THE "MENUDOS" STORY

The current phenomenon of the Menudos is defined by the female teens hysteria to their idols. These singers are teen idols who performs pop music, with a chorus made to be sung for fans and which has a melodic structure composed for the hitmaking current tendences.

This tendence is not so recent yet. It risen from the 1940's popular solo singers as Frank Sinatra. He was the first artist classified as a pop star, in the year of 1943. His characteristics were so typical: a singer with an attractive look, love songs with a chorus to be sung for anybody and simple melodies calculated to be a big hit.

In that time the yankee cinema, based in Hollywood (Los Angeles, California), one of the biggest motion pictures complex of the world, was a cultural modality so popular worldwide, and the music was the spice to this commercial cinema popularity. Most of these films were musical movies and some of these actors were singers and dancers and they also recorded label singles with some regularity.

In the fifties, there were several vocal groups made as teen idols. There's always been vocal groups in the music history, with some repercussion, but a few of them had a greatest success until the 50's. One of the most popular vocal groups between the youngsters was The Platters, a pioneer from the current convencional black music in the United States. With a style based by a commercial translation of jazz and blues music, adapted to the basic appreciation from the Hollywood standards, The Platters had greatest hits like "The great pretender", "Smoke gets in your eyes" e "Only you".

In the sixties, the female hysteria had strong ressonance to a british rock group, The Beatles. Despite this group is a vocal group (all the four members sung and made choir), their members were instrumentists, songwriters and arrangers, which made this band to be so much important to music than the teen idols normally suggest.

The Jackson Five (Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael), however, were even so a band, because the older brothers were instrumentists and studied composition (The Jackson Five did not write their songs that time). So later, in 1975, disjoint from Motown, the group signed to CBS (Sony Music at this moment) and got to increase a brother to their membership, called Randy (in the eighties, their sister, Janet, started an ascendent solo career, adding a success to her family; other sisters, Latoya and Rebbie, tried similar career but falled to ostracism). The group changed their name to The Jacksons and the members got to be songwriters, being a funk band to make front to the seventies groups KC & The Sunshine Band and Earth Wind & Fire (the both also north-americans and from the CGS cast that time) and the british group Kool & The Gang.

The authentic funk music - nothing to do with the miami bass, a rhythm confused as a real funk, because it was a mistaken translation of the funk and electronica fusion released by the DJ and rapper Afrika Bambataa developed its present phasis since 1973, initially attached in the disco music phenomenon, with groups like Chic and the others upon mentioned, and so much others beyond. With the hip hop phenomenon, the funk made its revolution in the eighties, and to follow this wave, the music manager Maurice Starr invented the vocal group New Edition, whose hits were "Is this the end?" and "Candy girl". The group revealed singers like Johnny Gill and Bobby Brown (today the husband of the famous singer Whitney Houston) and the group was a way to reconstitute the success of the Jackson Five, but in 1983 (time of the Michael Jackson's biggest hit, with his 1982 solo album, Thriller). In 1986, Maurice Starr, so glaed for the New Edition success, invented another similar group, but with white men as the members, called New Kids On The Block.

The Menudo, created in 1977, was a "swindle" to be successful during a few of years, from 1983 to 1986. Beneficiary by the U. S. political possession in Puerto Rico, the Menudo made relative success in the Uncle Sam's nation, and a ostentatious success in the whole Latin America, from Mexico to Uruguay (including Brazil). Some years later, a scandal involving the group's manager and producers contributed to the split of Menudo, in the nineties.

Nevertheless, when Take That started to be something near to a music band, with members playing instruments and writing songs constantly, the group had split in 1995. The member Robbie Williams broke relations with his manager and partners, troubled for the pressure about him. Later, Robbie got to be a respected pop singer and songwriter, have being, discretely and at the little time, a former musician of the famous band Oasis, the one he left for the serious conflict between he and the Oasis vocalist Liam Gallagher.

Other Take That members, Gary Barlow and Mark Owen, had not the same luck, although Owen was so well-disposed, had played electric guitar on most of his own songs and worked with the new wave rock producer Craig Leon (Ramones, Blondie, Spy Vs. Spy, Eugenius). And not even a rumour of a supposed affair with the popstar Madonna pushed Gary Barlow to the music showbiz.

After Take That, other menudo groups would only come in 1997. Too much near the post-teen virility of the NKOTB style than the fussy and pansy ingenuousness of Menudo, the new boys groups imposed new values: muscular gym, and occasional beard making, a moustache or little beard, some scandalous facts (as laterly the rejointed group New Editions, with the members so strong, manlike and ready to make disorder) and politically correct attitudes, like, for example, the self-named "band" status, allthough these young singers never play an instrument. It's a strategy to attibute to these pop groups the same idolatry universe of the rock'n'roll groups, famous for the appreciated conception of "bands", which is appropriated to the rock groups (formed for the real musicians), but not to the most of teen groups, self-called as "bands" for no reason.

And there came Backstreet Boys, N'Sync, 98º, Another Level, Westlife, Boyzone, Five, Taxiride and so much others. Solo singers as Ricky Martin (ex-Menudo), the Iglesias brothers (Julio Iglesias Jr., Javier e Enrique, all of them sons of the famous spanish love songs crooner, Julio Iglesias) and Bosson have followed the collective idols charisma. Female answers as the groups Spice Girls, All Saints and Destiny's Child and singers like Britney Spears, Christina Agüilera, Jessica Simpson and so much others had also come. And the teenage hysteria, the one has not any musical knowledge considered, only bother to the each member's "private life" or "personal profile", while the opportunism of the music industry and the ignorance of the current press media keep to warrant the titles of "bands" and the credit of "musicians" to these groups so lazy and inoperative to these music conditions.

Back