MA Major Research Project – J. Smith; McMaster University – Cultural Studies and
Critical Theory
“DIRTY POP”: BOY BANDS, QUEERNESS AND POP PLEASURE
“DIRTY POP”: BOYS BANDS, QUEERNESS AND POP PLEASURE
BY JOCELYN SMITH, B.A.
A Major Research Project Submitted to the MA Program in Cultural Studies and Critical
Theory In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Master of Arts
McMaster University © Copyright by Jocelyn Smith, September 2012
ii
MASTER OF ARTS (2012) McMaster University
(Cultural Studies & Critical Theory)
Hamilton, Ontario
TITLE: “Dirty Pop”: Boy Bands, Queerness and the Politics of Queer Pleasure
AUTHOR: Jocelyn Smith, B.A. (Wilfrid Laurier University)
SUPERVISOR: Dr. Susan Fast
NUMBER OF PAGES: vi, 76
iii
Abstract
In the late 1990s, boy bands such as the Backstreet Boys and *Nsync dominated
the North American popular music charts and the hearts of girls and young women.
Despite my position as a straight female fan of boy bands, in this paper I take a “sidelong
glance” or, to use Stuart Hall’s words, an “oppositional reading” of boy band texts and
instead explore the relationship between these boy bands and their young gay male fans. I
focus primarily on how queer pleasure and queer sexual agency are explored within the
space of the boy band, but only within certain racial, gendered and sexual limitations, and
I look at how boy bands and their producers manipulated the image of the eroticized male
body and utilized the all-male environment to blur the lines between the homosocial and
the homoerotic—and to appeal to the emerging sexual interests of young heterosexual
girls and young homosexual boys without offending their ever-present parents. Drawing
on queer and feminist theorists such as Judith Halberstam, Sara Ahmed and Jeffrey P.
Dennis and popular music scholars such as Stan Hawkins, Gayle Wald and Susan Fast, I
demonstrate how boy band texts, and the social interpretations of these texts, are
inextricably connected to pop music texts of the past and to understandings of normative
(and nonnormative) sexuality and gender identity within specific social contexts. To do
so, I create a historical “web” (as opposed to a linear historical narrative) that explores
the popular music history behind these boy bands—specifically the gendered and
racialized history—and leads me toward a more complete understanding of how and why
boy bands signify as queer.
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Acknowledgments
Many of the people I have spoken to over the past year about the topic of this
major research project have commented about how unbelievably lucky I am to be able to
write about something so unabashedly fun. And while there have been a few moments
where it has been difficult to remember how much fun I used to have listening to,
dancing to, and talking about boy bands, I am indebted to those who have made this
incredibly fun and challenging project a reality.
First, I want to thank Dr. Patrica Molloy and Dr. Maria DiCenzo at Wilfrid
Laurier University for their encouragement and enthusiasm about my ideas during their
initial stages. I would not have been able to do this without their support. Second, I want
to acknowledge my colleagues at McMaster. Their friendship, undying support and
outside-the-box viewpoints have been invaluable and I look forward to spending the next
four years in this inspiring, loving and challenging environment. Third, I want to thank
my family and friends outside of McMaster for supporting me even when they thought
my ideas were a little “out there” and for never failing to believe that I could do this.
And finally, my biggest thanks go out to my supervisor Dr. Susan Fast, for her
encouragement, her guidance, her patience and her honesty. Her enthusiasm about my
research interests brought me to McMaster, and I am eternally grateful for that. I came
here with no background in popular music studies, and, with her expertise and guiding
hand, I was able to begin to turn my love for boy bands and my interest in queer and
feminist theory into a critical academic project. Many thanks!
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Table of Contents
1. 1998 and Beyond! Introducing the Boy Band “Phenomenon”
1
2. “If You Wanna Be My Lover / You Gotta Get With My Friends”: Boy Bands
11
and Homosociality
2.1 Girl Talk, Boy Talk? Homosociality and Youth Culture
13
2.2 “No Strings Attached”? Puppets, Puppet Masters and the Tin Pan Alley
26
Formula
2.3 Cock Rock, Teenybop Pop and Doo Wop: Homosociality and the Spectacle
30
of the Male Body
3. “Doesn’t Matter if You’re Black or White”? Crossover Music and the
43
(Racialized) Male Performing Body
3.1 Crossing Over, Dancing and the Spectacle of the Male Body
46
3.2 Androgyny and Queer Monsters in “Thriller” and “Everybody (Backstreet’s
58
Back)”
3.3 “The press be askin’ if I like sodomy / I don’t know, yeah, probably”:
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Physicality and Homoeroticism in the Boy Band Video
4. “Which Backstreet Boy is Gay?” Concluding Thoughts on the Queerness of Boy
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Bands
5. Works Cited
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1. 1998 and Beyond! Introducing the Boy Band “Phenomenon”
Stan Hawkins opens his book Settling the Pop Score with a personal anecdote:
The year was 1985. I recall the rise of Madonna and her domination of MTV with
her teasing video, “Like a Virgin,” and her performance being anything but. This
was also the same year that Prince was breaking through into mainstream pop.
Many adored him in his self-indulgent film, Purple Rain, while others were
bewildered, shocked, and repulsed. Then there were the Pet Shop Boys—weird,
ironic, definitely gloomy.... Everyone seemed to love the Eurythmics and their
brassy gender bending songs, even if Annie Lennox appeared to parade around as
a social worker. (Hawkins 2002: xi)
This was the era that Hawkins refers to as the “MTV boom,” the era of gender-bending
and ambiguous sexuality, of glam and glitter, of banality, and of the pop music video.
Similarly, I want to begin with my own anecdote. Hawkins included his anecdote to write
himself into his analysis; he argues in his preface that “[c]entral to [his] enquiry is the
question of what these musicians and their texts have signified to [him] during the last
two decades of the twentieth century” (2002: xi). Despite movements in the opposite
direction in the field of musicology, Hawkins clings “to the belief that meanings are ...
derived from our personal understandings of our social contexts” (2002: xi). I cling to the
same belief, which is why I feel compelled to include my own anecdote and situate
myself within the 1990s boy band phenomenon.
The year was 1998. I was nine years old. In August of that year, I attended my
first-ever concert: the Backstreet Boys at the Molson Amphitheatre in downtown
Toronto. It was their Backstreet’s Back tour, celebrating their second album in Europe
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MA Major Research Project—J. Smith; McMaster University—Cultural Studies and
Critical Theory
and Canada, and their first album in the United States. 1 I still have the t-shirt that my
best friend’s father bought for me at the concert. The once-black fabric is now grey and
worn thin and shapeless, and there’s an odd patch sewn on the back where I ripped it
climbing a tree. The shirt is an adult’s medium and came down to my knees at the time,
but I wore it to school on the first day of grade four with a stylish pair of black leggings.
To me, this anecdote is arguably more important to my project than the Backstreet
Boys’ impressive record sales, although I will include those as well. Susan Fast, in her
book In the Houses of Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music, includes her
own experiences as a female fan of Led Zeppelin to demonstrate how a woman related to
music that was supposedly made for and consumed by men. I include my experiences for
reasons that are, on the one hand, very similar to Fast’s: I want to demonstrate how a
young girl related to and embraced (and wore on a t-shirt) the masculinity that was
constructed largely to appeal to her. On the other hand, as I just mentioned, boy bands
were for her (or me), while Led Zeppelin was not, and so my fan experiences function
differently from Fast’s in that sense. But regardless of whom the music was created for,
young girls’ identification with and understanding of this masculinity—and I will argue
that it is a definitively queer masculinity—is central to the signification of the boy band
pop text.
And I was not the only one smitten. I recall swooning over the Backstreet Boys’
“Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)” video with my friends after school. I remember
basing our Halloween costumes on the costume of our favourite Backstreet Boy in the
1
Album titles and track listings for Backstreet Boys albums differ depending upon
country of release. Unless I indicate otherwise, I will be referring to Canadian releases in
this paper, therefore Backstreet Boys is their first album, Backstreet’s Back their second,
Millennium their third, and Black and Blue their fourth album.
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MA Major Research Project—J. Smith; McMaster University—Cultural Studies and
Critical Theory
“Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” video. There were heated playground arguments
comparing the record sales of the Spice Girls to those of the Backstreet Boys and *Nsync.
Older teenagers walked around wearing t-shirts that proclaimed: “Boy Bands Suck.”
Howard Stern gave the Backstreet Boys the homophobic nickname “The Backdoor
Boys.” Critics argued that it was all just a phase, and young people would be bored of
boy bands in two years. But none of that mattered. The boy band craze was here to stay—
and, as I will suggest, perhaps had always been there and will never go away.
The year began with Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love, the Spice Girls’
Spiceworld, Shania Twain’s Come on Over and Hanson’s Middle of Nowhere topping the
charts, and ended with the eponymous albums Backstreet Boys and *Nsync and *Nsync’s
Home for Christmas all in the top ten of the Billboard 200. The Backstreet Boys, formed
in 1993 in Orlando, Florida, by Lou “Big Poppa” Pearlman, owner of Trans Continental
Records entertainment company, went from performing at Disney World to touring
Europe for two years—with thousands of screaming young girls showing up at the airport
to see the Boys off as they headed back home (Dunn 1999: 43). By 1998, the Boys had
sold 27 million albums worldwide (Dunn 1999: 42), and their first American album spent
133 weeks on the Billboard 200, peaking at number four the week of January 31, 1998—
just in time for the eighteenth birthday of Nick Carter, the youngest member of the
Backstreet Boys. The Backstreet Boys’ next album, Millennium, debuted at number one
on the Billboard 200 chart on June 5, 1999, and remained on the chart for 72 weeks, and
the video for the first single from this album, “I Want It That Way,” was eventually
banned from the MTV program Total Request Live because pre-teen girls, the main
audience of the show, requested the song too often (Wald 2002: 25).
