Song of the Week: “Steal My Girl,” by One Direction - “I don’t exist if I don’t have her”
The other night while I was cleaning the kitchen I had the sudden urge to listen to One Direction. I didn’t think of myself as a One Direction (or “1D”) fan when the British boy band was active (2010-2016), and I certainly don’t think of myself as one now, but by the time I was belting my seventh chorus in a row word-for-word while dancing with all-purpose cleaner in one hand and a paper towel in the other, I had to accept that maybe I am, in fact, a fan of One Direction.
At the very least, I was active on the social media blogging site Tumblr at the height of One Direction’s popularity, so I was almost a fan by default. I had a favorite band member (Harry, obviously), a favorite song (“Story of My Life”), and an opinion on the ubiquitous fan fiction about the band’s members being in love with each other (decidedly anti).1
And yet, at the time, I was embarrassed to admit to any of this. Paradoxically, though the members of One Direction are all my age or older (30-32 now!), at the height of their popularity they felt far, far too young for me. Besides, I thought my music taste in college was way too indie and cool for boy bands.
At the beginning of this week, I didn’t think I was going to write about boy bands. I was struggling to settle on a topic, considering one deeply serious subject after another, but nothing felt right.2
And then, on Tuesday night, Taylor and I watched an episode of the hilarious Irish show “Derry Girls,” where the titular teenage dirtbags secretly travel to Belfast to attend a concert by real-life boy band “Take That.” As I watched the girls scream, cry, and jump up and down in excitement, it was as if a message formed in my head in perfect five-part harmony: I had to write about boy bands.
You Got It (The Right Stuff)
We must begin, of course, with a definition. What exactly is a boy band?
The current reigning scholar of boy bands is unquestionably Maria Sherman, a reluctant One Direction fan like myself who published Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS in 2020. I haven’t had time to read the book yet, but fortunately there are excerpts and interviews with Sherman all over the internet. Here’s how Pitchfork’s Cat Zhang summarizes Sherman’s introduction to the subject:
Her working definition of a “boy band” is a group of “attractive young men who dress similarly, dance without embarrassment, and sing well with one another.” Each band member can be shuffled into a designated trope—the heartthrob, the bad boy, the shy one—and is beholden to iron-clad commandments such as “honor thy love ballads” and “thou shalt not grow a beard.” Usually, a conniving businessman stalks behind the scenes.
This summary explicitly gives us two vital characteristics of the boy band that I’ll examine this week: boy bands consist of attractive young men singing to young women, and they are usually created for purely commercial reasons.
Sherman’s summary hints at, but does not make explicit, a third vital characteristic of the boy band. Their songs tend to be about big, dramatic feelings: love, heartbreak, pining, nostalgia, and betrayal.
They are, in other words, processed cheese.
Of course, not everyone agrees about the definition of boy bands. I like this DnD-style boy band alignment chart, which summarizes the differences of opinion nicely.
Taylor, by the way, suggests we expand the definition ad absurdum: Alvin and the Chipmunks? Boy band. The young revolutionaries in Les Miserables? Boy band. Gregorian monks? Boy band.
These extreme examples are silly by design. Some more ambiguous cases, however, are far more contentious.
Case in point, a question of generic origins: were The Beatles a boy band?
I Want to Hold Your Hand
Often considered the most influential rock band in history, The Beatles were active in their established form between 1962-1970. Over the decade, the enduring members - Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr - constantly reinvented their sound and their personal style. Altogether, they released 213 songs, including hits as iconic as “Yesterday,” “Let It Be,” and “Here Comes the Sun,” eventually becoming the most successful musical act in history.
I’m not here, however, to introduce The Beatles to you. They need no introduction. I’m here to ask whether they were a boy band - a question that I know likely delights half of my readers and repulses the other half.
First, let’s start with the obvious. The Beatles were a band. Consisting exclusively of young men. All four of them provided vocals, though Paul and John appeared the most frequently.
