I feel like the more honest we are and the more open we are, I think the more we will relate to other people who are queer just like us and who want to listen to queer lyrics and stuff that's just not the regular.
And I think just going forward, just the more authentic we can be is just the best. We just want to be ourselves. Cameron Cipolla: Honestly, there's no hiding it.
I walk around with a little baby purse around every day. We're in crop tops and short shorts, limp wrist, nails painted. Even if we didn't want to say we were a queer boy band, it's written all over us. I know you guys are pretty new, but how has it been putting yourselves out there? Have you gotten any hate or pushback from weirdos? What is it like, because you guys are so open about your sexuality and identity? How has it been received from people so far?
Daniel Avenu: We've really gotten a lot of love. And we get a decent amount of DMs that are really, really special and really, really nice. And it's really awesome to see how we can connect with other queer fans. Sometimes we get hate, but whatever. Cameron Cipolla: I don't think we've ever gotten hate for being gay. I don't think there's been any homophobic hate necessarily. Obviously, there's still a long way that needs to go and a lot that needs to be done before we can have true honest, queer representation in music.
But what's it like just be to out and open from the beginning and be honest with people from the get-go? There were so many artists back then who had to hide.
They were told by their management they had to hide who they were and go in the closet just to have a successful career. But what it's like to start this project and start it as your true selves where so many people in the past didn't get that opportunity?
Daniel Avenu: It's people like them who have helped pave the way to where we can finally be totally out and loud in ourselves. And especially, not even artists, but queer people in general who have been leading us to this point. Danny: For me, I feel like I'm very unapologetic of who I am.
So for me it's like, I don't feel brave for just saying I'm gay from the get-go. It's just who I am. So I don't feel like I'm making a statement.
I guess we are essentially, but definitely giving credit to every gay person, artist or not, who came before us, because without them, this would literally have never happened.
Danny: Yeah. I just feel like we just stay authentic to ourselves and that's just what we've always done. And I don't really ever put to thought like, 'Oh, are people going to hate us for being gay from the get-go for doing this? Cameron Cipolla: And also we don't have management right now, so we're just like, 'No rules!
Daniel Avenu: Yeah. Feel confident and enjoy ourselves and have fun with the songs and just to be present in what we're doing and what we're creating.
Danny: And we're not just like a boy band that met through Simon Cowell. We've known each other since we were all eighteen. Danny: We were like baby gays and grew up as adult gays together. Even though we're still so young.
We've always had each other. It feels just like a sisterhood. Finally just doing something artsy together and I feel like if it was me solo, I'd be a lot more scared, but I'm glad I have these sisters. Just to wrap things up, I want each of you to give me your opinions about what the future of music is. What do you hope music will look like?
Are you hopeful for it? And we'll use this as like a manifestation hour. Just say what your wildest dream is for your careers and what do you want to accomplish 10, 20 years down the line? Sean Gray: Arenas. And yeah, I think it's getting more and more power to the artists.
People are getting more exposure through social media and finding followings that would be a lot harder in the past. And I think that's really hopeful for new artists like us because, as Cameron said, we don't have a manager, we don't have anything.
So we're just having fun with it and making music that feels right for us and that we can relate to and just putting it out and doing it for ourselves and people can relate to that because it's so authentic to us and people have similar experiences being queer and I think it's good because it's more sentimental, the music.
It's not just industry babies that get told to sing on this part and that, people have the power to create now. Cameron Cipolla: I have two answers for our future in the music industry, I'm talking worldwide tours, people know our name.
I want magazine covers. I want everything. The limit is there is no limit. It's our own thing," he explained. What's going on here? They were forced to talk about it when a reporter kept asking about it during an interview, with Joe saying when they told the interview they didn't walk to talk abou the rings, the response was, "'Well, I'm just going to say you're in a cult. And then it became a massive story: "The next thing you know it's 'The Jonas Brothers and their purity rings. And the brothers never felt comfortable with the attention that was placed by the media and fans on their ring, with Nick saying, "I took pride in it, until I watched those interviews back years later and was like, I sound like a robot.
Of course, the rings eventually came off, their Disney Channel show ended and the band broke up in Joe would later open up to Vulture about the pressure the brothers felt to live up to their image, admitting, "We didn't want to disappoint anyone—our parents, our fans, our employers—so we put incredible pressure on ourselves, the kind of pressure that no teenager should be under.