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MA Major Research Project—J. Smith; McMaster University—Cultural Studies and
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1998 was also the two-year anniversary of *Nsync’s “discovery” by Lou
Pearlman in Orlando, Florida. It was also in this year that the boys’ debut album *Nysnc
was released in the United States and went platinum in just four months (Squires 1998:
17). The album peaked at number two on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for
109 weeks. Their first single, “I Want You Back” (1998), was already a gold record in
Europe and had broken “long-standing European records, knocking out Michael Jackson
as the king of the quickest-rising single and capturing the title for longest reign for a new
act on the charts” (Squires 1998: 14-15). By the time their second album, No Strings
Attached, was released in 2000, *Nsync was drawing crowds of approximately 8,000
fans, primarily young girls accompanied by their parents (and about 100 police officers),
to Times Square for the chance to glimpse the group as they entered the Virgin
Megastore for an in-store meet-and-greet (Christman and Berent: 2000). Billboard
magazine writers Ed Christman and Anna Berent reported that the “shrieks from the
mainly female crowd” could be heard from Billboard’s main offices in Times Square “all
day long,” and that the line to enter the Virgin Megastore to purchase the record the
morning it came out began the evening before (2000). The store was unable to
accommodate any shoppers other than the *Nsync fans that day (Christman and Berent:
2000).
Another one of Pearlman’s boy bands, LFO, peaked at number three on the
Billboard Hot 100 with their hit single “Summer Girls” in August, 1999, and, in 2000,
ABC, alongside Pearlman, produced Making the Band, a hit reality show that, in its first
season, created the new boy band O-Town (named after Orlando, a.k.a. Pearlman’s boyband heaven). As Bruce Handy and Timothy Roche reported in Time magazine in 1999,
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MA Major Research Project—J. Smith; McMaster University—Cultural Studies and
Critical Theory
“these [were] fat times for bubble gum and its makers.” Quintets and quartets of “clean—
but not too clean—cut guys with great dimples and abs” dominated the charts, award
shows, radio stations, music video stations, and the hearts of teenyboppers everywhere
(Handy and Roche 1999). This was, to borrow Hawkins’ wording, the second “MTV
boom,” and Pearlman and his boy bands were right at the centre of it. This was the next
generation (and, arguably, the final generation) of music-video performance, made up of
pop musicians who were born between the early 1970s and early 1980s and who grew up
watching the music videos that Hawkins refers to in Settling the Pop Score. And although
this was also the era2 when hip-hop/R&B, country and alternative rock crossed over into
the mainstream, with artists such as Usher, Will Smith, Brandy, Shania Twain, LeAnn
Rhimes, Garth Brooks, Pearl Jam, Matchbox 20 and the Dave Matthews Band topping
the charts, it became known, due largely to the attention paid by MTV, as the “era” of
industry-manufactured groups of boyish men singing in perfect harmony, wearing
matching outfits and performing choreographed chair-dances.
While some critics argue that recording companies only turn to boy bands in
“dark times” because they are easy to produce and easy to sell to impressionable young
girls (Hiatt 2008), I want to suggest that the reasons behind the boy band “phenomenon”
are much more complex than profit margins. The boy-band “brand” of masculinity is
caught up in discourses of masculinity, whiteness and queerness within the pop music
industry. The interpretation of pop texts cannot be reduced to an analysis of
I wish to problematize the concept of a musical “era” in relation to boy bands
throughout this paper. The resilience and recent resurgence of boy bands (e.g. One
Direction) will always be at the forefront of my mind. The question may be, then, when
hasn’t there been a boy band phenomenon, rather than when has there been.
2
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MA Major Research Project—J. Smith; McMaster University—Cultural Studies and
Critical Theory
commercialism and trends in consumption, it “is an interdisciplinary task that deals with
the relationship between music and social mediation. It is [a task] that includes taking
into account the consideration of the sounds in their relation to us as individuals”
(Hawkins 2002: 3). My aim, then, is to provide a more thorough understanding of the era
of synchronized chair dances and matching outfits, by drawing on the fields of queer and
feminist theory alongside pop music studies and musicology. I want to explore how the
sounds, lyrics and images of boy band songs and videos—not to mention the extraneous
material in books, magazines, and various other sources—related to fans as individuals
and as social groups. I will be analyzing performances as interpreted by fans, as well as
analyzing media discourse. In particular, I will explore the relationship between boy
bands and queer young men. My main argument here is that boy bands and their
producers manipulated the homosocial space of the boy band and the eroticizing,
objectifying space of the music video to construct a distinctly queer, yet often also
sexually “innocent,” masculinity. Of course, neither of these tactics of constructing
queerness is new. In the first section of this project I will focus on the tradition of the
homosocial space in pop music, looking at the girl group genre from the 1960s through to
the Spice Girls, who are often cited as a precursor to the 1990s boy band phenomenon, as
well as at “boy groups” such as Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and doowop groups of the 1960s. In the second section of this project I will look at the male body
as spectacle, focusing primarily on the music video and iconic pop video artists such as
Michael Jackson and Robbie Williams. I will also look at racial appropriation in this
section, and on the role of the racialized male body in pop music.
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Critical Theory
But clearly here we are not speaking of queerness simply as homosexual desire,
but also as a construction of gender-based “nonnormative logics and organizations of
community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (Halberstam
2005: 6). Queerness or “gayness” is not necessarily the presence of homosexual desire,
but the absence of normative masculinity3 and heterosexual development. Hegemonic
masculinity and heterosexuality is often reified in popular culture “to demonstrate not
heterosexual desire but the lack of homosexual desire; the depiction of an inevitable
hormone-drenched ‘discovery of girls’ may erupt in part from a refusal to depict a
‘discovery of boys,’ a disavowal of the possibility that the homosocial might evolve into
the homoerotic” (Dennis 2002: 214). Boy bands’ nonnormative embodiment of
masculinity and heterosexual male sexuality, I will demonstrate, directs (or orientates, to
use Sara Ahmed’s term) some listeners (and viewers) to interpret the boys as queer,
despite the heteroromantic4 nature of most of their lyrics and their comments to the
media. How can we unpack these ideas in order to provide a more thorough analysis of
popular music trends as they relate to representations of gender and sexuality in the
1990s, and particularly to provide a more thorough analysis of the queer white
masculinity of the late-1990s boy band?
Hawkins argues in his essay “The Pet Shop Boys: Musicology, Masculinity,
Banality” that through the 1980s into the 1990s, there was a significant shift towards a
3
I say “masculinity” here only because I am dealing with primarily male-identified
subjects throughout this project. Similarly, I will often use male pronouns, and I have
made this choice consciously based on the gender identity of the majority of the subjects
I am dealing with.
4
I use the term “heteroromantic” here instead of “heterosexual” because the boys were
often presented as boyish and presexual—they expressed romantic feelings for girls, but
never explicit sexual desire. Their feelings were often presented as “crushes,” not as adult
attraction.
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MA Major Research Project—J. Smith; McMaster University—Cultural Studies and
Critical Theory
“new bricolage of masculinity” (1997: 120).5 Through the “eroticisation of the male
image within popular culture,” the promotion of male narcissism and the embrace of
sexual ambiguity and camp sensibilities, gay erotica and “the fetishism of maleness”
were transported into the mainstream marketplace, and, more specifically, into the pop
music and pop music video marketplace (Hawkins 1997: 121, 123). I will explore how
this “bricolage of masculinity” translates into the context of popular music aimed at
young audiences in the mid- to late-1990s, specifically looking at the discourses of
queerness surrounding “the spectacle of the male body,” androgyny and the “girlish
masculinity” of boy bands (McDonald 1997: 278; Jamieson 2007: 245; Wald 2002: 6). I
aim to move toward an understanding of how boy bands and their producers manipulated
the image of the eroticized male body and utilized the all-male environment to blur the
lines between the homosocial and the homoerotic—and to appeal to the emerging sexual
interests of young heterosexual girls and young homosexual boys without offending their
ever-present parents.
Daryl Jamieson points out in his essay “Marketing Androgyny: The Evolution of
the Backstreet Boys” that “queer decodings” of “popular art forms” are nothing new
(2007: 247). However, the intentional manipulation of the eroticized male body,
particularly the androgynous or potentially queer male body, in the marketing of boy
bands opened up new mainstream spaces for queer pleasure and the queer gaze.6 That
5
In Sherri Rifkin’s book Givin’ It Their All: The Backstreet Boys’ Rise to the Top, she
says that Nick Carter “wouldn’t take receiving flowers from a young woman as an insult
to his manliness ... he’s a ‘90s kind of guy!” (1998: 106). This phrase—“a ‘90s kind of
guy”—is a great example of Hawkins’ “bricolage of masculinity,” a masculinity not
dependent on the subordination of women through compulsory heterosexuality.
6
Here I am invoking Laura Mulvey’s definition of the gaze in her seminal work “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), and I will argue that the spectacle of the male
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being said, the queer potential of these “manufactured” boy bands should not be used as
an excuse to celebrate them as wholly revolutionary or resistive. Rather, the boy band
phenomenon worked both to uphold gender, racial and sexual norms and to provide what
Diane Railton calls a highly commercialized “carnivalesque” space of “illegitimate
legitimacy,” where the “spectacle replaces the everyday, and norms of gender and
sexuality are transgressed” (2001: 327). In other words, boy bands offered a space for
their fans to explore queer masculinity by addressing an audience (i.e. queer young men)
that had rarely been addressed directly by mainstream pop in the past and by
problematizing the male gaze by offering up men as the object of the gaze.
Of course, this is not to say that men had never made men the object of a queer
gaze before. Artists from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to the Beatles have been taken up
as queer. However, I want to argue that boy bands’ explicit appeal to their queer
audiences (e.g. Nick Carter appearing on the cover of xy magazine) was markedly
different from their predecessors. However, their queerness was confined to the space of
the boy band. I do not want to belittle the significance of this queerness, but it was a role
they played in their performances, not a viable lifestyle—for example, ex-*Nsync
member Lance Bass explains in his memoir that it would have been dangerous for him to
come out publicly as queer while he was a member of a boy band (Eliot 2007: viii-ix).
This queerness was a phase, just like pop music fandom itself is supposed to be a phase.
As Railton argues, “the freedom of carnival could be seen as a way of maintaining social
order by giving people a safety valve that helped them cope with the pressures of [the]
body, whether intended for women’s pleasure or queer pleasure, is “queer,” as in it
subverts the normative, voyeuristic male gaze. I will discuss this idea further, drawing on
Susan Fast’s work in Houses of Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock, in the section
regarding the male body as spectacle.
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Critical Theory
day-to-day.... A similar role can be seen for the carnivalesque of ‘pop.’ It, too, is
temporally bounded.... The pleasures of ‘pop’ are something that [fans] must learn to
grow out of” (Railton 2001: 330), or at least learn to be quiet about. This queer pleasure,
then, is temporally bounded to the boyish homosocial realm of the boy band, and cannot
continue into manhood—at least not while one is still a pop star. Thus this project will
focus on how queer pleasure and queer sexual agency are explored within the boy band
phenomenon, but only within certain racial, gendered and sexual limitations.
