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 while pushing their way into the mainstream at one hundred twenty beats per minute. Cant complain Courtney Love and britpop with changing rap music for good hip hop or 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 had been dreading the most successful band of the decade is splitting up. Its not 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. Greatest hits is going to be a last album from today. Is noble. We even set up an emergency hotline little brother magazine because kids were calling and saying they were going to kill themselves as 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 all met and their diehard fans have remained true to this day. But remember this. As a smoky ive got photos from every american scene and every country i could get them from. At some point tide connected so much my mother gave me a big back and said that if i didnt sort it out she threw it all away i. Remind you of course you daydream when you. Take that new that too and set out to develop a fan base by performing at schools in nine hundred ninety 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 prince. 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 to bring there wouldnt be boy bands if it werent for Michael Jackson. The king of pop first achieved success himself as part of a boy band the jackson five as a solo artist he like the foundation of 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. The bending gave way to cute boys and saluted. With a new wave of boys by means starting a new kids on the block and Going Forward there was a lot more kind of sexual direct. Shots being taken off bodies being shown 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 room she can have r. And b. Styles and rap styles did show off thats all well muscled kind of physiques offered up for the enjoyment of female fans im also. A fans as well. Thanks. Definitely to train as sex symbols you know tops coming off you know im paying all that kind of stuff for the while so it was the whole show it was the dancing it was the. It was the looks it was the clothing it was the moves and the songs. You. Love it everywhere is very gay video because weve got purple lip somewhere and cut off top some stuff. When you look back on some of those boy bands in the ninetys like they look really 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 way im now youre like what this is obviously gay you know you have you know take that you know looking for femina doing. Thing is that people didnt translate that as being gay. In nine hundred ninety three boys and appeared on irelands biggest late night show without a song all record deal but plenty of hot moves and no shortage of sex appeal. Thank. God we look forward to hearing from you when youre famous. But it wasnt done skills that made them famous lead singer run in keatings distinctive voice is what catapulted boys on to the top of the chops. Thanks. But that was one finds that they werent allowed to mention at the beginning bands member Stephen Gately. And yet it was the gay and lesbian clubs in large cities that provided the pathing springboard full fledgling boy bands and girl groups what went over well that would also catch on with the mainstream londons legend tree. Posted the. Thats when it sank not dressed in leather perform for an adult audience for the first time. Irish band boy zone and westlife did shows that. We used to perform g. A. Y. Quite regularly actually its just a great lie its a really for the it was the world like we could before we let our hair down 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 everybodys drinking everybodys having for. But the Gay Community was any targeted on officially the official target group was a completely different one. Was. Girls their minds coming this way paolo and that scream is deafening you just you know 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. Weve got to perform with that take that and they were huge at the time 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. We were a group. So for the next show as we said we were riding mc trucks like take back the kids theyre going to kill us. Screaming and swinging girls 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 a place where fantasies can run wild. From the middle of the sixtys you start to get these groups theres a sort of common. Particularly with the teen age and preteen. For the sort of bands that i was like somewhere between. Pets search subjects you know its like an early experimentation with ideas of love and romance and from sex for a very sort of a form a girl who may not be allowed to have a boyfriend could have her imaginary breaker in dealey is from all one and have posters up and hearts around his face and you know if you go see him in concert in paris dont feel weird about it because hes there and shes hearing or you scream as loud as you want. But for many fans the boys represent more than just peanuts on the walls their companions who accompany them through a tumultuous time in their lives. A lot of our fans and especially now as they are adults and they come to ash shows and they tell us about how they felt when i would seen him since we may not be you know you two and the music doesnt sort of change the world for me but the one thing we do to him and we did was that when they have really difficult times and when theyre going to get teenage years and those years can be very emotional and very difficult. I think we gave them a lot. I. Didnt really get brows now you know the hostess tell us for us why here if its a day from dallas they say you know my flag ive got such fond memories of the time of the ballad i would come home from school. I had a holiday or something was troubling me i would put your music all in just one of my bad that was the song just it was like hearing the sound of it wash over me and it made me it just happened somewhere else yeah. One would wish for something that many didnt understand why young girls like us were wild about it even some of the girls didnt understand opportunity as fast on meteor that it was a hat thing going in a contrast to boys their age girls are more bound to the household thats true today but even most l. In the ninetys girls have to help out around the house they cant stay out as late in the evening arent even 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 from groups gather to let off emotional steam boys want to play football and