Nick also opened up about this, saying in , "There was a lot of pressure on us to maintain a certain image and carry ourselves a certain way. Aside from that pressure, the brothers were also disagreeing over the direction they wanted their music to go in, ultimately splitting in But six years later, the JoBros fans were delighted when they released their hit single "Sucker" and went on a massive press tour, officially reuniting.
New Kids on the Block formed in the earlys '80s and consisted of brother duo Jordan and Jonathan Knight, Joey McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg , and Danny Wood ; they went on to become one of the most successful and genre-defining boy bands. How big where they? A stampede occurred during one of their concerts in South Korea in , resulting in the death of one teenage fan and 50 injuries. Like the mega-bands that followed them, NKOTB also faced their share of scandal and legal situations.
At the height of their fame, the band was accused of lip-syncing by Gregory McPherson , who worked as an associate producer on one of their albums. To put the rumors to rest about their vocal capabilities, New Kids infamously booked a last-minute appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show , immediately putting the rumors to bed by singing live to prove anyone who doubted their vocal capabilities wrong.
They went on to file a defamation lawsuit against McPherson, who had initially sued the group's manager Maurice Starr for creative infringement and breach of contract. They eventually settled out of court, with McPherson then fully retracting his lip-syncing claims.
Like other members of boy bands, members of NKOTB also secretly battled mental health issues while being adored by millions of fans around the world.
In , Jonathan announced he was leaving the group, initially explaining it just felt time to end it. The others were angry at first, but they understood. But fans never knew the true extent of Jonathan's battle with panic attacks until he interview with Oprah Winfrey , during which he was visibly shaking and struggling to remain calm.
In 's New Kids on the Block: Five Brothers and a Million Sisters , Jonathan confirmed his exit from NKOTB was due to his anxiety, and also hiding his sexuality, publicly coming out as gay after he was accidentally outed by '80s pop star and his ex-girlfriend Tiffany in I knew I didn't want to be confined anymore.
I think I was dealing with my inner demons. In , Jonathan walked off stage mid-concert after experiencing what seemed to be a panic attack. After the incident, he simply tweeted, "I'm sorry," and returned to the stage for the band's next concert.
In , lead singer Rich alleged Pearlman had also taken advantage of them during an interview with Howard Stern , saying, "I should've made, like, at least 2 or 3 million dollars.
But the more shocking accusation was that Pearlman asked him to touch his penis, as well as the penis of a European music executive, with The Boy Band Con also featuring audio from the interview. Of addressing the rumors about Pearlman's possible interest in young men in the documentary, director Aaron Kunkel told The Los Angeles Times , "We didn't want to engage in any rumor-mongering or anything like that, so we tried to be as meticulous as possible and have corroboration for anything that was said.
But we're really happy we were able to provide a platform for everybody to just speak. That's what we wanted everyone to do, because ultimately, a lot of people had a lot of weird feelings about things that Lou did.
Sadly, Rich passed away at age 36 after battling leukemia, with Devin passing away in after a yearlong battle with stage four adrenal cancer. News in a statement. On behalf of the LFO family, thank you for the tremendous outpouring of love from friends, family, fans, media, and those in the music industry.
After experiencing success in the late '90s and early aughts with hits like "Bump, Bump, Bump" and an appearance in You Got Served , the hip hop boy band's members— Omarion, Lil Fizz, J. Boog and Raz-B— announced they were going their separate ways in At the time, their manager Chris Stokes said it was an amicable split, telling E!
News in a statement , "We've had a great run together making hit songs, albums and now movies. The kids are growing up and are interested in pursuing their own careers. I have enormous respect for each of them, and I wish them success in their pursuit of their individual careers.
Luckily, there is hope. The group is hardly your traditional boy band -- they are a group of racially and ethnically diverse young men whose sound is an innovative fusion of pop and hip-hop tropes. With a fast-growing audience, tens of millions of Spotify streams and a sound different from any other boy band performing today, Brockhampton is on the verge of blowing up.
Industry executives, take note; groups like Brockhampton are the future of the genre. Search term. Billboard Pro Subscribe Sign In. Top Artists. Top Charts. Hot Songs. A couple of months later, Robbie Williams left the band that split up altogether the following year. Boy band masculinity, as I want to show, is strategically performed as an "innocent" masculinity which is especially appealing to young teenage girls and their parents.