This boy-band phenomenon did not occur within a vacuum; I want to situate it
within its specific historical moment. Throughout this project, I will be creating a
historical “web” (as opposed to a linear historical narrative) that explores the popular
music history behind these boy bands—specifically the gendered and racialized history—
and outlines various approaches to interpreting history within popular music studies. This
will aid me in understanding how and why boy bands signify as queer and will provide
me with a framework to analyze several boy band songs and videos. 10
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2. “If You Wanna Be My Lover / You Gotta Get With My Friends”: Boy Bands and
Homosociality
In her book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives,
Judith Halberstam argues that the homosociality of the boy band performance creates
homoerotic tension between the girls in the audience and the boys on stage that is on the
verge of being pushed over the edge:
The fan desire and ecstasy can only be maintained by keeping at bay the erotic
relations between the boys, on the one hand, and the potentially erotic relations
between the screaming girls, on the other. As the boys sing together, the girls
scream together, and the whole fragile edifice of heterosexuality could come
tumbling down at any moment if the homosocial structures of desire are made
explicit. (2005: 178)
Halberstam’s focus in her analysis is primarily on the homoerotic potential of these
performances for the female fans, but in this chapter I wish to explore how the
homosociality of the boy band performance—and not just the on-stage performance, but
the music video performance and their performance as pop stars and celebrities in the
media circus as well—contributed to the construction of their queer masculinity.
Specifically, I want to argue that boy bands manipulate their homosocial environment to
both create a safe, “feminized” heterosexuality and invite queer readings. In order to do
this, I analyze boy bands’ performance of homosociality alongside other single-gender
musical groups, such as girl groups, all-male rock bands, barbershop quartets and doowop groups.
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MA Major Research Project—J. Smith; McMaster University—Cultural Studies and
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First, I turn to girl groups—both 1960s girl groups and the 1990s hit group the
Spice Girls. Jacqueline Warwick defines girl group music as comprising the following
elements:
an emphasis on the concerns and interests of teenage girls in its lyrics (i.e., boys,
the strictness of parents, etc.); material prepared for the most part by professional
songwriters; origins in the recording studio and dependent upon professional
session musicians; an instrumental sound often dominated by orchestral
instruments rather than the minimal rock’n’roll band lineup of guitar, bass guitar,
and drum kit; and above all, the audibly adolescent voices of girls interacting in
dialogues between lead and backing vocalists. (2007: ix)
My principal focus is on her final element—“the audibly adolescent voices of girls
interacting in dialogues”—because it is through this musical “girl talk” that the nature of
the homosociality of the girl group is defined. But I also want to briefly discuss if and
how boy bands fit the other elements of Warwick’s definition—and how this contributed
to a queer reading of their homosociality.
Like girl groups, boy bands’ songs put an emphasis on the concerns and interests
of teenage (and pre-teen) girls. The perspective of the songs is different, but the focus is
always on how the girl feels; it is about catering to her needs, not the singer’s. This
allows boy band music to be understood as concerning girls’ interests, despite the fact
that it is sung by boys. As Warwick argues, “music associated primarily with audiences
of girls tends to be considered girly by association, regardless of the actual sex of the
performers” (Warwick 2007: 5). For example, many of the song titles include the word
“you,” such as the Backstreet Boys’ “I’ll Never Break Your Heart” (1997), “Just to Be
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Close to You” (1997), “As Long As You Love Me” (1998), “Anywhere For You” (1998),
“It’s Gotta Be You” (1999), “Don’t Wanna Lose You Now” (1999), *Nsync’s “I Want
You Back” (1998), “I Just Wanna Be With You” (1998), “This I Promise You” (2000),
and so on and so forth. The songs are all about what the singer will do to make the “you”
in the song happy, putting “you” before himself and—as the majority of listeners would
interpret the “you” to be referring to a female love interest—catering to the needs and
emotions of the teenage girls that make up their audience, just as girl groups do.
However, perhaps it is not “just as” girl groups do, because, frankly, the boys are not
girls, and cannot wholly identify with them or participate in “girl talk.” I want to return to
Warwick’s points about girl group music being manufactured later, but here I will turn to
her final point: girl group music as homosocial dialogue.
2.1 Girl Talk, Boy Talk? Homosociality and Youth Culture
Warwick asks: “The main audience for girl group music ... was teenage girls,
many of whom would grow up to become second-wave feminists. How might the girl
group repertoire, with its focus on romantic fantasies and ladylike behavior, have
functioned as a dialogue that prefigured the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s
Women’s Liberation movement?” (2007: 45). To put it simply, girl groups embody “girl
power” in a way that boy bands cannot because, through girl group music, the world is
privy to the voices of girls. This may seem overly simplistic, and even contradictory to
the fact that most girl-group songs were written by men, but these girl groups still
brought girl culture and “girly” ways of communicating into the spotlight, and this public
acknowledgement of the existence (and even legitimacy) of “girly-ness” was influential
to the second- and third-wave feminist movements. One example that carries through
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1960s girl-group music to the songs of the Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child—and is the
final point made by Warwick in her definition of girl groups (2007: ix)—is “girl talk.”
Warwick argues that the “call-and response form of girl group songs is often understood
as a musical representation of ‘girl talk,’ a conversational method considered central to
girl culture” (2007: x). Later in the book, Warwick connects girl talk to French feminist
Hélène Cixous’s notion of écriture feminine, which “subscribes to the necessity of
connecting female utterance to the body, and ... celebrate[s] the embodied nature of the
voice, seeking to validate women and women’s experiences by insisting that their bodies
be heard in their writing” (2007: 41). Warwick argues that “[s]inging—even recorded
singing—is valuable for exploring these ideas, because through this medium, utterance is
part and parcel of flesh” (2007: 41). The very fact that these songs (and dances, in live
performances) are expressed through the female body opens them up to feminist potential
that songs sung by men can never possess; “girl talk” performed by women, even when
written by men, can be understood as a celebration of women’s bodies and women’s
methods of communicating.7
This “girl talk” is evident in the Spice Girls’ first single “Wannabe” (1996),
where, in the chorus, one girl sings, “Yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really
want,” and the other girls respond, “So tell me what you want, what you really, really
want,” and the first girl answers, “I really, really, really want a zig-a-zig-ahhh.” The
nonsensical nature of the lyrics makes no difference; the song still comes across as a girl
Obviously, not every utterance from a woman’s body is wholly and non-negotiably
feminist, but the movement of women’s communication from existing solely in the
private sphere to being in the spotlight of the public sphere—and this is different from
women adopting men’s methods of communication to participate in the public sphere—is
hugely significant.
7
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discussing her desires with her friends. The primacy of female friendship is solidified in
this song with the repeated lines sung by all the girls together: “If you wanna be my
lover, you gotta get with my friends / Make it last forever, friendship never ends.” While
the song is still about finding a boyfriend, female bonding is represented as more
important, and the girls make it clear that no boy is worth losing their friends over. Boy
band songs, on the other hand, consistently put romantic relationships first; their songs
repeatedly promise to abandon their male friends to make a girl happy and criticize men
who do not do this (e.g. the Backstreet Boys’ “All I Have to Give” (1998), *Nsync’s
“Girlfriend” (2002)) and rarely, if ever, mention the girl’s friends—unless it is a male
friend that the boys are jealous of.
Boys cannot participate in “girl talk,” and there is no “boy talk” equivalent,
except perhaps explicit conversations about their sexual exploits with girls.8 Excessive
male bonding and male homosociality is read as queer much more quickly than female
homosociality. For example, Warwick discusses a girl group song called “I’d Much
Rather Be With the Girls,” which was originally “written by Keith Richards and Rolling
Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham as ‘I’d Much Rather Be with the Boys,’ but the
band decided not to release it themselves, perhaps because the unabashed celebration of
homosociality seemed too risky for a group determined to assert their identity as sexually
dangerous bad boys” (Warwick 2007: 201). And while boy bands steered clear of lyrics
that celebrated homosociality, the relationships between the boys within the groups,
which were discussed at length in preteen magazines such as Bop and Tiger Beat and in
8
This overt heterosexuality within the homosocial space of the rock band is something I
wish to return to.
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books about the boy bands, did resemble boyish homosocial relationships, and this played
a large role in creating the queer or girlish masculinity of boy bands.
Specifically, I want to look at the example of the Backstreet Boys a potential site
of “queer temporality” or “queer time.” Judith Halberstam describes queer temporalities
as “queer,” deviant or “backwards” experiences of linear sexual development (2005). The
homosociality of the aptly named “boy” band freezes the desires and relationships of
these “boys,” who are, in actuality, adult men, in what Jeffrey P. Dennis calls the
“carefree homosocial Eden” of boyhood, which men are expected to abandon once they
discover the “opposite sex” (2002). Marketed almost exclusively to a barely pubescent
audience, boy bands embody what Halberstam calls “the fantasy of perpetual youth,” or a
“preadult” sexuality (2005). Halberstam uses the concept of queer time to discuss boy
band fandom, but I want to use the concept to discuss the representation of the boy bands
themselves. Boy bands profess romantic feelings for the “opposite sex,” but their
exclusively same-sex environment suggests a lack of commitment to heterosexuality,
thus, on the one hand, offering a “safe,” non-penetrative sexuality to young fans and their
parents and, on the other hand, inviting homoerotic readings, which is what I want to
focus on. Specifically, I am looking at the homosocial relationship between Backstreet
Boys Brian Littrell and Nick Carter, nicknamed “Frick and Frack” due to their close
friendship.
While Carter and Littrell have been friends since they met in the early 1990s, and
are still friends today, as far as I know, I am focusing on how their friendship was
portrayed during the peak of the Backstreet Boys’ fame, between the years of 1997 and
2001, or when Carter was between the ages of 17 and 21 and Littrell was between the
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ages of 22 and 26. Pre-teen magazines, as well as the numerous books that were
published about the boys during this period, were littered with images and stories about
the group as a whole, but they also often featured images of Littrell and Carter alone,
goofing around, often physically touching one another, play-fighting or playing sports.
