So You Want to Start a Boy Band...

So you're interested in profiting off of the ignorant and as-of-yet unpubertized voices of photogenic young men. Congratulations, you've come to the right place. We're here to show you the ropes and tropes in your quest to ascend the Billboard charts. Had you thought to jump on the Boy Bandwagon 15 years ago, you would be well on your way to making easy millions off of the hard earned allowance money and babysitting profits of young girls. In today's music market, it's a bit more hit or miss, so try your best to adhere to the formula verbatim.

These tried and tested tips should set you on a path to exploiting aspiring juvenile singers. While we can't guarantee success, if you don't hit it big with this secret recipe, you've probably skipped a step somewhere along the way. Check your work and try again. It should all add up if you're doing it right.


Step 1. Hire Lou Pearlman or like-minded manager. Try best to avoid fraud.

Talent manager Lou Pearlman would make a natural first choice as a partner, but his money laundering and conspiracy charges may cause a hiccup on the road to your goal of wallpapering your guest bathroom with hundred dollar bills. If he's not willing to strike up the biz again for fear of setting off a court-appointed anti-boy band formation ankle bracelet, you can probably make do with a cheaper imitator. A Queens accent and noticeably Semitic last name can't hurt, though.


Step 2. Assemble a pack of harmony-prone teenagers

If possible, try to find a group of teens on the street who randomly but conveniently erupt in harmonious song. Failing that route, feel free to hold some open casting calls marketed at crazy stage mothers and former Mickey Mouse Club members. As a last resort, stage the audition process as a reality TV series. As a warning, the popularity of the resultant band will be fleeting, but you do get the added bonus of some fun televised in-house drama. All in all, sort of a tradeoff.


Step 3. Establish the stock characters:

Try your best to populate your newly formed boy band with some combination of the following prototypes:

The Sensitive One: It doesn't hurt to have one guy who exhibits general displays of feelings. Socially awkward and otherwise alienated teen girls eat that stuff up, so cast with their quiet desperation in mind.

The Baby: To effectively market your group to a wide age range of fans, keep your band demographic varied in age. "The Baby" is a necessary component, both for his help filling in on that high F note and his statistically adorable innocence.

The Bad Boy/Rebel: If the guy you've cast as the Bad Boy doesn't yet have any tattoos, feel free to adorn him with some ambiguous Chinese characters and a barbed wire ring around the bicep. He may also wear sunglasses at inopportune times,such as indoors where there's particularly dim lighting. He does what he wants; he doesn't need to follow society's rules about vision.

The Heartthrob: This is the guy you need at the center of every album cover to ensure the screaming young girls come out in full force. He may be a handful sometimes, but just try not to punch his teeth out. Those pearly whites will be paying your bills.

The Older One: To appeal to the full demographic of pop music listeners, it's always okay to have one out-of-place significantly older band member. Just give him a sort of big brother/fatherly role in every photo opportunity and no one will notice that he's 43.


Step 4. Commence ad nauseum photo shoots featuring matching outfits and comically serious expressions

Matching outfits display a sense of solidarity and unity, so your fans will know not to differentiate the band members as individual human beings. The serious expressions establish their reputation as legitimate artists. Just kidding, they just make awesome centerfold shots for BOP! Magazine.


Step 5. Amass Screaming Fans, preferably of the teen girl variety

Recruit a loyal army of young girls with supple vocal chords and a propensity to throw teddy bears and training bras onstage during a particularly soulful performance of your band's hit ballad. Bonus points if they'll cry on camera as they express their unwavering love and adoration for your act.


Step 6. Sell millions of records

This is the backbone of your operation, so invest most heavily in this step. No one really buys records anymore, so this is one of those steps that would have played out better 15 years ago. Nonetheless, you can't have a successful boy band without some sort of musical backup to justify your existence and fame...no matter how inconvenient it is to schedule those pesky recording studio sessions between photo shoots and autograph ops.