However, boy bands could only be so successful because they delivered to much larger audiences. As will be shown, boy band culture did not only affect teenage girls but also queer audiences e. This is easy to understand if we keep in mind that the members of these bands are usually casted by managers in highly eclectic selection processes.
These bands are actively created for commercial purposes. Unlike "real" bands who often practice in rehearsal rooms like garages or basements for many years before they play their own songs in bars and shabby clubs, boy bands first tour high schools where they perform in front of mostly female teenagers e.
Backstreet Boys or they have their first appearances in gay bars e. Take That. Gayle Wald describes this bias as one of "pop girlishness" versus "punk virility" 13 which, according to her, carries underlying tones of homophobia.
But it is also, as Foucault makes plain, a question of power. In the following paragraphs of this article, I will demonstrate in how far boy band culture bears traces of queer interventions, even though dominant discourses of boy band culture rest on heteronormative assumptions of sex, gender, and sexuality.
It is night. It is dark. Old, dry, withered leaves are spread on the ground and the bleak aesthetics of the concrete floor and the concrete buildings surrounding the basketball court do not create a particularly romantic atmosphere. In this homosocial setting i. The second stanza is sung by Nick, who assures the gender-unspecific "you" that everything he does "is for you" and that he lives his life in order to make the addressee come back to him.
After that, Nick repeats the words which were first sung by Brian whereupon the five boys start with the second chorus. The third stanza is sung by A. Accordingly, in the last two choruses, the degree of suffering after the break up increases ecstatically. These soaked shirts are being unbuttoned bit by bit until the song reaches its final climax. When promising their never-ending love, the boys are sending ambiguous messages on a textual as well as on a tonal level.
Although the song — and this is true for most pop songs — is relatively trivial when it comes to its lyrics, one of the "queering elements" is its address to a sex- and gender-unspecific "you". This gendered ambiguity leaves room for interpretation so that the addressee can be imagined as belonging to one or several of innumerable sexes and genders.
On a tonal level, when suffering from their love lost, the Backstreet Boys frequently sing in high-pitched, pleading, and almost whiny voices, thus staging themselves in opposition to traditional, hegemonic masculinity. In the video, the Backstreet Boys self-consciously put their bodies on display.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone. Nor can they be described as "hard bodies" in the sense of protecting "body armors", reminding us of those soldierly bodies analyzed by Klaus Theweleit in the late s. He argues that "[u]nlike the built body, the definition of the lean body has an apparent naturalness about it. While the lean body does not have the same overblown signifiers of phallic power as the built body, the lean body still shows the male body as strong.
On the one hand, we know that — at least since the emergence of the "metrosexual urbanite" 26 in the late s — the male body just like the female body before and ever since has been exploited as "one of the common signifiers of contemporary consumer culture. Instead, "the borders have dissolved. And it is along these lines which emphasize ambiguity and in-betweenness that we should read "boy band masculinity".
The rain perfectly replaces their tears. The pictures make us ask: Can we spot tears? Are the boys crying? Do rain and tears intermingle? Are they blending into each other? Does the rain make the imagined tears invisible? And finally, does the nightly, homosocial environment of collective suffering invite for "male tears"? It is not important whether or not the emotions shown in the video are "real" or "authentic". Instead, the crucial point here is that the video opens up a space in which "male tears" become a possible alternative to hegemonic constructions and assumptions of masculinity.
Nick Carter, as the youngest, most androgynous member of the band, was the Backstreet Boy who played the most sexually ambiguous role within the band.
Since he appealed to both of the main groups of fans that the Boys were courting young girls, due to his age, and gay men, due to his androgynous body-type , Wright Stuff [i. He is the only one of the boys who never really enters the basketball court or "playing field".
He remains standing in the grandstands. Whereas the other "soaking wet Boys [are] in various states of undress", 35 Nick does not expose his bare chest. He just dances and watches. Not a lot, I would like to add. Questions of "authenticity" become irrelevant if we consider that boy band masculinity, just like every other gendered performance, has to be negotiated repeatedly within a socio-cultural framework.
In her discussion of drag performances in Undoing Gender , Butler makes us see that "we live, more or less implicitly, with received notions of reality, implicit accounts of ontology, which determine what kinds of bodies and sexualities will be considered real and true, and which kind will not.
In order to further strengthen my point and to show that boy bands seem to encourage people to respond to them on a very affective level, I would now like to turn to several ambiguous responses to boy band culture.
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