These images were accompanied by stories about how close the boys were, despite their
five-year age difference. For example, Sherri Rifkin, in her 1998 book titled Givin’ It
Their All: The Backstreet Boys Rise to the Top, describes the relationship between Carter
and Littrell as “very close” (1998: 114). She writes that the “two of them can also be very
competitive, especially when it comes to sports, particularly basketball, which is the
boys’ favourite” (1998: 114). However, she adds that Carter does not like losing to
Littrell, so like a good big brother, Littrell lets Carter win a lot. Additionally, Rifkin
comments that the pair always shares a hotel room while they are on tour (1998: 114)—it
was often reported in magazines like Bop and Tiger Beat that Littrell and Carter kept the
others awake by playing video games and joking around all night long.
Rifkin’s book demonstrates a number of things about the ways in which the boys’
friendship was marketed to their fans. First, the boy-ish-ness of their relationship is
emphasized, specifically Carter’s boyishness. They are portrayed as brothers, playing
around, or “horsing around,” even. Sharing a hotel room alone is not sexually
suggestive—these are boys, having a slumber party. It is as if their relationship was
frozen in time. Carter pouts when he does not win, and they would both rather stay up all
night playing video games and wrestling than sleep. Second, their relationship is
construed as a mentorship, with Littrell discussing serious topics with Carter and teaching
him how to be an adult and a “better man.” However, it is also common knowledge
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amongst the Backstreet Boys’ fans that Littrell is a devout Christian, so these lessons
about becoming a “better man” likely have nothing to do with being sexually active,
despite the boys’ ages. Third, the pair is separated from the larger group. This is crucial
because I want to discuss here not only why the homosocial bonds within boy bands were
important in creating the balance between homoeroticism and “safe” heterosexual
masculinity, but why Littrell and Carter’s was emphasized specifically. And Littrell’s
wholesome Christian image definitely was a large part of that.
The focus on Carter was necessary. As the youngest member of the group, and as
“the cute one,” he was the most boyish and unthreatening, guaranteed to be the most
popular with young girls, who perhaps had not developed a taste for the more manly
appearance of the eldest member of the group, Kevin Richardson, who was popular
primarily with the mothers of fans. Additionally, as the most androgynous-looking
Backstreet Boy, Nick was also the most popular with queer teen boys, a point that I will
return to in a moment. While I will not go so far as to suggest that Littrell and Carter’s
friendship was nothing more than a marketing ploy, I do want to argue that it was
emphasized due to its marketability, which is directly related to its preadult, preheterosexual nature.
While Nick is closest in age to fellow Backstreet Boy A.J McLean, McLean was
the tattooed and pierced bad boy who suffered from an alcohol addiction—definitely not
the kind of friendship to market to 12-year-old girls. Howie Dorough, on the other hand,
was the “Latin lover,” and a friendship with him would definitely not quell parents’ fears
of hyperheterosexualization, which Gayle Wald argues was a very big concern for
parents of pre-teen girls in the 1990s (2002: 14). And the aforementioned Kevin
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Richardson is nine years older than Carter, which would make a close friendship between
the two when Carter was a teenager seem questionable. In fact, pairing Carter and
Richardson was extremely popular in slash fan fiction about the Boys—that is,
homoerotic stories about the boys written by fans—so the decision not to publicize such a
relationship was likely wise, unless they were aiming for hyperhomosexualization.
Perhaps Richardson’s overtly masculine appearance swung too far in the opposite
direction. Littrell, however, had a wholesome image, was openly religious, wrote songs
about his mother and enjoyed pulling childish pranks. The pair were “safely”
heterosexual. They were non-threatening to the parents of pubescent girls, but their
lyrics—not to mention Brian’s religious stance—were still reassuringly heterosexual, for
the most part.
However, there are still many obvious ways that this relationship could be
understood as queer—particularly within the context of the 1990s. Jeffrey P. Dennis, in
his essay “The Heterosexualization of Boyhood,” argues that in the era after the gay
rights movement and the AIDS crisis, young boys were forced to identify as heterosexual
much earlier in life, as to quell any suspicions that their homosocial childhood
relationships might become homosexual:
In the products of mass culture, male adolescents are not only heterosexual, but
absurdly eager; undesiring, minimally desiring, desiring within reasonable limits
is not allowed. They participate in sports, enroll in classes, volunteer for charities,
and apply for college for no other reason than to meet girls. They lapse into
jammering idiocy when a girl looks at them, hand over the keys to the family car
in exchange for a kiss, agree to fight tigers or jump out of airplanes on the off
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chance that a girl might be impressed. When Dad hears of the latest mishap, he
need only recall his own adolescence and ask, with a paternal chuckle, ‘What’s
her name?’ (Dennis 2002: 214).
Dennis argues that in the 1990s, all homosocial relationships between boys evoked the
question, “Do you like girls or boys?” and thus, to deter this line of questioning, boys
“must begin their quest for heterosexual orgasm at birth” (2002: 216). Regardless of
Littrell and Carter’s sexual innocence (which, in and of itself, is highly suspect, due to
their ages and their celebrity status), any overt celebration of their relationship—if it does
not revolve around girls, that is—can be, and likely will be, read as gay. They are
described as “playmates” who enjoy “horsing around” all night long alone in a hotel
room, and they are often pictured touching and hugging one another. Additionally,
Littrell and Carter often sing the lead parts in many of the Backstreet Boys’ love songs,
alternating verses and making it sound like the two are singing to one another, as opposed
to a female love interest.
For example, in the song “As Long As You Love Me” (1998), Carter begins the
song with a verse professing his love to an ambiguous “you.” After the chorus, Littrell
responds with the second verse, where he also professes his unconditional love for “you.”
And then Littrell continues, after another chorus, “I’ve tried to hide it so that no one
knows / But I guess it shows / When you look into my eyes / What you did and where
you’re coming from / I don’t care / As long as you love me, baby.” Gendered pronouns
are avoided here, and the word “you,” as I have mentioned, is used repeatedly,
emphasizing the possibility of the song as a conversation between the two boys. Littrell
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even mentions attempting, in the part that I read, to hide his feelings for the “you” in the
song, so that “no one knows,” indicating that perhaps this is a closeted love affair.
Daryl Jamieson, in his essay “Marketing Androgyny: The Evolution of the
Backstreet Boys,” describes how this queer relationship between Carter and Littrell is
reflected in the music as well as the lyrics:
The first four measures are synthesised treble (i.e. in the register in which females
sing; feminine) tones that move solely on beats one and two, holding chords over
beats three and four. This creates a feeling of hesitancy, of stasis and
incompleteness, which represents the singer alone, without love. In the second half
of the introduction, the previous material is repeated verbatim while a synthesised
guitar in a lower register (i.e. the register in which males sing; masculine) fills in
beats three and four, thus completing the sound, and removing the static effect. The
music now has momentum, an energy to it, and this new drive has come from the
union of the feminine and masculine registers.... So far, this is a fairly traditional
male- female situation, hardly original, and not at all queer. But when this material
returns at the end of the first verse, as the backing for the chorus, what is notable is
that only the feminine voice is used, and not the masculine guitar voice. After a
verse in which a confused young protagonist—Nick—pours out his soul, the chorus
is accompanied by the hesitant, static, drum-less, feminine theme, thus associating
Nick with the feminine theme which needs the masculine to complete it.... Just
before the final chorus, the drum and voices stop for a four-measure recapitulation
of the introductory synthesizer/guitar phrase. It is a reminder at the end of the piece
of the beginning, of how the tentative, ‘feminine’ synthesizer (Nick) has been made
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whole by the stronger, ‘masculine’ guitar sound (Brian). (Jamieson 2007: 253-254).
Thus, with the lyrics and music combined, “As Long As You Love Me” has a very strong
queer subtext. And as Jamieson also notes, “[t]he fact that this is a love song which only
two singers of the five sing, that no gendered pronouns are used at all, and that we know
(from extramusical sources) that Brian and Nick had a very close friendship, adds to the
suspicion that this gay relationship is being consciously implied by [songwriter Max]
Martin” (2007: 254). However, in order to maintain mainstream popularity, particularly
with young girls and their parents, it is crucial that most people do not interpret the song
as a queer romance.
Jamieson claims that “only people who search for queer meanings will interpret this
song as a gay love duet. Most will hear it as a love song addressed by the Boys to the
listener alone. Gay boys can interpret it one way, young girls (and their parents) can
interpret it in a completely different way; everyone is pleased, and no one is offended”
(2007: 254). Consumers are invited to read boy bands’ songs or videos as queer if they
are so inclined, but, as Backstreet Boy Howie Dorough emphasizes, this is only
acceptable as long as “[the gay male fans] know we all, you know, date girls” (qtd. in
Wald 2002: 33). Reading these songs and videos as queer is always positioned as what
Stuart Hall would call an “oppositional reading” (1980)—as opposed to a reading of
these texts as expressions “of (heterosexual) ‘puppy love’” (Wald 2002: 32). Those who
were not already “orientated” in a way that would “direct” them towards a queer reading
would not uncover the queerness, thus queer desire is positioned as a “deviation” from
the intended message, whereas heterosexual desire is “neutral” (Ahmed 2006)—or, to use
Hall’s language, “dominant” or “preferred.” However, I want to suggest that reading boy
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bands as queer is less the result of an oppositional reading and more of a “sidelong
glance” at the material being presented.9
Sara Ahmed, in her book Queer Phenomenology, approaches the concept of sexual
orientation and queerness from a phenomenological perspective, arguing that “[s]pace
acquires ‘direction’ through how bodies inhabit it, just as bodies acquire direction in this
inhabitance” (Ahmed 2006: 12). In other words, spaces are defined and created by the
paths taken by people within the space, just as these paths within the space define and
create the people who take them. This concept of direction is inextricably tied to the
concept of “straightness,” and “[t]o go directly is to follow a line without a detour,
without mediation. Within the concept of direction is a concept of ‘straightness.’ To
follow a line might be a way a becoming straight, by not deviating at any point” (Ahmed
2006: 16). Thus, Ahmed argues, “[i]n the case of sexual orientation, it is not simply that
we have it. To become straight means that we not only have to turn toward the objects
that are given to us by heterosexual culture, but also that we must ‘turn away’ from
objects that take us off this line. The queer subject within straight culture hence deviates
and is made socially present as a deviant” (Ahmed 2006: 21). To view boy bands as
possessing a queer masculinity, however, is not necessarily “deviant.” It is not “straight”
either, but it does not involve a complete “turning away” from objects of heterosexual
desire for either the boy band or the viewer (fan/critic/scholar/etc.). For example, Nick
Carter’s youthful androgyny may create a queer image for him—and he may be aware of
9
When I was at at the 2012 Popular Culture Association of Canada Conference, a woman
presenting on slash fan art described fans’ queer reading of the relationship between Sam
and Dean Winchester in the television series Supernatural as a “sidelong glance” during
the question period, and I am adopting her phrasing here because I think it applies to boy
bands as well.