goes go to a Backstreet Boys concert i think girls as a fan should be taken more seriously this shouldnt be dismissed as swindlers 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 if they want a shy or at. Least Entertainment Industry didnt mind the kids had money to spend and it offered them. And the of ways to spend it. Is what bands are perfect right they spring up not mushrooms or 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 the real following with purchasing power. Things about rights was it was. A relatively prosperous time there was becoming we did recover a good boom it was filtering down and so everyone has a lot more money and including right teens and preteens you know if it actually got a lot spending power theres a huge potential there to make money not just with selling the records but with all the merchandise or color spinoffs movies d. V. D. s thing much and dice has always been around just to hit new levels and new heights in the ninetys when when people knew that they could release one song and have three different versions of it just by changing the cover and our e. P. All five of your five boys in the band you you got a single with five different face it until five i mean that thats taking it to the extreme yeah i think then you have people jump on the bandwagon that you had like the dolls and we had terrible suites we had capri sun drinks worlds population and bed sheets on the way and sunglasses and now it 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 childs play video games or tamagotchis and the Entertainment Industry turned its attention to girls. Comeback 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 all sorts of new publications in the ninetys like britney to young list 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 the crew volved around the Software Line sation of women. Yet as with female protagonists were in the foreground on shows like clueless. Then there were novels like Bridget Jones diary these characters were incredibly independent had jobs usually in the Media Industry had lots of friends money and could look after themselves but there was one thing missing prince charming home. 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. Well for the girls the guys were very good looking all of the girls were to it it was a great looking cast to want to have some pretty people on their look perry who 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. I think they did a great job of reaching Middle America who was their tar target audience and demographic giving them team lessons that was still packaged in a way that was somewhat whole song. By youth for years the members of boring 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 bowie regular boys just like those who went to your high school and the eightys were all about luxury 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 that it did but i think. When you look at issues of bravo from the sixtys seventys and the early eightys there were also a fair number of adults on the covers so thats just alone for example in the seventys there was but spencer wearing a full beard noisy gun and then they you thought session began in the ninetys and there were more and more boys on the covers of avant. And 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 for life palpable their motto youthful freedom instead of perfect superwoman despite the fact that top models were also experiencing a boom in spanish. And i think the ninetys were an era of supermodels with big names like audi a chef erin Cindy Crawford the ideal was ninety sixteen ninety i really believe that the girl is. Are 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 thank you thats funny the vicky often picked them and also there. Was. The girl next door she defined Music Television of the ninetys established channels like v h one and m. T. V. Catered to cool kids but things changed when music channels shook up the market and drove the Youth Culture to an absolute peak. Television became a cobbled program happy babbling would slip ups and breakdowns but close to the action provided there was satellite reception or cable in the house in the ninetys private programs into their living rooms throughout europe. Who took sick you go because that didnt it that when Satellite Television became available i got the chance to see a little more of what was going on out there suddenly i could choose between all sorts of programs and music channels i discovered fever the evil one and the other two 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 we just came up of the whole new kids on the block maybe three years earlier four years or. When their popularity soared when the old and everybody had moved on to the grindstone it wasnt about you know nobody wants to watch a boy band or europe celebrated synthpop in the 1980s 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 music for hard times there was no room for sweet dreams up not. From the eightys you had to crack epidemic we had each ivy eighth epidemic we had the failure of trickle down economics so the nonthreatening fun hip hop of the sugarhill gang or run d. M. C. That would change in the ninety eight people were suffering people were angry Police Brutality 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. 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. Pappa. The ninetys definitely 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. All voted stormed the stage with found us vocal and plenty to say in songs that took on rights is a sexism and discrimination they were clear in that amount. In the ninetys i think women were definitely thinking more about their own sexuality you know are there 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 jane didnt mind calling things as they were their texts were adult as was their audience however another band became the voice of a whole goes generation t o c. O o. O o o. O. O o o o. O. T. L. C. Determined the whole nine hundred ninety s. Wrote him this way young women with their songs whether its contraception Sexual Exploitation or sick beauty ideals all these issues were mentioned. T. Bone as chile on the night lisa left eye lopez stood for girl hour. A concept which still had to find its way into mainstream. Was. The girl power off the spice girls became the patrick tim bottom and of the movement. From englands working class they brought feminism to the masses and their message the struggle is over now lets have. As melanie