The return of the boy band

Just saw a bunch of girls giggling over pictures of the British group One Direction and arguing which one among the boys is the cutest. They can’t make up their minds and I have a feeling that many similar scenes are now going on around here and other parts of the world because of One Direction. This is the band, whose songs and I must add also, faces, have recently become the UK’s hot new export.

The five young and very attractive members are Niali James Horan, 18; Zaya Malik, 19; Liam Payne, 18; Harry Edward Styles, 17; and Louis Tomlinson, 20. They all joined the show The X-Factor as individual contestants but failed to qualify. Producer Simon Cowell and guest judge Nicole Scherzinger then suggested they try out as a band and that was how One Direction was born.

After the X-Factor stint ended, the group was on a record-breaking tour where tickets sold out minutes after the announcement a few months ago. They next won over Adele at the Brits Music Awards when their first No. 1 selling song What Makes You Beautiful won for Brit Single of the Year. They were also recently in the U.S.A., where they appeared in various TV shows, including American Idol, visited malls to sell lots of albums and got the One Direction fever going in America.

Next thing I knew there was also The Wanted, another boy group from the UK. Composed of also good-looking guys, Max George, Nathan Sykes, Siva Kaneswaran, Jay McGuiness and Tom Parker. The band has been around longer than One Direction and has hit songs like Glad You Came, All Time Low, Heart Vacancy and Lose My Mind. But thanks to the renewed interest in boy bands, thanks to One Direction, The Wanted is now getting the big promo push in the US.

So why is the boy band craze happening again now? I say it is because One Direction came at just the right time. With the Jonas Brothers grown up, the boy band genre was deemed dead and buried. On the other hand though, a new generation of females has reached puberty and was ready for its own batch of teen heartthrobs to get their crush juices going.

Take note that there seems to have been boy groups for every generation since the ’60s. The Beach Boys, the Monkees, the Jackson Five, New Kids On The Block (NKOTB), Backstreet Boys, etc. One Direction is the one that fills the need for the kids of today. If not, you can just watch out for many more cute, young guys singing boy pop soon and take your pick.

The Beatles was the first boy band of the pop era. But nobody thinks of those guys today as a boy band. I guess this is because the members of the group all matured into serious musicians after only one album. Maybe it was also because they had been serious all along and only became a boy band to get heard and to get their music accepted. After fans had gone gaga over I Wanna Hold Your Hand, it became easier to introduce them to Penny Lane or Strawberry Fields.

That is the best way to take advantage of boy band success. Grow as artists and be assured of a long, lucrative career. Just like The Beatles. Now if the other members do not have what it takes to do that more demanding job, then go off on your own. Brian Wilson did. He is now an acclaimed musician while the other Beach Boys are still singing Get Around in nostalgia shows. So did Justin Timberlake, who is now one of the biggest pop stars in the world and the one who makes me wonder whatever happened to the other boys of N’Sync.

On the other hand though, it is not really so bad being part of a boy band for life. They might divert once in a while to do solo efforts but the Backstreet Boys remain one of the greatest boy bands of all time over 30 years since they hit big time. Donnie Wahlberg, who is a fantastic actor in the TV series Blue Bloods, moonlights occasionally with his old band, NKOTB from the ’80s. And then right up to the time when he did of a heart attack early this year, Davy Jones at 60 something was singing Monkees hits and looking good.