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this image10—but that obviously does not mean that Carter cannot be heterosexual in
“real” life. And young women may interpret the relationships between boy-band
members as queer, and may even fantasize about romantic and sexual encounters
between these boys (and publish these fantasies online in the form of slash fan fiction),
but this “queering” of boy bands does not mean that these girls must “turn away” from
boy bands as objects of their own straight desire. While gay male fans are queer subjects
that do “turn away” from objects that keep them on the straight line, many who
participate in this queer reading of boy bands are not queer subjects and thus have not
completely deviated from the straight line nor have they engaged in a completely
oppositional reading—as I said, it is more of a sidelong glance.
As I mentioned earlier, queerness is not necessarily the presence of homosexual
desire, but the presence of “nonnormative logics and organization of community, sexual
identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (Halberstam 2005: 6), and
“hegemonic heterosexuality is often reified to demonstrate not heterosexual desire but the
lack of homosexual desire (Dennis 2002: 214). If the boys had “discovered” girls, or were
more specific about the object of the “you” in their love songs, their queerness would be
erased. Littrell and Carter’s refusal to participate in the “discovery of girls,” then,
functions to desexualize them, but it also marks their homosocial relationship with the
potential of the homoerotic—and, more specifically, it marks Carter with the potential of
the homoerotic.
Littrell’s Christianity, his age and his more manly appearance and voice distance
him from queer readings. This may seem antithetical—he is an equal participant in the
10
And it is rather clear that he was aware of this image, as he appeared on the cover of
XY magazine, a now-defunct publication for queer teen boys.
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relationship with Carter, and is consistently paired with Carter socially and vocally. But
Littrell always assumes the masculine role, either as the mentor or as the lower, stronger
voice in the song. While Littrell, like the rest of the boys, still inhabits homosocial queer
time, his inability to perform boyish innocence as Carter can removes him from being the
focus of the homoerotic readings. As I mentioned earlier, it was Carter’s youthful and
androgynous appearance and voice that made him popular with queer teen boys, and his
prolonged boyhood is what made him open to queer interpretations. Halberstam argues
that queerness is often experienced as a “stretched-out adolescence” (2005: 153), that
queerness is the belief that the future “can be imagined according to logics that lie outside
of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction,
and death” (Halberstam 2005: 2). As long as Carter resembles a boy, not a man, and puts
off the “discovery of girls,” he can be understood as queer, regardless of the fact that he
does not “discover” boys either. It is interesting to note here, as Daryl Jamieson does, that
the Boys’ fame declines rapidly after Carter gains weight in his twenties, making him
appear more manly, and begins dating women (2007: 257).
While this homosocial bonding is apparent in girl groups—and in the Spice Girls’
“girl power” mantra specifically—it signifies quite differently when it occurs within a
group of boys. Female friendships have been championed since second-wave feminism as
providing avenues for girls and women to explore their own voices and create
communities centred on issues—political or otherwise—that are specific to women, and
depictions of these strong bonds have become commonplace in popular culture (e.g. the
Spice Girls, Sex and the City, etc.) However, as Jeffrey P. Dennis describes, male
friendships took on a new meaning at the end of the twentieth century; as gay culture
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became more visible, heterosexual male culture moved away from depictions of
affectionate male homosocial bonds. The childishness of the relationships between boy
band members gave boy bands some leeway in this respect, but it only takes a sidelong
glance to read these relationships as queer.
2.2 “No Strings Attached”? Puppets, Puppet Masters and the Tin Pan Alley
Formula
Warwick describes girl groups as all having “three to five adolescent female
singers who seem to articulate highly personal sentiments and concerns, but each has also
been regarded as a group of puppets masterminded by some behind-the-scenes Svengali”
(2007: 8). I want to return to this idea of individual personalities within the groups in a
moment, but here I want to focus on this image of the groups as “puppets masterminded
by some behind-the-scenes Svengali” and how this affected the perceived homosociality
of the groups—that is, how their homosocial relationships were perceived by fans and
critics, not how they actually were, as we, for the most part, are not privy to that
information.
In her discussion of Phil Spector and his relationship to the 1960s girl groups,
Warwick provides a Marxist feminist analysis of the pop music industry at that time:
Whether the producer considers himself (and I use a male pronoun advisedly) to
be a collaborator or an auteur, he is generally believed to contribute usefully to a
recording session in light of his ability to hear the record as a whole because of
his greater distance from the music-making. This detachment, impossible for
musicians to achieve, purportedly allows for a more sophisticated understanding
of how best to prioritize sonic elements and fit the various parts together. In a
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Marxist feminist analysis, however, the person occupying this role is far removed
from the actual production of music. An examination of the material conditions of
recording shows the musicians making the sounds documented in the recording
process as the producers, whereas those running the recording session are in
positions analogous to overseers in factories, or patriarchs whose wives’ bodies
are ‘instruments of production in pregnancy, giving birth or lactation.’ (2007: 94)
Spector, Fuller and Pearlman all functioned as these “overseers” or “patriarchs,” ensuring
that the products of the girl groups and boy bands labour become “alien objects” to the
singers. To put it in Marx’s terms, because “the product of labour does not belong to the
worker ... it confronts him as an alien power, [and] this can only be because it belongs to
some other man than the worker” (Marx qtd. in Warwick 2007: 103; emphasis in
original). Because their songs do not belong to them, despite the fact that they perform
them, girl groups and boy bands (as well as many other pop stars) tend to be viewed by
fans and critics alike as puppets, as Warwick says, and this creates a submissive or weak
image for the musicians. *Nsync’s “Bye Bye Bye” video (2000) even opens with the
boys on a stage attached to puppet strings being controlled by a giant young woman—
obviously the dominant message here is that the boys are being controlled by a
manipulative and cruel girlfriend (to whom they must say “bye bye bye”), but the image
can be applied to the boys’ careers as well. The song appeared on *Nsync’s second
album—their first without Pearlman—and was titled No Strings Attached, which can
again be read as a reference to their controlled careers.
Journalists approach the “boy band story” as a story of business success, rather
than musical talent; for example, the title of Bruce Handy and Timothy Roche’s article in
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Time magazine that I mentioned earlier is “Big Poppa’s Bubble Gum Machine” and the
subtitle reads: “Boys who can sing and dance and look supercute! It's an old formula, and
it still drives girls crazy—just ask Svengali Louis (‘Big Poppa’) Pearlman” (Handy and
Roche 1999). The article opens with condescending and bitingly sarcastic advice for the
aspiring teen idol:
Advice for the modern teen idol: there's more to it than just cashing royalty
checks and autographing training bras. There are difficult issues that must be
faced. For instance, some toy company may want to measure your face so that it
can manufacture dolls with your likeness. You could make a lot of money selling
them to your youngest fans, but then your older fans—the 12- and 13-year-olds—
would think you're babyish and move on to Hanson. And then there's all the
choreography you have to remember while you're trying to look as yummy as
possible. And the whole goatee-or-non-goatee dilemma. And the fact that your
manager keeps insisting you enter your hotels through the front door to keep the
fans at the police barricades happy. It's a hard row to hoe for the turn-of-thecentury dreamboat. (Handy and Roche 1999)
According to these journalists, being a male teen idol requires no talent or actual
brainpower (these “boys” can barely decide whether or not to grow facial hair!).
This perspective was validated in many ways by the ABC-produced reality
television show Making the Band, in which Pearlman assembled a group of singing,
dancing men in their late teens and early twenties in Orlando, Florida (boy band
headquarters) to battle it out for a spot in Pearlman’s new five-piece boy band. In the first
episode, the audience is shown auditions from all over the United States. Diverging from
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Pearlman’s boy-band formula is not encouraged—if any contestants did, their clips were
not shown on television. There is, instead, clip after clip of young men performing the
same few *Nsync songs, and, in-between auditions, gushing about their experiences at
Backstreet Boys and *Nsync concerts. As fans, the men are already positioned as
submissive to Pearlman’s business model (they fell for his marketing ploys!) and as
queer, because, according to debates on the Internet, it is doubtful “whether male fans can
be straight if they derive pleasure from a band that is so obviously ‘gay’” (Wald 2002:
30). Additionally, many of the men admit they cannot dance well, but this is not treated
as a major problem; in the next round a choreographer remedies their lack of talent. All
that Pearlman and the other judges seem to be concerned with is the boys’ image and
whether they can harmonize with each other. Tellingly, there is a clip in the first episode
of a tall, blond contestant named Ashley Parker Angel (who, in fact, does make the band)
wondering if there will be girls in the audience during one of their first performances,
because, if there are, he will be sure to flirt a little bit. Clearly he understands what
Pearlman wants and is willing to play right into his hands.
This top-down relationship played a significant role in making the homosocial
environment of the boy band a queer one. First, as Gayle Wald in her essay “‘I Want It
That Way’: Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands” argues, “Big Poppa”
Pearlman functioned as “an implicitly homosexualizing ‘Daddy’ figure” (2002: 11)—
Vanity Fair even published an article claiming that Pearlman sexually assaulted a number
of the young members of his boy bands, although none of these claims have ever been
confirmed (Gray 2008: xxvii-xxviii). What has been confirmed, however, is that
Pearlman was stealing profits from his boy bands. Rolling Stone reported that in May
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1998, the Backstreet Boys filed a lawsuit against Pearlman and his company accusing
them of keeping approximately $10 million in recording and touring revenues since 1993,
while the Boys received $300,000 total (Dunn 1999: 42). *Nsync also eventually got rid
of Pearlman for similar reasons. The boys are positioned here as submissively queer—as
the feminine victim of the homosexual relationship, not the aggressive “top.” This
submissive relationship to Pearlman connects boy bands to “the ‘baggage’ of aggressive
industry sponsorship more readily associated with the Motown ‘girl’ groups of the
1960s” (2002: 11). As Warwick describes, songs that were written for one of these
Motown girl groups could easily be given to another group if the first did not co-operate
or perform it to the producer’s standards—Lance Bass recounts a similar experience of
Pearlman peddling the same song that he claimed to have written to a number of different
aspiring boy bands (Bass 2007: 33-34)—and members of girl groups were often replaced
by other girls (sometimes a cousin or a girl that resembled the original girl in some way)
if they got married, became pregnant, or just simply burned out. Boy bands, like these
1960s girl groups, are, for the most part, interchangeable in this way.11
2.3 Cock Rock, Teenybop Pop and Doo Wop: Homosociality and the Spectacle of
the Male Body
Up until this point in my project, I have not much discussed the physical
performances of homosociality; I have analyzed in depth how the boys’ performances of
homosociality in song lyrics and in media coverage verges on the homoerotic, but I have
not analyzed their performance of homosociality in music videos or on stage. The male
One Direction are often referred to as the “new Backstreet Boys” or the “new *Nsync”
as if the industry simply recycles material, handing down songs from one generation to
the next.