The Beatles did form organically, instead of through studio meddling: John, Paul, and George met as teenagers in Liverpool. And - crucially - the Beatles’ hits stemmed from the incredibly productive Lennon-McCarthy songwriting partnership rather than being fed to them by a slick Swedish producer or team of corporate writers. As blogger Kathy Copeland Padden argues in a 2022 article, if the Beatles were a boy band, “so was everyone else.”
To be fair to Padden, as a concept and a term, “boy band” wasn't codified until the 1980s (the Oxford English Dictionary notes a 1985 article in The Guardian). I would argue, however, that to dismiss the Beatles as no more a boy band than any of their contemporaries ignores a pretty important phenomenon: Beatlemania.
Between 1963 and 1966, the Beatles saw a level of cultural popularity so fanatical that the press frequently compared it to religion.3 Their 1965 concert at Shea Stadium was the first time a major sports arena was used for a musical act, drawing a record 55,000 fans.
And the most prominent fans during Beatlemania? Devoted, head-over-heels-in-love teenage girls. As the Beatles played songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah),” girls screamed, sobbed, and swooned. On one memorable occasion, a 12-year-old girl named Carol Dryden almost died by suffocation when she attempted to mail herself to The Beatles.
“I hadn’t thought about fresh air or food,” Dryden said in an interview. “All I wanted was to see the Beatles. I don’t know what I would have done had I really arrived on their doorstep. I suppose I would have fainted.”
I recently stumbled upon a clip of another enthusiastic New York fan declaring her undying love for Paul McCartney (and sure, Ringo Starr too), which you can watch below to get a sense of the general tone at the time.
So yes, suffice to say, in precisely the same way that teenage girls would devote themselves to the boy bands of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s, teenage girls were obsessed with the Beatles.
And, in similar fashion to criticisms in later decades, naysayers worried that teen girls’ love for the mop-topped lads from Liverpool heralded disastrous cultural decline.
In a controversial 1964 article for The New Statesman, “The menace of Beatlism,” Paul Johnson writes:
The teenager comes not to hear but to participate in a ritual, a collective groveling to gods who are blind and empty…Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures: their existence, in such large numbers, far from being a cause for ministerial congratulation, is a fearful indictment of our education system, which in 10 years of schooling can scarcely raise them to literacy….the core of the teenage group - the boys and girls who will be the real leaders and creators of society tomorrow - never go near a pop concert. They are, to put it simply, too busy. They are educating themselves. They are in the process of inheriting the culture which, despite Beatlism or any other mass-produced mental opiate, will continue to shape our civilisation.
RIP Paul Johnson, you would have loved Reddit.
Johnson’s division of the Beatles from real British culture seems laughable now - they weren’t part of the “British Invasion” for nothing. The false binary he establishes here, however - between fans of pop music and “the real leaders and creators of society” - is one that stubbornly endures.
Fortunately for us, however, those legions of female fans looking for the next dreamy musical act endured too. I really like this video, which summarizes major boy bands from The Beach Boys (1963) to BTS (2018). Some, like New Kids on the Block and *NSYNC are familiar. Others, like BBMak, have faded into obscurity.4
There are two things that stand out to me, seeing all these acts back to back. First, while the video features both Black and white bands and band members throughout the decades, the white bands in the video are far more frequently included in cultural histories of the genre. This is not surprising by any means: the history of American popular music is in part a history of cultural borrowing from and appropriation of Black musical innovation.
Within the context of the highly-produced and carefully marketed boy band, young men of color have consistently struggled to find as high-profile a place. As Sherman explains in an interview with NPR:
I also think that perhaps because Black and brown youth are typically sexualized at a younger age, they're not afforded the same privileges of a white boy band. And that's why you can have the Backstreet Boys, who are around the same age doing something similar, but sold to tweens, whereas Boyz II Men is for a more mature audience.
Even within popular groups, racial tensions and inequalities persist; before leaving One Direction for a solo career, lone Muslim member Zayn Malik faced occasional racism and Islamophobia from both fans and the general public.
The other thing this “boy bands through the ages” video reminded me of was that, while music critics frequently disparage the artistry of boy bands themselves, they often serve as launching points for far more respected solo musicians.