Step 7. Release incredibly expensive videos with high production values

Fear no special effect; they will prove invaluable on your quest to mass-marketing your boys' faces as a desirable product. This again may have worked better back in the days of Total Request Live when occasional music videos actually graced the airwaves of Music Television, but try your best to improvise with whatever's left of the genre's diminishing fan base.


Step 8. Decline in Popularity; attempt requisite comeback

Prepare yourself for the inevitable: your once fiercely loyal fans will eventually grow into some semblance of adults and will thus lose screaming interest in what you're peddling. As your popularity wanes, you may want to repackage your band to poise them for a late-breaking comeback. There are no guarantees, but the respect they command is too low to warrant a dignity-excusable cop-out. Milk this one for all it's worth.


Step 9. Hope for the best with members' respective solo careers and/or allow them fade quietly into obscurity

At this point, your boys are no longer boys, but over-the-hill 23-year old men--except the Father Figure guy, who's probably pushing 50 by this point. Some may choose the solo career path, though few will succeed. Others will go quietly into the night, but not everyone will settle for this quick relinquishment of fame. Those select few have several options, the most headline-grabbing of which are to come out of the closet, get arrested, or start a reality television series based on the antics of their colorful family. Choose wisely, though; they only get one shot at that People magazine cover, so we suggest encouraging your guys to tread carefully.


So there you have it: a foolproof formula to establishing and marketing your very own boy band. We're not really supposed to make this sort of sensitive information available to the general public, so consider yourself lucky to be among the privileged privy parties. We don't want this information getting into the wrong hands, of course. Well, not again. And again. Really, it keeps happening. Just be ready to apologize for your eventual fraud charges when they go public, okay? That's pretty much all we can ask.

More Fun with Children of the 90s Search Terms

There have been so many hilarious search terms popping up in my Google Analytics tracking data, I felt it was only fair to spread the funny around and share them with you. After all, haven't you ever wondered what make other readers and/or random internet lurkers like yourself curious about the 90s? What's that? No? You'd rather just reminisce about the 90s? Just kidding, of course you do. Due to popular demand, we're having another brief interlude to examine just how confused some of us 90s fanatics really are.

In the case of many of these terms, it seems the asker is simply misguided or possibly suffers from incredibly vague childhood memories. Others, though, are far more troubling. For one, it makes me want to build a makeshift time machine with suicide doors, gun it to 88, and knock out the guy who came up with the bright idea of teaching Whole Language in lieu of grammar in elementary schools. Clearly, many of us are still suffering from the unfortunate ramifications; if the frightening structure of some of these searches are indicative of our grammatical prowess, I'm about to invest in widespread remedial training.

Granted, we all behave differently when we think no one is looking. We act differently in the comfort of our own homes than we do in the presence of others. After all, we'd be far less likely to blast the Tom Jones and break out the Carlton dance if company was present. Google has granted us with a precious gift of insight into these innermost thoughts of our fellow 90s fans, and just what kind of nostalgiaheads would we be if we didn't accept and delight in that gift?

I appeal to you, fellow 90s fans, for help in decoding these Google quests. Between the lot of us, we've got to be able to provide these poor lost souls with some answers. If we can't come up with anything, well, then there's always mocking.



19 ninety's nickelodeon game show
I just really like this interpretive spelling; I propose we issue extra credit for number breakdown creativity.

90's cartoon that has a strong man that when changes back to a kid, green goo release
I'll need your help with this one, I'm drawing a blank. Admittedly the description is lacking in...everything. Mostly proper tenses and pronouns.

3 boys, brothers. blonde hair, young musicians from the 90s, who were they
First of all, they were Hanson. Second of all, I feel like you're giving progressive clues on a game show. What do I win?

1993 music video with kids wearing bee

Really? Just wearing a bee? That's it?