11
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body as spectacle will be the primary focus of the second and final chapter of this project,
and there I will further explore the male body as object of the gaze, drawing on Mulvey’s
famous theory of the male gaze and Hawkins’s and Fast’s more contemporary
interpretations. However, here, in the final section of my first chapter, I want to begin to
look at physical performance and discuss how homosociality/homoeroticism is conveyed
through music video and stage performance, looking at how 1990s boy bands have been
influenced by “cock rock” and doo wop groups. At the beginning of this chapter I quote
Halberstam’s description of a Backstreet Boys’ concert—“As the boys sing together, the
girls scream together, and the whole fragile edifice of heterosexuality could come
tumbling down at any moment if the homosocial structures of desire are made explicit”
(2005: 178)—and here I want to take her analysis a step further, looking not only at the
boys singing together, but also the boys dancing together (and I use the term dancing
rather loosely to mean anything from Mick Jagger’s unrehearsed solo gyrations on stage
to *Nsync’s tightly choreographed group dance numbers).
To begin, I want to return to Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie influential essay
“Rock and Sexuality” where they compare performances of male sexuality in “cock rock”
and “teenybop.” Their argument is that cock rock (e.g. The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin,
etc.) is consumed almost exclusively by boys and men, and the image of male sexuality
in cock rock is one devoid of responsibility and emotion, while the image of male
sexuality in teenybop is about romance and feminine sexuality, and it is consumed almost
exclusively by girls. Many scholars of popular music, including Frith himself, have
criticized this essay for purporting essentialist arguments about gender and the
consumption of music, but the description of cock rock performance in the essay provides
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an excellent jumping-off point for me:
Cock rock performers are aggressive, dominating, and boastful, and they
constantly seek to remind the audience of their prowess, their control. Their
stance is obvious in live shows; male bodies on display, plunging shirts and tight
trousers, a visual emphasis on chest hair and genitals.... Cock rock shows are
explicitly about male sexual performance.... In these performances mikes and
guitars are phallic symbols; the music is loud, rhythmically insistent, built around
techniques of arousal and climax; the lyrics are assertive and arrogant, though the
exact words are less significant than the vocal styles involved, the shouting and
screaming. (Frith and McRobbie 1990: 374)
Frith and McRobbie describe the homosocial environment of the cock rock performance
as “macho.” The collective male experience of rock shows, they argue, is “reminiscent of
football matches and other occasions of male camaraderie—the general atmosphere is
sexually exclusive, its euphoria depends on the absence of women” (1990: 375).
Teenybop performance, on the other hand, depends on the woman as the object of desire;
they argue that the female viewer of a teenybop music video or concert should feel as if
the male pop star is addressing her specifically, while the female viewer of cock rock will
most likely feel alienated. But I want to argue that both of these arguments are
destabilized (although not totally devalued) by the queer potential of the homosociality of
the performance.
In In the Houses of Holy, Fast analyzes the “visual iconography” of Led
Zeppelin’s performance, particularly focusing on Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, and
argues that Frith and McRobbie’s assertion that cock rock performances are macho
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displays of heterosexuality is only one way of interpreting these physical performances.
Frith and McRobbie suggest that the displaying of chest hair with an open shirt (or no
shirt) and male genitalia through tight pants “masculinizes” the performance, because
these are distinctly masculine sexual attributes, but Fast discusses alternate
interpretations. Instead of viewing Robert Plant’s bare chest simply as a macho display,
she argues that the baring of his “belly may signify warmth, and its soft fleshiness ... can
be associated with the feminine/maternal” (Fast 2001: 188). Additionally, she claims that
although the “prominence of Plant’s penis through his jeans ... may be considered a mark
of macho arrogance ... [and the] position and shape of [Jimmy] Page’s guitar—low-slung
around his hips—may turn the instrument into a phallic symbol” (Fast 2001: 186), there
are other possible interpretations. For example, from a female or gay male perspective,
“the visual image of [Page and his guitar can be] erotic to watch,” just as Mick Jagger’s
sensual stroking of the microphone and his rhythmic hip gyrations in tight leather pants
can be as well (2001: 186). For my purposes, it is worth remembering that these men are
performing on stage alongside other men.
For example, I want to look briefly at a live performance of “Satisfaction” by the
Rolling Stones in 1969 from the Gimme Shelter documentary. Mick Jagger’s
“shimmying” around the stage can read as highly erotic (particularly when paired with
the shot of a screaming young woman in the audience), and he gyrates against his
microphone stand, a distinctly phallic object. The camera often zooms in on the faces of
the other band members, who appear to be staring at Jagger as he performs his
masturbatory dance. The camera also often zooms in on Keith Richards’s guitar, which,
like Page’s, is slung low on his hips, positioned right at his pelvis, and his fingers run up
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and down it in his own masturbatory dance as he stares at Jagger. Jagger pauses singing
for Richards’s guitar solo, and as he turns to watch Richards perform, he thrusts out his
pelvis and puts his arm behind his head, putting his entire torso and pelvis on display.
Throughout Richards’s solo, Jagger dances around the stage, twirling quickly, playing
with his scarf, tossing the microphone stand violently back and forth, and clapping while
making aggressive faces at the audience. These displays of sexual “machismo,” if read as
erotic to the viewer, can easily also be understood as homoerotic, since, as Frith and
McRobbie point out, women are excluded from this environment—at least from the stage
environment, because, as I mentioned, a woman is specifically shown enjoying the
performance in the audience.
This is one distinct difference between cock rock and boy band performance—the
audience at a boy band concert is primarily made up of girls and young women.
However, in live (and video) performances of many of their more upbeat songs, boy
bands embrace a similarly erotic performance style that, even though it is performed to
women, blurs the boundary between the homosocial and the homoerotic. For example, on
the Homecoming: Live in Orlando 1998 DVD, the Backstreet Boys perform a medley of
two of their first upbeat singles, “Get Down” and “We’ve Got It Going On.” Unlike the
Stones, none of the Backstreet Boys are holding instruments and their microphones are
even hands-free, so there is nothing for them to hold onto. Their performance begins with
a violent jump and pelvic thrust in unison and they break into a choreographed dance,
with one member of the group breaking off from the dance to sing lead. The boys thrust
and gyrate behind Nick Carter as he sings lead first. Then A.J. McLean takes over, with
his chest bared, and he moves to the front of the stage as the group transitions into the
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chorus and thrusts his hips repeatedly at the girls in the front row and directly into the
camera. At the end of the chorus, the Boys slowly and sensuously gyrate their torsos in
unison, standing close to one another but looking toward the audience. This eroticization
of the all-male group is intentional and directed primarily at the straight female (and gay
male) audience, while, as Frith and McRobbie argue, the cock rock performance is
“macho,” not erotic. But, as Fast argues, and as I do as well, cock rock performance is
erotic, as is boy band performance, and these erotic performances confined within the
homosocial space of the staged can easily be read as queer. However, because the
homosocial space of the boy band is more overtly an erotic performance for their
primarily female audience, less interaction between the boys can take place, lest, as
Halberstam says, “the whole fragile edifice of heterosexuality ... come[s] tumbling down”
(2005: 178). This does not mean interaction it does not happen, of course. Although the
boy bands perform their eroticism primarily in unison, unlike cock rock bands, there is a
certain amount of watching between the boys, such as when the lead singer separates
himself and performs downstage from the others, or when Carter hangs back from the
Boys’ basketball game in the “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)” video, which I will
discuss in detail in the second chapter. Also, in a performance of “Anywhere for You” on
Backstreet Boys: Live in Concert (1998), Brian Littrell ends his first verse by pointing at
Carter, either signaling to him that it was his turn to sing in an older brotherly fashion, or
directing the lyrics “Far beyond the call of love / The sun, the stars, the moon” to Carter.
Their homosocial/homoerotic relationship, which I have discussed at length, also comes
out in physical performance.
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But the eroticism of cock rock bands is not the only influence on the physical
performance of queer homosociality by 1990s boy bands. For instance, there were other
“teenybop” groups such as the Jackson Five (I will discus Michael Jackson’s influence on
boy bands extensively in the next chapter), the Monkees and even the Beatles. Frith and
McRobbie claim that the Beatles were a unique case; they were “a girl’s band ... [but
their] image was ambiguous, neither boys-together aggression nor boy-next-door pathos”
(1990: 383). Their image was softer, more innocent than that of the Rolling Stones (in
fact, the Stones’ manager crafted the band to be the “anti-Beatles”—their rebelliousness
was staged to counteract the relative respectability and childishly silly antics of the
Beatles), and the uniformity of their haircuts and outfits resembled the “matching dresses
worn by members of girl groups” (Warwick 2007: 77). Like the Beatles, to some extent,
and 1960s girl groups, 1990s boy bands wore matching outfits, and often their names
(*Nsync, for example, or the more recent One Direction) imply a sense of unity and
cohesion, whereas cock rock band members are often seen as individual, strong-willed
characters (think of the very public disputes between Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, for
example). While some cock rock bands do adopt costumes or uniforms, such as Angus
Young’s schoolboy uniform or Kiss’s outrageous makeup, they tend to reflect more
individualized, strong and/or controversial positions. But this “teenybop” style of unity
and cohesion is also found in another mid-twentieth century genre of all-male musical
groups: doo-wop. In her analysis of 1960s girl groups, Jacqueline Warwick explores the
development of black sounds in barbershop and doo-wop music, and I want to explore
how the homosociality represented in both of these musical styles, but doo-wop in
particular, were influential to the late-1990s boy band. In addition, I want to argue that
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despite the similarities between the homosocial atmosphere of doo-wop performance and
boy band performance, the all-black environment of doo-wop groups created a drastically
different homosociality from that of the primarily white boy bands I am studying.