While The Jackson Five gave us the grooves of “ABC” and “I Want You Back,” more importantly, they gave us Michael Jackson. Who still thinks about any member of *NSYNC other than Justin Timberlake?
As comedy website Above Average warned One Direction members in a satirical 2015 letter purportedly from fellow *NSYNC member, Joey Fatone:
Here’s how it’s gonna go down, fellas. While you’re all on hiatus, Harry will record some dope singles with Beyoncé, Ryan Adams, and Wiz Khalifa, come out with a killer solo album produced by Pharrell and Timbaland, cut his hair, dye his hair, do a second less awesome album, let his hair grow super long and wear it in two braids, crush a self-effacing cameo in a Judd Apatow movie, buzz his hair and release a third, self-produced album on which he hints at being bisexual that everyone will call his ‘best work.’
The rest of you are f*cked.
A year after he left One Direction, Rolling Stone named Harry Styles’s 2017 debut single “Sign of the Times” the best song of the year.
Burnin’ Up for You, Baby
We’re not here, however, to talk about the artistry and adult male sexuality of Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, or Harry Styles.
These are not “man” bands, after all. They’re boy bands.
While boy bands have their share of fans of various ages and genders, including a not-insignificant number of LGBTQ+ teens, they are most notorious for their besotted teen girl fans.
This is intentional; while teen girls develop crushes on a vast variety of pop culture figures, boy bands are uniquely designed to appeal to their tastes. From their perfect hair to their lyrics promising tenderness and devotion, boy bands are created to appeal to the female gaze.5
As Dorie Bailey writes in her 2016 thesis “Beefing up the Beefcake: Male Objectification, Boy Bands, and the Socialized Female Gaze”:
‘Boy-watching’ has become engrained within the culture of young girls, and the media created with their gaze in mind further promotes this objectification of males and teen boys as a social pastime. The unthreatening nature of looking at these highly constructed and manipulated caricatures of attractive, ideal males for pleasure allows the girls to grow into the hormonal and emotional changes accompanying their growing up - without the real-life implications and potential consequences of actually exploring and acting upon these feelings with real-life boys.
Boy bands are dreamy - both in that they represent an idealized masculinity, but also because they live primarily in the imagination. For pre-teen and teen girls going through puberty, boy bands are a place to explore big, scary feelings in a safe and social way.
My favorite illustration of this exploration is in Pixar’s Turning Red (2022), a coming-of-age film about 13-year-old Meilin Lee dealing with puberty in 2002 Toronto. Meilin and her friends are obsessed with a fictional (and extremely catchy) boy band, 4*Town, building romantic fantasies about the band’s members and plotting how they can attend the band’s upcoming concert at the SkyDome.
For Meilin and her friends - as for so many teenagers - adolescence is a mortifying experience. The members of 4*Town - and the friendships strengthened by mutual love for them - help her feel less alone.
This Beat Cha-Ching Like Money
I’m less interested, for the sake of this newsletter and your attention span, in explaining the commercial side of boy bands. Yes, boy bands are cultural products, often engineered and controlled by corporations or sinister producers. Much like Fast and the Furious movies or reality TV shows, boy bands exist because they are immensely profitable, making gazillions of dollars on everything from magazine covers to branded school supplies.
Designed to make money and shaped by the whims of fashion, it’s actually easier to point to boy bands that don’t fit this model than to try and name the ones that do.
Take the Jonas Brothers, for example. While their career was both launched and tightly controlled by the Walt Disney Corporation, Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas really were brothers who (presumably) loved each other - and they continue to work together from time to time now that their Disney contract is long behind them.
The recent Korean boy band phenomenon BTS provides another interesting case study. As ethnomusicologist Yong-dae Kim explains in this 2020 episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour, though BTS was many Western listeners’ introduction to K-Pop, BTS actually breaks the K-pop mold:
So usually in K-pop industry, everything goes from top to down. You know, they make a group. They promote it heavily using a lot of money. But BTS just started their career with their fans since the day one. So it's more like kind of grassroot, you know, bottom-up type of indie movement rather than typical K-pop industry type of promotion and strategy.
