BURN !

All that link says is that boy bands are organized pop music groups of good looking men who can sing and dance.

Sounds a little like early Beatles

Not really Kelso.

Oh YEAH!????!?!?? Well can The Beatles DANCE? CAN THEY?!?! HUH!?!?!?!?!?

No seriously, can they? I know they knew how to kinda flip their mop-tops around.....

yeah, you must be confusing the Beatles with someone else...

Alabama was covering an n'sync song at a point in their career where the Beatles were still covering other people's songs.

But anyways, the big difference is the eras here. The Beatles were closer to your parents' and grandparents' nine inch nails or eminem than backstreet boys or nkotb.

'They're as bad as the New Kids and Menudo'


Anyone who votes for this option should never again be allowed to enter the Music forum.

Um, okay weargle....

yeah...i second that...

I could be wrong but I believe New kids on the block formed themselves...guess they arent a boy band...
I also believe 98 degrees formed themselves...guess they arent a boy band then?

not to mention bands like the BSB and Nsync did write alot of the later songs...not all..but some...


The beatles fame was manufactured......in the beginning their manager admited to paying girls to scream when they got off the plane..admitted to buyin out the sales on their first few singles and also admitted to payin people to go to their first gig at shea....

I can't believe this is even up for discussion. The Beatles have done more for popular music, as far defining it and revolutionizing it, than you could ever hope to understand. They practically invented and perfected the formula of a rock band playing pop/rock songs, much of which has yet to be improved upon.

In the early '60s 99.99% of songs were about "love and crap", as you say. You know who were the first musicians to sing about something else? That's right, The Beatles. With early songs like We Can Work It Out, Eleanor Rigby and Paperback writer, they were the first popular performers that made hits of songs with deeper meanings than "boy-likes-girl". How about their song Run For Your Life, where they threaten to kill a girl with lines like: "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than be with another man" - this was big stuff in the early '60's and this song was appropriately banned - it caused much more of a stir than, say, Nine Inch Nail's Closer.

Actually, in 1962, She Loves You absolutely did rock. Was it up to current heavy metal standards? Of course not, that's ridiculous - that's like being disappointed in the fastest horse in the world because it's not as fast as an F1 racing car. But you know who raised the standard for songs that ROCK HARD? That's right, The Beatles - go listen to Helter Skelter and tell me they don't rock. You say you're more into cutting edge avante-guard stuff? Listen to Revolution No.9, and I think you'd agree that it's way more trippy than anything even Radiohead can come up with. Actually, instead of talking out of your ass, why don't you do a little research first? - that is, unless you were trolling, in which case: congrats, I fell for it...


That was only for the U.S. and years after they became popular all on their own in England.

Yes, they were a boy band. They grew out of it in a couple of years, and continued growing at a phenomenal rate.

I think of boy bands as a group of cute, non-threatening, mildly sexual young men who tend to sing really high. They do wanna hold your hand. They don't wanna give you every inch of my love. Their appeal is to pubescent girls.

It doesn't matter if it was manufactured. Hell, Frank Sinatra's manager invented that whole screaming girls thing by paying a dozen girls to scream. It took off on its own after that. Sinatra had the brains and talent to reinvent himself when the Teen Heartthrob thing got old. So did the Beatles. But they got their respective starts as heartthrob and boy band.

<small></small>Reading about their time in Hamburg pretty much destroys the notion that they were manufactured.

but it took what....YEARS?

Yeah - they started playing together around 1959, they put out their first record in 1962 and came to the US in '63/'64.

I don't think anyone is saying they didnt revolutionize music. All I am saying, as well as some others, are that they started out like a boy band and transformed into one of the "greatest" (not my words) bands ever. Why are some of you getting so offended by this?

Traveling through European towns in a beat-up van all by themselves, playing for little to no money - How is that starting out like a boy band?

You do know that the Beatles were considered threatening by many after their Ed Sullivan performance, don't you? After that show, which set records, there was much noise made by many who were offended- yes, offended- by the music, their long hair, etc. Though their early recordings may sound "boy band" to some today, only a clueless dolt would label them as such.

Except for the first sentence, the nail has officially been firmly hit on the head.

hmmm... all this discussion and not one of the people who are saying the "Beatles were a boy band" addressed the fact that the Beatles played their own instruments and wrote their own songs!!!

I don't see Menudo, New Kids, Nsynch, or Backstreet Boys writing their own songs or playing their own instruments.

Who's to say others havent started out the same way playing for shit money? Were you with these other boy bands at their beginning? And what I meant by "starting out" in the first place was their first mainstream exposure. They were cute little men singing infront of screaming girls and that is no different than today.

Hanson.

I hear that those bands play a mean skinflute.

Early Beatles Yes. They played pop hits that appealed mainly to teenage girls. If that isn't "Boy Band" then I don't know what is. As for playing their own instruments, it wasn't like Pharrel or Timberland were around to throw down some some beats for them to sing over. If music companies today thought girls wanted to see their boy bands play instruments, they would.

I guess that I missed this on first read through. Thank you very much for contributing positively to the question at hand and not taking musical tastes personally.

It's still not absolutely clear how a boy band "starts out". I mean do you count the several years sorting out a stable line up and gigging across avariety of countries in small venues? Or do you skip all that and move on the to the time that they visit America, start to show some of the trappings of success (and, yes, of Brian Epstein's marketing).Maybe it is not the opinions being expressed but the lack of coherency.

As well as the problem with definitions, there is little to show that those arriving at the "yes they were a boy band" option offered in the poll have much knowledge of the band's history.

Boy band now seems to be used by folk as a perjorative term for a manufactured, short term musical phenomenon as opposed, say, to a band comprised of boys. Even saying that, the US-created Beatles clone band, The Monkees, had an element of longevity.Furthermore........ And, finally, someone reviewing Fred Levy's book "The Ultimate Boy Band Book" said: