Welcome to the nineteen nineties the cold war is history new technologies are changing the world in creating opportunities for innovations and a colorful variety in pop culture dance culture and alternative lifestyles pushing their way into the mainstream at one hundred twenty beats per minute. Kurt Cobain Courtney love and britpop with changing rap music with good pay poppers conquered the world and the liberal spirit of the decade came to an abrupt end with the attacks on nine eleven this is a look back on the days when cute boys and girls constant spell on teenagers everywhere welcome to the ninetys boy bands and girl groups. After months of speculation the news that every take that band had been dreading the most successful band of the decade in splitting up. It was really terrible i had a friend who was also a big take that fan and we cried. Then we sat in front of the radio and recorded it on tape because there was this big interview interview with. The greatest hits is going to be a last album from today. Is no will. Be on but we even set up an emergency hotline at bravo magazine because kids were calling and saying they were going to kill themselves as captives i think there really were two or three girls who killed themselves because tate got it split up. Take that in the ninetys they were at the top of a gigantic wave of boy and girl lands the man just a bass group of five had a massive teenage following turned over a tiny profits and kept the press on that sos and their diehard fans of remained true to this day. But remember this. As a species ive got photos from every american scene and every country i could get them from. At some point tired collected so much my mother gave me a big bag and said that if i didnt sort it out shed throw it all away i. Remind you of course you daydream when youre young. Take that music too and sat down to develop a fan base by performing at schools in ninety nine another boy band still rule the worlds big stages i thank. You. New kids on the block from the United States they were enjoying huge commercial success and operating a carefully managed merchandising machine. They even surpassed the superstars of the eightys like madonna Whitney Houston critics. And Michael Jackson michael i think with Michael Jackson was the biggest influence on the boy bands since they all combined music singing and choreographed dance routines but for all five of them would be on stage doing what Michael Jackson did as a one man show on the brink of there wouldnt be boy bands if it werent for Michael Jackson and. The king of pop first achieved success himself as part of a boy band the jackson five as a solo artist he laid the foundation for the ultimate Entertainment Experience challenge conventional ideas about masculinity and femininity as did many of his fellow pop artists by the end of the eightys j. Finding gave way to cue boys and a salute. With a new way for a boy by means starting a new kids on the block and Going Forward there was a lot more kind of sexual directness. Just being taken off bodies being shown and i think the big influence you know generally that culture had got more and more explicit about sharing back flash people like bobby brown these need much more raunchy kind of r. And b. Styles and rap styles did show a fair so well muscled kind of physiques offered up for the enjoyment of female fans and also our. Fans as well. Thanks. Definitely for trade as sex symbols you know tops coming off you know im paying all that kind of stuff for the while so it was a whole show is that the dancing it was the. It was the looks it was the clothing it was the moves and the songs that. Night live in every way was very gay video because we got purple it somewhere and taught some stuff that. When you look back on some of those boy bands in the ninetys like they look. Gay right but that was a time where. People didnt know you know people didnt think boy george was gay in the eightys people didnt think George Michael was gay in wales and you look at william now youre like what those obviously gay you know you have you know take that youre looking at doing. Thing is that people didnt translate that as being gay. In nine hundred ninety three boys and appeared on arlins biggest late night show without a song all record deal but plenty of hot moves and no shortage of sex appeal. Thank. You to go forward to hearing from you when youre famous. But it wasnt done skills that made them famous lead singer Ronan Keating still stink voice is what catapulted boys into the top of the chops. But there was one thing that they werent allowed to mention at the beginning band member Stephen Gately. And yet it was the gay and lesbian clubs in large cities that provided the path springboard for fledgling boy bands and girl groups what went over well that would also catch on with the mainstream londons legend three g. A. Y. Club posted the. Thats which dressed in leather performed for an adult audience for the first time. My response boys on and westlife did shows that. We used to perform j. Y. Quite rightly actually its just a great night its a really fun but it was the one night we could perform and that i heard that because you know most games youre taking taking it seriously here but you know youre a bit kind of conscious of whats going on but the something about you why its such a part of the audience is just everybody thinking everybody is having fault. But the Gay Community was any targeted on officially the official target group was a completely different one. Was. Girls whose their minds are coming this way paolo and that scream is deafening you just stop and you know and it will just be screaming i remember some of the reviews from some of our shows the reviewers used to get upset because they would say you know were going to give the show a bad review because the screaming was so loud we couldnt hear the music to actually review it. We got to perform with that take that and they were huge at the time and i remember traveling from our hotel we were going to do a show manchester. And they had to travel in up trucks and we were. Like these limousine cars and their fans thought that we were them because you couldnt see inside they were shaking how come we were a group. So i did better. So for the next show as we said we were riding mc trucks like take that because theyre going to kill us. Screaming and swinging goals were already doing that in the beatles era. The teeny boppers could integrate the boys on stage into their dream wilds which are free of sexual marital obligations place with fantasies and run wild. From the middle of the sixtys you start to get these groups as a sort of conquer them on that particularly with the teen age and preteen female audience for these sort of bands like somewhere between. Pets and sex objects you know its like an early experimentation with ideas of love and romance from sex for a very sort of sorry for a girl who may not be allowed to have a boyfriend could have her imaginary bravery in dealey its from all one and have posters up and hearts around his face and you know and go see him in concert in paris dont feel weird about it because hes there and shes hearing or you scream as long as you want. But for many fans the boys represent more than just peanuts on the wall their companions who accompany them through a tumultuous time in their lives. Are still. A lot of our fans and especially now as they are adults and they come to ash and they tell us about how they felt when i would seen them since we may not be you know you two and their music doesnt sort of change the world time but the one thing we do tim and we did was that when they have to really difficult times and when they got into their teenage years i mean those years can be very emotional and very difficult i think we can give them a lot. You can really get broads know you know it was just teddy bears for us and why here even today from thomas is they say youre my first love ive got such fond memories of the time the band i would come home from school. I had a boring day or something was troubling me i would put your music on on the just a lot of my bad and the songs were just it was almost like healing songs would wash over me and it made me just hoping for more of. My goodness for something that many didnt understand why young girls like oscar wilde about it even some of the girls didnt understand what you. If i started here than it being like i had thing in contrast to boys their rage girls are more bound to the household thats true today but even more so in the ninetys girls have to help out around the house they cant stay out as late in the evening on t. V. In allowed to go out on their own as much as their male counterparts and generally have less access to the potential sources that could allow them to acquire a certain amount of selfconfidence and even toward society and when young girls do go out often theyre not taken very seriously or given much attention groups gather to let off emotional stadium boys want to play football and goes go to a Backstreet Boys concert i think girls his hand should be taken one seriously they shouldnt be dismissed as soon as who obsess over pop stars we dont do that to male soccer fans and no one laughs at them when they sing their fan songs and yell and scream in. The Entertainment Industry didnt mind the kids had money to spend and it offered them plenty of ways to spend it. Boy bands are perfect right they spring up like mushrooms imo even join forces with the competition like the french band and the irish band boys earn twice the fun and twice the profits boy bands are an International Money making machine and their fans are the real following with purchasing power. Things by large was it was. A relatively prosperous time there was the economy to recover i think. It was filtering down and so everyone has a lot more money and including like teens and preteens ever actually got a lot spending power as a huge potential there to make money not just with selling the rec. It was but with all the merchandise or color spinoffs movies d. V. D. s i think much in dice has always been around just hitting levels in the heights in the ninetys where when people knew that they could release one song and have three different. Versions of it just by changing the cover you know you can go all five if you want five boys in the bangi you got a single with five different bicycle five i mean that thats taking it to the extreme but yeah i think when you have people jump on the bandwagon they get like a doll or something and we had horrible swings we had capri sun drinks while she popped like a bed sheets on the way sunglasses the ninetys was it was a massive explosion to really capitalize i mean it polite as much as you could to make money. In the ninetys are high on the new economy the digital age made room for new markets internet startups have the stock market booming multimedia products are created for a childs play video games all time i got she said and the Entertainment Industry turned its attention to girls. Come back ive heard of there was a noticeable push of products onto the market is specially targeted to girls if you take girls magazines for example there were what sorts of new publications in the ninetys like brigade to young miss magazines with a lot of content related to the cosmetics and Fashion Industries consumerism was promoted as a lifestyle in these magazines then there were also t. V. Shows that revolved around the software lies ation of women. Tell you yet as with the female protagonists were in the foreground on shows like clueless. Then there were novels like Bridget Jones diary and these characters were incredibly independent had jobs usually in the media industry. I had lots of friends money and could look after themselves but there was one thing missing prince charming. And this prince charming should be of their own age if possible whether in t. V. Shows films or advertisement the boy