90's hair styles what were we thinking
Good question. Unfortunately, my crystal ball is in the shop, so I'm unable to ascertain the specific collective spirit of our innermost thoughts and feelings. I'm guessing you could probably search deep within yourself and find the reasoning, if you just believe.

are you afraid of the dark janitor
Maybe it's just the political correctness in me, but I'm reading this as racist. For shame, anonymous googler.

children running away from foster care movies in 90s

What do you think, were there really that many of these in the decade? Enough to warrant their own genre? It seems a bit suspect. Unless maybe they mean children who ran away from movies about foster care. In that case, this might be very serious.

fruit snack in the 90's that are made of noodles like a fruit

They're probably talking about String Thing here, but there's something to be said for the creative license in that description. Made of noodles like a fruit? Not noodle-like fruit, that might make some semblance of sense, but just noodles like an actual fruit. The comparison is baffling.

describe the types of lifestyle children live in the 9o’s and in the currant year that promoted fatness
We could probably start with the currant, the fruit is very sugary. Other than that, we've got an "o" instead of a zero in 90s, some very confused grammar, and the word "fatness." That word is pretty awesome.

compilations of awesomeness 90s
Look no further--you're already here!

edward scissorhands is so sad
Good point. No, really, I appreciate you sharing. I'm glad we had this talk.

oh we have that baby-sitter died
I don't even know where to start with this one. What? I guess it could be some very confused variation of Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, but it's really all over the place.

kid show that has talking plains on nickelodeon

Oh, I always preferred the ones with the talking mesas. As far as slope landforms go, they're pretty much tops. You know, elevation-wise. At least compared to the plains. I think I'd better stop while I'm behind on this one.

90s song can i get your number the one with the seven digits

I know the song you're referring to, but I can't help but love this misheard interpretation of it. Oh, that one. I was going to give you one with the area code included and/or my European access code, but then I was like, hey, just the seven. Got it.

dont you hate it when your eating a dunkaroo and the biscuit breaks in the
In the what? The what? The suspense is killing me now. And for the record, I totally do.

how many kids in the 90's didn't have a dad
Um, total? Worldwide? Fictional? You've really got to be a little more specific. I'd like to help, but you're throwing a two centimeter lure into a 343,423,668,428,484,681,262 gallon ocean. Yes, I just had to google "gallons in the ocean," so someone will probably be making fun of me on their Google Analytics search term round-up sometime soon.

90's cartoon which superhero usually says lets get dangerous
I just like the phrasing on this one...usually. Did Darkwing Duck occasionally forget his lines or have flash of creative discretion? Maybe sometimes he just didn't feel like it.


That's not even the worst of it, but I used my discretion in censoring the really obscene and/or absolutely non-native English speaker-generated content. If any of you know these answers, please, throw these poor souls a line. It's the least we can do. Well, actually, we could probably not do anything, so it's the second least we can do. Regardless, they truly need your help.

Grunge Style and Fashion

Note: This post mainly details the look of grunge, not the music. Stay tuned for more in-depth grunge music posts at some later date.

In every decade, for all squeaky clean bubble gum pop actions there develops an opposite and angstier reaction. It's a law of subculture physics. Mainstream culture is simply too narrow and too goody-goody to encompass the whole of the youth population. The 70s gave us hippies, the 80s punk rock mavens, and the 90s bore us the Generation X-level gloom of grunge. Youth culture can not subsist on good clean fun alone; it needs an introspective core to lend some much-needed depth and idealistic values to the mix.

Does that mean we'll look back on emo kids in twenty years and appreciate their wealth of feelings and eye-obscuring well-sculpted haircuts? Maybe. Only time can tell the youth subculture story for the ages. When we're in the midst of a movement, it's tough to imagine the cultural impact it will have on our retrospective summary of a decade. In the early 90s, grunge was just a burdgeoning lifestyle movement that endorsed limited showering. We could not have known at the time that it would have the iconic impact it did on the face of an era.


