstreet Boys played their first Toronto concert in front of 2,000 fans at the Warehouse.
Yes, as the famous song-and-dance band's loyal legion of letter-writing fans would be quick to point out, my prediction proved false.
Five minutes have come and gone. Actually, 1,663,200 minutes have come and gone.
The Backstreet Boys play the SkyDome this Wednesday, in what will be their sixth soldout Toronto concert visit.
In the meantime, the group's three albums, including last year's Millennium, have all surpassed diamond status (one million copies sold) in Canada alone.
Symptomatic of their extended lease on limelight, they've matured from a cookie-cutter pop act to a fluffy but surprisingly distinctive singing group, just as their gortex sportswear has been ditched for suits.
The quintet -- Kevin Richardson, A.J. McLean, Brian Littrell, Nick Carter and Howie Dorough -- have come full-circle in their journey from bubblegum upstarts to music-biz commodity. They netted four nominations at this year's Grammys, including one for best album (Millennium), and were invited to perform for the award-show telecast.
They didn't win anything, mind you. And it's not like the Grammys were ever a hub of credibility for artists. Neither is the cover of Rolling Stone, for that matter.
Still, the trophy nods were almost symbolic that the world's flagship boy-band had hit creative puberty and graduated to a new-found success with a wider audience.
One of the Boys, Richardson, ominously predicted that three years ago during the Backstreet Boys' first Sun interview.
"We see ourselves eventually becoming an adult contemporary R&B band," Richardson said. "Our music isn't for a specific audience."
Granted, the singer also compared his group to the Beatles, a cardinal sin in the eyes of the music press -- not that there ever has been any love lost between BSB and their critics.
Obviously, I wasn't the only scribe to underestimate the group's lasting power when they first danced off the conveyor belt at Orlando, Fla.'s Trans Continental Company in 1996. That's the same hit-making plant -- and, interestingly, part-owner of the Chippendales strip-joint chain -- that within two years would churn out 'NSYNC, Britney Spears and LFO, among others.
Supplying the early hits for BSB, 'NSYNC and Spears was the late Swedish songwriter Denniz Pop, who died of cancer in 1998.
Comparisons to New Kids On The Block -- the late-'80s prototype for virtually all song-and-dance boy-bands to follow -- were practically universal for BSB.
Derided as "showroom dummies," "pre-fab pop stars," "Chippendales for pre-teens," they seemed designed for the sole purpose of being a flash-in-the-pan sensation.
The group's first conquests in the mid-1990s read like a war map of Europe in 1940: Germany, Belgium, France. Their debut hit single, We've Got It Goin' On, was a smash overseas before the group had even finished making its first album.
Then the Backstreet Boys broke into Quebec and Canada in '97.
In a pattern that would later be repeated by 'NSYNC, they took their time before rolling clean over their U.S. homeland.
So even the staunchest of BSB critics must have cracked an egg-faced smile and shrugged last spring when Millennium, an album that saw the group dabbling in songwriting for the first time, started to illicit grudging three- and four-star reviews.
"The perspective on most teen or boy bands is that they have their five minutes and their hit single, and then they disappear when their fans reach puberty," says Jane Tattersall, National Marketing Manager at Zomba/Jive Records, the Canadian distributor for the Backstreet Boys' label.
"But when the pop market is saturated with a certain kind of music like it has been these past few years, one or two bands transcend the genre. It's like how Madonna is still around, but no one remembers the hundreds of other pop acts from that time."
Exan Auyoung, co-host of YTV's teen-pop-driven Hit List show and witness to BSB's Toronto debut gig back in '97, has a simpler explanation for the group's Grammy nomination.
"It's because they are selling records," Auyoung says. "Kids can really relate to these teen groups, and they're the ones with the buying power (for CDs) these days. It's a huge boom. You have siblings in the same household who each have their own copies of the Britney Spears album.
"I wonder what the backlash will be."
Just as the Backstreet Boys have outgrown their teen-pop pigeon-hole, so too have they moved on professionally.
Unhappy sharing the House That BSB Built with other acts, in 1998 they sued Trans Continental boss Lou Pearlman -- a settlement was eventually reached -- and fired manager Johnny Wright. ('NSYNC and Wright later jumped ship for a deal with Jive, resulting in a lawsuit from Pearlman and former record company RCA. That also was settled.)
Richardson and Littrell, now 28 and 24 according to company documents, are set to break millions of young hearts when they both marry this year.
Potential solo success beckons, too. McLean has made noises about launching a side-career under the banner Johnny Suede, for it would let him be the wildman he's not allowed to be in BSB.
And so, as the Backstreet Boys' appeal spreads from 13-year-old school kids to a potentially less fickle audience of Top-40 radio listeners and R&B fans -- and a growing following in the gay community -- one has to wonder if more Millenniums are to come.
More than a million minutes after my first prediction, all bets are off.
THE BACKSTREET BOYS FILE
- "All five of us are big hams. We love the attention. Everybody who interviews us asks about the negative side, about being labelled as poster boys. As long as we make good music, we'll have no problem with having a long career."
-- Kevin Richardson, March 1997
- "We weren't happy before. Personally, I felt like I was getting up on stage because we had to. Now we want to."
-- A.J. McLean, May 1999
- "Canada had a lot to do with America catching on. It started to leak down and America couldn't hold back no longer."
-- Howie Dorough, May 1999
- "We don't want people to become sick of hearing about us. Once music becomes successful, it's like every record company has to get their version of that. But the only way for us to quiet our critics is to keep putting records out. We're not trying to please the critics, we're just trying to please ourselves."
-- Kevin Richardson, May 1999
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