First, however, I want to look at the similarities between the physical
homosociality of doo-wop groups and boy bands in performance, focusing on the first
televised performance of doo-wop group Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers singing
“Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” in 1956. The group consists of five young men, and they
are all dressed in matching dress pants, dress shirts and bow ties. While boy bands are
rarely dressed this formally, their outfits do often match. As the group sings, they snap
their fingers and sway their hips in unison. Frankie, the youngest of the group and the
lead singer, stands downstage from the others and sings more directly to the
audience/camera, while the other four harmonize in the background, occasionally singing
the same words as Frankie, but mostly making the nonsensical noises that are associated
with doo-wop: “ahhhh,” “ooooh” or “doooo-wahhh.” They often interact and make eye
contact with one another as they harmonize. While Frankie faces forwards, they stand
almost in a circle, facing one another more than the audience/camera. This turning away
from the audience/camera, as opposed to the Backstreet Boys’ direct performance toward
the audience that I just discussed, does not put the boys’ bodies on erotic display, but it
does emphasize the homosociality of the performance. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers
are all wearing the same outfit, and expressing the same emotions—which appear to be
the emotions of the lead singer, Frankie, as he is separated from the group—but there is
still a camaraderie between the boys. They are singing to the female object of their desire,
but also to each other. Partway through the song, they stop singing and perform a tightly
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choreographed dance in unison. Again, Frankie breaks apart from the other four and
dances in front. They end the song standing clustered together, inches from each other,
facing the camera and singing in harmony. Unlike the cock rock performances, their
movements are in sync with one another; this is not locker-room bragging about sexual
conquests between boys, and it is definitely not a competition. It is a softer
homosociality, more feminized and cohesive.
Like doo-wop (and barbershop), boy band songs rely heavily on these multi-part
harmonies backing up the lead singer, particularly in their ballads—for example,
*Nsync’s “I Drive Myself Crazy” (1998) and “Sailing” (1998), a Christopher Cross
cover. In both *Nsync: The Official Book (1998) and Bass’s Out of Sync (1997), the
group’s ability to harmonize well with one another is emphasized. These boy bands were
not simply made up of four or five guys that could sing well, but of guys that could sing
well together. The only reason Chris Kirkpatrick, the “leader” of *Nsync, hunted down
Lance Bass in Tennessee was because the group specifically needed a strong bass voice
to round out the harmonies. Additionally, on Making the Band (2000), they did not just
choose the five best singers, but tested out different combinations of the twenty-five best
singers until they found the best harmony.12 Thus I want to suggest that the homosociality
of the 1990s boy band blends cock rock sexuality and doo-wop uniformity and
harmonizing to create a softer, but still (homo)erotic, masculinity in performance.
But it is worth noting here the vast differences between social interpretations of
black male homosociality and musical performance versus white male homosociality and
musical performance. While Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, much like the Jackson
12
Interestingly, O-Town is also Pearlman’s most racially diverse boy band, with two men
of colour in the group.
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Five, embrace a clean-cut, all-American image, perhaps to counteract the violent
associations with black male homosociality, the urban origins of doo-wop and barbershop
cannot be ignored.
While barbershop music “is commonly understood as the province of fresh-faced,
white, male singers from Smalltown USA,” Warwick argues, the “sounds we now think
of as barbershop were, however, a significant feature of black quartet singing in the late
nineteenth century” (2007: 18). Doo-wop, which Warwick defines as “a predominantly
male genre of ensemble singing that flourished specifically in urban communities in the
mid- to late 1950s” (2007: 21), emulated the tight harmonies of barbershop, but evolved
into a different image. While barbershop began as black quartets, it became squeakyclean, small-town white music; the “doo wop world,” on the other hand, “was made up of
gangs of adolescent boys roaming inner-city neighborhoods and claiming particular street
corners as territory” (Warwick 2007: 21). For these groups, Warwick argues, “[s]inging
was an important way of bonding and of guarding turf” (2007: 21). At this time, then,
black music created an identity for black men that blended together “tight harmonies,
sweet falsetto voices, slow tempi, and sentimental lyrics ... [with] marauding and
swaggering” and claiming territory (Warwick 2007: 21). Black men, through music,
attempted to create an identity for themselves that included a soft, sensitive side, but was
also grounded in aggressive, upwardly mobile masculinity. This racial identity was
strictly gendered: “while upwardly mobile African American city boys in the 1950s were
able to form doo wop groups and roam the streets in search of adventure, their sisters
were more likely to sing in the school choir and to harmonize behind closed doors at
home” (Warwick 2007: 24). Throughout this paper, I have consistently mentioned
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Orlando, Florida, as the centre of the boy-band universe, and I have commented on boyband members’ close ties to Disneyworld. Warwick ties the black barbershop quartets
and doo-wop groups strictly to urban spaces—street corners, clubs, and other dangerous
late-night places of the urban underworld. She also ties girl groups, who imitated the
styles of their barbershop and doo-wop brothers, to suburban and home spaces, to “safe”
interior spaces. Location is central to boy bands’ racial and gender identity, and to the
public perception of their homosociality. Pearlman’s boy-band machine was careful to
create an image that moved away from the aggressive, territorial masculinity of urban
spaces—an image adopted by doo-wop groups of the 1950s and 1960s, but also by black
contemporaries of 1990s boy bands. A mainstream hip-hop scene was emerging in North
America as boy bands climbed the charts, with artists such as Jay-Z, DMX, Snoop Dogg,
Lauryn Hill, Outkast and even Will Smith topping the charts as well. These artists
claimed the “street” image of doo-wop groups, but abandoned the vocal style for the most
part, while boy bands claimed the vocal style and abandoned the image. Biographies,
such as Rifkin’s Rise to the Top and Squires’s *Nsync: The Official Book, and magazine
articles about boy bands emphasized their wholesome family values and small-town
backgrounds; many of the boys (e.g. Lance Bass, Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson)
grew up singing in church choirs in the southern States, and many, as young adults,
performed in children’s shows at Disneyworld or on the Disney Channel (e.g. Justin
Timberlake, JC Chasez, Chris Kirkpatrick and Kevin Richardson). Their Orlando-based
girlish sexual innocence and shelteredness is a departure from the urban image of black
music of the second half of the twentieth century.
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This “cleaning up” and “whitewashing” of “dangerous” black music by the white
music industry has been occurring for well over a hundred years. Negus argues that “the
music industry has systematically exploited the music made by black performers,” and
that “the white-dominated industry has been directly responsible for transforming black
forms of expression into a commodity” (1996: 41). Particularly, he argues that shifts in
the music industry in the mid-twentieth century killed the black music and the black
musical identities that were in the process of being created:
[The] rationalization and restricting of the record industry ... gained momentum
during the late 1960s ... [and] ripped apart the connections that were being
established between black musicians, independent black and white businesses and
the black community. In their place it has instituted the ‘conglomerate control of
black music’ in which black artists are forced into adopting a ‘crossover
mentality’ to reach a mass white audience. (Negus 1996: 41)
While many would argue that, on the surface, racial boundaries have been broken down
in all facets of North American life since the 1960s, the integration of people of colour
into white society has crushed the lines of communication within communities of colour;
as Negus argues, “black and Latin artists have been forced away from communicating
with their own communities, and redirected towards a wider white market” (1996: 42).
Black music, to be profitable to the artist, must appeal to a wide audience, not just a
specific group. Negus claims that “the white-dominated industry has instituted the
conglomerate control of black music and ... the pressure to ‘crossover’ (produce music
that moves between different categories, but specifically from the rhythm and blues/urban
charts into the top 40) has forced performers to modify their music to become more
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acceptable to white audiences” (1996: 110). However, if black artists are willing to play
the game, so to speak, they also expose themselves to “theft, diluting and exploitation ...
[of their] musical practices by white artists and the white-dominated industries” (Negus
1996: 110). This is, arguably, what happened during the boy band “phenomenon,”
mirroring what happened when barbershop evolved from black male quartets to clean,
small-town USA, white male quartets. This “whitewashing” shifted the understanding of
homosociality within these groups, moving away from an aggressive, urban group
mentality to a safer, albeit “girlish,” homosociality.
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3. “Doesn’t Matter if You’re Black or White”? The Spectacle of the (Racialized)
Male Performing Body
In the second and final chapter of this project, I will explore how the eroticization
of the male body in boy band performance (particularly in music videos) functioned to
queer the 1990s boy band. The music video of the 1980s and 1990s opened up a new
space to make the male body the object of the gaze—a reversal of Mulvey’s famous
argument that “the straight male is unable to bear the strain of sexual objectification”
(Hawkins 2002: 17). Of course, this was not the first time that the male body had been
made the object of the straight female/gay male gaze. As Fast outlines in In the Houses of
Holy, referring to the stage performances of Led Zeppelin primarily in the 1970s,
“certainly in performances of so much rock music it is the male body that is displayed—
as a symbol of masculine strength and power to male and female spectators and as an
object of erotic desire for female (and probably also male) spectators” (2001: 186).
However, the male body that was displayed in pop music videos of the 1980s and 1990s
was eroticized in a rather different way that invited queer readings more directly.
Both Hawkins and Richard Middleton agree that the music video has led to new
understandings of the physicality of pop—both for the male body and the female body, of
course, but here I will focus on the male body. In his essay “On Male Queering in
Mainstream Pop,” Hawkins describes how “[i]mages of men through the 1980s and into
the 1990s signified a subtle blend of the soft and hard: a chiseled muscularity framed by
beautiful clothes, makeup, and flawless complexion,” and argues that, “[a]bove all, a
greater emphasis fell on narcissistic display that challenged traditional norms of virility
and toughness” (2006: 280-281). In other words, masculinity in pop moved away from
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what men’s bodies could do and toward what men’s bodies looked like. Pessimistically,
this could be understood simply as a marketing ploy—after all, the “metrosexual” man
buys more than the mere “heterosexual” man, in theory—but, in the pop world, this
objectification of the male body opened up important new ways of articulating gender,
sexual and racial identities through the body, particularly in the music video.