The Pacific Northwest was a fitting setting for the rising music subcultural movement; rainy Seattle weather provided an appropriately gloomy backdrop for the angst-ridden alternative lifestyle. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden released records with a unique and distinctly resonant sound. The grunge movement was borne of a blended puree of idealism and cynicism, encompassing the themes of Generation X disillusionment with societal norms. The Seattle Music scene provided a showcase for the encapsulation of youth subculture burnout, giving voice to artists outside of the mainstream.

Like all pure, genuine social movements, it wasn't long before The Man found a cunning way to capitalize on the rise of Grunge culture. It's the ultimate irony of alternative youth culture: it rises through sincere and meaningful expression, only to be diluted into a marketable, packageable blurb for distribution. Grunge was a lucrative business; much to the chagrin of Grunge scene musicians, their music skyrocketed to popularity in conventional circles. While these artists rose to fame for their elucidation of their innermost alienation and disillusionment, suddenly their music was playing on a top 40 station and their faces were adorning concert t-shirts.

Since I am by no means a music expert and was a mere nine years old at the height of the grunge scene's popularity, I won't pretend to have a comprehensive knowledge of the nuances and subtleties of Seattle Sound. I'm far more qualified to outline the Grunge fashion that filtered down into mainstream society. We may not have been great thinkers and expressionists, but we could rock a mean flannel. Inasmuch, retailers could charge a hefty price in their principle-free exploitation of interest in Grunge culture with their shameless marketing of items like these:

Plaid Flannel

Possibly one of the most recognizable and iconic of grunge influences, plaid flannel became a staple in both male and female early 90s' wardrobes. Optional but suggested: flannel worn open over grungy tee shirt. I would also accept "worn around the waist."

Thermal Tops

Seattle weather can get pretty chilly, so for practicality's sake a thermal shirt provided Grungy youth with some much needed warmth. This was far less practical in cities like LA and Miami, of course, where the wearer usually sacrificed a great deal of literal sweat in the name of alternative fashion.

Combat Boots

It's hard to clomp around angstily without the proper footwear. Clunky, heavy boots fit the bill, hindering the element of surprise in any attempt to sneak up on people.

Birkenstocks

For warm days when clunking around just wouldn't do, there were Birkenstocks. After all, who espouses free expression and independent thought better than the Germans? No one, that's who.

Wool Caps

Hot or cold, wool caps were more of a statement piece than a practicality. Even respected designers began sending their models down the runway with unkempt hair tucked under ski caps, though their motivation may have been tied to the savings in hairstylist costs.


Torn Jeans

How is anyone going to know that you don't care what you're wearing and that you're above superficial wardrobe selection unless you carefully choose a garment to express that sentiment? Torn jeans frequently topped off grungy ensembles, indicating the general apathy associated with the movement. Take that, society! Our jeans are well-ventilated and anti-mainstream culture.


Similarly, non-clothing fashion assimilated accordingly to sufficiently match our dirt-spackled wardrobe. Your grunge look just wouldn't be complete without:

Greasy, stringy hair

No grunge look worth its weight in hair oil would hold its own without an unkempt mass of dirty, stringy hair. Men and women alike hopped on the greasy hair bandwagon, abandoning showering in favor of a more in-your-face, anti-hygiene look. The fad grew out of Grunge musician's genuine angst and apathy, but it gave the rest of us an excuse to be lax in our showering schedules.

Questionable Facial Hair

A scraggly beard could serve as a major credibility booster for your supposed anti-society attitude. It wasn't a necessary element, but the presence of some ratty facial hair could probably help your cause in establishing yourself as legitimately grungy.


Grunge as a youth subculture ran far deeper than the fashion it inspired, but this highly visible representation played a major role in propagating the trends worldwide. For those of us not lucky or adolescent enough to rebel against anything, Grunge style allowed us to express ourselves in an allegedly unconventional way. Everyone else may have been doing it, but magazines and TV were telling us it was the way to be alternative, hip, and anti-mainstream. They would know, right?