One of the positive aspects about interacting with the rest of the world in more than a professional or nerd capacity is that sometimes I find out what’s happening in popular culture. Therefore I’m now clued in to the fact that a new generation of boy bands seems to be rising up, born at the turn of this century, tempered by pop doldrums, disciplined by a hard and bitter ascendance of hip hop. We’ve all seen this before, haven’t we? And we’ll see it again.
I can only think back to the fall of 1996. My roommate at the time was an Anglophile from Singapore, who was well connected to the British pop culture scene. He introduced me to a joke called Take That. Or at least I thought it was a joke. Little did I know that that British boy band was simply a forewarning of what was to come in the late 1990s, thanks to the evil machinations of Lou Pearlman. With only a vague consciousness of the boy band craze of the late 1980s, I was totally taken dumbfounded by the power of the formula in those years. Boy bands became such a phenomenon …