band style was everywhere the metrosexual man with youthful looks and well groomed appearance became the new ideal of beauty i was. Working for the girls the guys were very good looking all of the girls were to it it was a great looking cast of two one i had some pretty people on there lou perry whos still gorgeous to this day so it was a group of pretty kids we did have heart that episode got to perform every day of the week. Was. I. Thank you. Thank you thank you i think they did a great job of reaching Middle America who was there to target audience and demographic giving them. Teen lessons that was still packaged in a way that was somewhat whole song i didnt buy you for years the members of going girl bands were just like normal boys and girls the era of unapproachable superstars of the eightys was over. This gap between the star and the fans became smaller you no longer had dazzling personalities like david kelly at regular boys just like those who went to your high school in the eightys were all about. Goods and yuppies it was a time when men were the primary marketing target in the ninetys it opened back up to the wider masses of the city but i think. It was about when you look at issues of gravel from the sixtys seventys and the early eightys there were also a fair number of adults on the covers so thats just along for example in the seventys there was but spencer wearing a full beard noisy gun and then they you thought action began in the ninetys and there were more and more boys on the covers of our. Hands many of the female figures on t. V. Were also girlies now plats hair slides and sneakers the style of dress is colorful and diverse theres rest from life palpable their motto youthful freedom instead of perfect superwoman despite the fact that top models were also experiencing a boom. And i think the ninetys were an era of supermodels with big names like audi a chef erin Cindy Crawford the ideal was ninety six to ninety i really believe that the girl years were already that unconventional they were worried whether men like it or not that was very extravagant. And the different fashion styles were put together completely crazily i think it wasnt targeted so much at the mens views think thats funny the ricky often picked them out alice. Was. The girl next door she defined Music Television of the ninetys established channels like v h one n m t really catered to cool kids but things changed to a new Music Channel shook up the market and drove the Youth Culture to an absolute peak. Television big. Troubled program happy babbling with slip ups and breakdowns but close to the action provided there was satellite reception all cable in the house in the ninetys private programs into the living rooms throughout europe. Return to q coco said didnt think that when Satellite Television became available i got the chance to see and itll me more of what was going on out that suddenly i could choose between all sorts of programs and Music Channels i discovered fever fever one and leave it to that was incredible i became aware of all sorts of countless artists on the just the European Youth programs provided the main showcase for boy and girl bands in europe even american bands like the Backstreet Boys and and sink were aware of their importance and took advantage of them because by the mid one nine hundred ninety s. Interest in singing and dancing boys in white pop culture had dropped significantly in the United States. The white boy band couldnt get arrested americas enough weve just come off of the whole new kids on the block maybe three years earlier four years earlier when their popularity soared when the old and everybody had moved on to the grindstone it wasnt about you know nobody wanted to watch a boy band or europe celebrated synth pop in the one nine hundred eighty s. It was heading for a big dance wave in the one nine hundred ninety s. But grunge and hip hop dominated the american pop charts hard music for hard times there was no room for sweet dreams of love. From the eightys you had to crack epidemic we had each ivy aids epidemic we have the failure of trickle down economics so not thriving fon ahead of the sugar hill gang or run d. M. C. That would change in the ninety eight people were suffering people were angry police approached. Palatino poverty Ronald Reagan ruining the country george bush sr coming in it was time to talk about whats going on in your community in the ninetys it was quote unquote gangsta and for all of the criticism of coral ho gangsta rap it really was a reaction to what people were going through women to found new possibilities of expression in this music like mc lyte queen that she felt pappa. Not taking the ninetys definite in the open the door for womens rights again through music because of hip hop Sister Soldier and all of these people who are screaming about their status with women. Open the doors for the r. And b. Singers in the soul singers to have an opinion. Voted storm the stage with founders of vocal power and plenty to say in songs that took on racism sexism and discrimination they were clear and then to moms. In the ninetys i think women were definitely thinking more about their own sexuality in our lives some of the lyrics were pretty racy the lyrics were definitely forward thinking in terms of what we want were not just you know an object we have feelings and desires and we wanted to be right. Afro American Girl bands like james didnt mind calling things as they were that texts were adult as was their audience. However another band became the voice of a whole girls generation t. L. C. Was. About. To come out how. Shell seem determined the whole nine hundred ninety s. Wrote him this way young women with their songs whether its contraception Sexual Exploitation all sik beauty ideals all these issues were mentioned. Teabags chile and the late lisa left eye lopez stood for gulp our. Concept which still had to find its way into mainstream. Was. Girl power the spice girls became the