Those grassroots fans, by the way, do more than buy albums. Famously, in 2020 K-Pop fans got political, flooding tip lines with false reports to protect members of Black LIves Matter and trolling Donald Trump by reserving tens of thousands of tickets to a Tulsa rally and then not showing up.
As Sherman argues, the fans relationships and actions are at the heart of why boy bands matter:
“To think about boy bands critically, you can't really adhere to the same value systems where authenticity by songwriting is the best or the most interesting thing an artist can be. You have to place that value of authenticity elsewhere, and that would be the connection that listeners have with the music itself.”
We Danced All Night to the Best Song Ever
At the end of the day, however, the reason why I think boy bands endure - the reason why I’m still dancing to One Direction in my kitchen with puberty long behind me - is because boy bands are fun.
Boy bands sing big songs about big feelings, often accompanied by wild visuals and over-the-top choreography. There is a sincerity and joy to their music that is infectious.
As one blogger writes in a 2015 post, “It’s FUN, though. It is fun as hell, let me tell you. Loving a thing is so much more of a trip than feeling meh about a thing.” She recalls seeing *NSync for the first time in concert, in 1999. “They were there, and so was I. I loved them so much, I felt sure I would die of it.”
Similarly, Sherman recalls the euphoria she felt when, as an adult music critic, she first heard One Direction’s What Makes You Beautiful:
It felt like butterflies in my stomach, like I had a crush on a song — and not these boys, necessarily, but what this sort of symbolized: this pure serotonin release, absolute freedom from embarrassment, just fun. I think there's something really beautiful that happens when you find that boy band that really gets you into that appreciation. It feels like almost a political dismissal of pre-existing limitations of what’s credible or cool.
The enduring fun of boy band music - its earnest silliness and reliable serotonin boost - was demonstrated handily by this cold open from the sitcom Brooklyn 99.
After a witness notes that she overheard the criminal singing “I Want It That Way,” police detective Jake Peralta encourages suspects in a line up to perform the Backstreet Boys hit to establish a tonal match - which they all are able to do, with varying levels of enthusiasm.
Chills, literal chills.
This cold open, by the way, has transcended an audience of teenage girls or sitcom fans to develop a fandom of its own - to the point where GQ wrote an oral history of how it came to be. My favorite fact to emerge from that article? The Backstreet Boys themselves lip-synched to the scene in a video with, of all people, the staff at the Empire State Building. Even funnier to me? The Backstreet Boys weren’t very good at lip synching.
As Long As You Love Me
Derry Girls - the show that initially inspired me to create this week’s issue - is a show about growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. While bomb threats, sectarian violence, and armed soldiers dominate the news and haunt public life, the show’s main characters obsess over the more mundane dramas of adolescence: popularity, exams, fashion, and boys.
While any boy band concert feels like a momentous occasion to fans, “Take That” visiting Belfast is especially exciting. By entering the tumultuous region, the band’s members offer the girls a chance to feel normal.
Derry Girls knows what so many of us eventually learn the hard way: the world is not a very safe place to be a teenage girl.
And still, amidst that danger, boy bands give teenage girls a place where they can celebrate, and explore their desires, and build lasting friendships.
And, dare I say it? That’s what makes them beautiful.
When it comes to boy bands, what should I add to my syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
I’m a big fan of gay fan fiction (also known as “slash” fiction) about fictional characters, and I don’t mind it about dead historical figures either. It just creeps me out when it’s about living people.
Can you believe we’re on our tenth issue of Syllabus already? And next week…IT’S GONNA BE MAY.
In 1966, John Lennon notoriously said “we’re more popular than Jesus now.”
At the height of their popularity, 1999-2003, BBMak sold three million albums. To give you a sense of scale, *NSYNC sold one million copies of their 2000 album No Strings Attached in a single day.
A term derived from “the male gaze,” a concept coined in 1973 by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey, who observed that the vast majority of films assume a heterosexual male audience, depicting women as passive and sexual while men are active and three-dimensional