Word of the Month: Direction

Friends,

So I took a break for the holidays. That is: Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve Eve, Christmas, New Years, and my birthday. So, a pretty long break. (Maybe I've written about holidays so often in previous years that I needed to actually just live some.)

My goal is to update Tangent Space(s) about once a week. Taking a 2-month break is obviously counterproductive to that. So, let's make a deal: I'll do my best to start now with one blog post per week, and in turn you simply agree to read and comment on everything I write, ask meaningful questions, add hilarious commentary, promote my blog everywhere you go, and take about 15 minutes per week to think of and send me topic ideas.

Deal!

But right now, I'm going to hop on a train a fellow blogger from my church is starting. It's a monthly blogging exercise in which you take one word and write about it however you want. Now, before I start, I want to admit/complain that the marketing for this campaign is decidedly feminine:

hashtag #awordwithyou (seriously)

And yet, this will hopefully prove to be just the push I need to start back up. The word for January is... direction.


What's up with One Direction?
On their website, they refer to themselves as '1D'

When I was in elementary school, my main concern was being cool. In third or fourth grade, I learned that Boyz II Men were cool. I promptly asked for their music and soon received the album II on cassette tape.

One day in fourth grade, a classmate asked me what my favorite Boyz II Men songs were. The only ones I could remember in the moment were "I'll Make Love to You" and "Yesterday" (Beatles cover). I waited nervously, wondering how easy it would be for the world to see through my thinly veiled ruse, my forced popularity-aimed fanhood of a band whose lives and lyrics were like a foreign language to me.

The boy, whose particular opinion counted a lot in determining a kid's popularity, nodded and said, "Yeah, I love 'Yesterday'." Whew.

Looking back with my 27- 28-year-old mind, I have a few observations about that hilarious scene:

1. We all cared way too much about popularity.
2. That kid could have been quasi-faking his love of Boyz II Men too! What if none of us actually understood or liked their music!? One person could have seen something on TV about how cool they were...
3. The thing, though, is that Boyz II Men actually was pretty awesome. To a less legit extent, so was All-4-One. But then something terrible happened in the mid-90s. In about 1995-1996, these two groups essentially lost their mojo. This left a gaping hole in the music scene for 2 all-male vocal groups. In 1997, those spots were filled... by the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC.
4. While it was standard operating procedure for girls to love these late-90s boy bands and for guys to hate them, of course we all secretly loved to jam out to their catchy hits, provided no one was around to see us. That's the thing about catchiness-- it doesn't matter if the thing is of terrible value to society or you personally. You get sucked in. See also: Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Storage Wars, Pawn Stars, etc.

All that to say, the pop boy band genre officially died in 2001. That year saw the end (in popularity and/or existence) of *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, and O-Town. Finally, after 5 long years of assault on adolescent ears, the war was over. Boy bands had gone the way of the buffalo...

...until...

The Boy Band Zombie uprising of 2011!! (The seeds of which were sewn in 2010 by none other than 2 of the worst human beings to ever grace television screens, Simon Cowell and Nicole Scherz, uh, Scherzi, umm.. 'Schers not gonna work here anymore')

You probably think I'm overreacting. Maybe. But one boy band --just one-- may threaten the music and TV freedom of us all.


Comment and stuff
We had a deal!!

What is your story with the late-90s boy bands? To which one did you pledge your rabid loyalty?

Jon