Pop music has always been physical—as Middleton argues, the “physicality of
pop ... has been obsessively thematised since the very beginnings of the music” (2001:
219; emphasis in original)—but the music video allows the viewer to locate the feeling
and movement of a song in the star, “whose person seems to embody the feelings the
music expresses, and whose gestures both incite and stand for the corporeal responses of
fans, through dance and in other ways” (Middleton 2001: 219). But the star’s body in a
music video is, “above all, a gendered body ... [and gender in pop music is] defined not
by a binary ‘cut’ but as mutually constitutive, giving rise to discursive interplay, multiple
gender histories and varied possibilities for musico-erotic pleasure” (Middleton 2001:
221). Here I want to argue that the objectification of the male body in boy band videos
opens up “varied possibilities for musico-erotic pleasure” by playing on different
histories and interpretations of the gendered and racialized performing body.
The queer masculinity of these primarily all-white boy bands is distinctly physical
and distinctly racialized. Many boy bands cited black pop music groups from the late
1980s and early 1990s, such as Boyz II Men and New Edition, as their inspiration. For
example, Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys asserted, “We’d like people to look at
us like Boyz II Men or New Edition, only we’re white,” and Jeff Timmons of 98 Degrees
commented, “It’s curious to me that people see Backstreet Boys when they look at us,
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and not Boyz II Men or BLACKstreet or Dru Hill” (qtd. in Wald 2002: 13). And in
*Nsync: The Official Book, numerous comparisons are made between Michael Jackson
and *Nsync. At the very beginning of the book the author writes, “*Nsync say they’re
just a bunch of regular guys. Regular guys who can blend vocal harmonies to perfection.
Ordinary Joes whose moves rival Michael Jackson. Guys next door who just happen to be
taking the music world by storm” (Squires 1998: 3; emphasis added). The Backstreet
Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” (1998) video was also clearly inspired by
Jackson’s “Thriller” (1983). And Jackson even performed “Pop” with *Nsync at the 2001
MTV Video Music Awards. *Nsync’s choreographer, Wade Robson, actually won a
Michael Jackson dance contest and took lessons from Jackson himself, and the group’s
dance moves resembled Jackson’s quite closely.
Despite these overt ties to black pop musicians, Gayle Wald argues that the
“whiteness” of mid- to late-1990s boy bands is crucial to their commercial success as
sexually ambiguous pop stars. While their “emulation of African American male vocal
groups [is] a source of musical authenticity,” in order to remain sexually “safe” and
therefore accessible to girls, young women and young gay men, boy bands had to
distance themselves “from the more sexually frank and staunchly heterosexual lyrics,
dance moves, and vocalization of the very black vocal groups they tout as models” (Wald
2002: 12). As Gayle Wald argues, “strategies of negotiating male gender and sexuality
are profoundly raced, consistent with the long history of the spectacularization of African
American men … as bodies inscribed by racial difference, and thereby subject both to
sexual fetishization and heightened state (police) scrutiny” (2002: 19). However, the
spectacle of the black male body in pop music underwent significant changes in the
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1980s and 1990s, and I want to look here at how Michael Jackson’s embodiment of black
masculinity in his music videos—and the “Black and White” and “Thriller”’ videos in
particular—influenced the queer eroticization of the male body in boy bands.
3.1 Crossing Over, Dancing and the Spectacle of the Male Body
Kobena Mercer, in his analysis of Michael Jackson’s music video for the song
“Thriller,” claims that “Jackson not only questions dominant stereotypes of black
masculinity, but also gracefully steps outside the existing range of ‘types’ of black men”
(1993: 92). However, just because Jackson creates a “new” black masculinity does not
mean he is removed from the tradition of black music. As Barry Shank describes in his
essay “From Rice to Ice: The Face of Race in Rock and Pop,” race is central to all pop
music and cannot be removed:
In all forms of popular music since minstrelsy, racial identity has been asserted,
defended, negotiated and denied. The musical signatures of racial identity
undergo constant transformation as the dialogic renegotiation of racial difference
stimulates the production of new forms. The history of racial segregation in the
United States shaped the creation of the music industry and left us with a
fractured soundscape of racially distinguished musical traditions. Continuing
racially based social inequality increases the intensity with which racial meanings
in rock and pop are scrutinised, analysed, internalised or rejected. While some
scholars have argued against the validity of terms like ‘black music,’ ‘AfricanAmerican music,’ or ‘white music,’ insisting that all current popular musical
traditions share traits derived from both Europe and Africa, there can be no
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denying that the interrogation of race and racial difference—whiteness as well as
blackness—lies at the core of rock and pop. (Shank 2001: 257)
In other words, although race means different things to different groups of people, its
impact on pop music—both its producers and its consumers—is profound and cannot be
ignored.
Whiteness is associated with technological, social and cultural progression in
music, with the creation of new methods and styles. Indeed, it was the invention of the
electronic microphone that allowed Frank Sinatra to connect more intimately with his
female fans, and the invention of the television that introduced girls and young women to
Elvis’s pelvis, the adorable haircuts of John, Paul, George and Ringo, and the antics of
the Monkees. White teenybopper pop would not exist without technological innovation.
Blackness, on the other hand, is often associated with “authentic” culture and traditional
methods. This leads to white music being understood as more “clean,” manufactured and
conservative than black music (Elvis’s pelvis notwithstanding), and also as more
“private” and reserved than black music, which, in contrast, is conversational, democratic
and physical (Frith qtd. in Negus 1996: 101-102). Warwick provides the following
anecdote in her book from Fanita James of the all-black 1960s girl group the Blossoms
about the instructions the group received when they backed white artists: “The producers
would tell us; they would say, you know, ‘less vibrato, and sound “white”.’ That’s
exactly what they would say. That meant smoother ... we would all breathe together. Isn’t
it pitiful to say it like this!—but this is what we thought it meant. Besides breathing
together, just a softer, and more conservative sound’” (James qtd. in Warwick 2007:
105). This is the type of music that is family-friendly, appropriate to listen to in suburban
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living rooms, and (eventually) the kind of music that one would listen to privately on
one’s personal stereo or Walkman. Black music, on the other hand, is loud, sexual and
“natural” and should be experienced live in a bar, where one can express him or herself
physically and dance with others.
Obviously, these definitions are not airtight, and the actual lived experiences of
people of colour, either those in the music industry or those consuming the products of
the music industry, complicate these broad, albeit nuanced, classifications. For instance,
Hawkins argues that the technologically progressive and modernized image of white
music contributes to the queering of white male pop artists like Robbie Williams and
Justin Timberlake. The “rhetoric of the marketplace” in the 1980s and 1990s “seemed to
reject conventional masculinity by distancing itself from heteronormativity ... [b]ut this
reshaping-through-style coterie was subtle and, arguably, deceptive and did not
necessarily signify a direct rejection of patriarchy; on the contrary, it was as if the whole
project was an elaborate extension of modernization” (2006: 281). The white male body
became a project of modernization and late capitalism, and its subsequent queer
masculinity was a product of consumer culture and market progress, not of social change
or sexual revolution.
Although many would claim that boy bands’ talent pales in comparison to
Michael Jackson’s—and it is undeniable that Jackson’s career was much more
successful—boy bands, and *Nsync in particular, were consistently compared to Jackson,
and, often, they made, or at least encouraged, these comparisons themselves. The reasons
for desiring this comparison are obvious. As Mercer outlines, Jackson’s LP Thriller
(1982) “sold over 35 million copies worldwide and is said to be the biggest selling LP in
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the history of pop” (1993: 80). By the age of 26, Jackson was “reputed to have amassed a
personal fortune of some 75 million dollars” and “he’s been a star since he was 11”
(Mercer 1993: 80). Mercer even argues that Jackson’s childhood singing group with his
brothers, the Jackson Five, “practically invented the genre of ‘teeny-bopper’ pop” (1993:
80). While I am not sure that I agree completely with that assertion about the origins of
teenybopper music, it is clear that Jackson is one of the leaders in a tradition that boy
bands follow proudly.
But Jackson’s relationship to these all-white boy bands, while perhaps on a
personal level quite friendly, is fraught with tension under the surface. Imitation may be
the sincerest form of flattery, but Jackson struggled throughout his career to carve out a
space in the pop music industry to assert his own black masculinity and to keep it from
being subsumed by the white pop machine. Carol J. Clover, in an analysis of the 1985
television special That’s Dancing!, hosted by Singin’ in the Rain star Gene Kelly and
featuring the dancing talent of Michael Jackson, comments that “in 1983 when ‘Beat It’
was released, and even in 1985 when That’s Dancing! was made, Michael Jackson was
one of very few black stars to have appeared on MTV” (2002: 165). MTV “featured
white artists singing ‘black’ songs ... and/or white artists ... who ... surrounded themselves
with an ‘aura’ of black musicians and dancers,” but black artists were rarely the stars of
the songs and videos: “the new disposition of race on MTV in the 1980s looked
remarkably like the old disposition of race in [Hollywood] of the 1930s and 1940s, with
the brilliant but also token Jackson holding down a position not unlike that once occupied
by Bojangles Robinson” (Clover 2002: 165). As the “ambassador” for his race in
mainstream pop music, Jackson faced many difficult decisions about how to assert his
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racial and sexual identity. Many white Westerners view black men as sexually dangerous,
and, often, black performers have had “to compromise their identity in order to reduce
their sexual threat” (Hawkins 2002: 188). Obviously, Jackson was not the first black man
to be put in this position—Steve Waksman provides an excellent analysis of Jimi
Hendrix’s phallic style of performance and Hendrix’s subsequent ability to appeal to both
white women and white men due to cultural perceptions of black masculinity, i.e. white
men desire black masculinity because it is something wild that they do not possess but
that white women want, and thus “the white man is reduced to a voyeur forced to
recognize his own impotence—unless he is somehow able to possess the black man’s
tools” through colonialism, or, in the case of pop and rock music, through the
commodification of the black male rock star (Waksman 2006: 68-70). But as Hawkins
describes, the 1980s (and, to a certain extent, the 1990s) was a complicated time for
“performing” race in the pop music industry, largely due to the immense popularity of the
music video and the increased visibility of physical performance.
In his analysis of Prince, Hawkins discusses the pressure for black artists to be
“crossover” artists in the 1980s. “Crossover” is a term used “for African-American music
that [has] moved into a commercial, predominantly white mainstream market” (Hawkins
2002: 169). Jackson, alongside Prince, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Tina Turner,
Lionel Richie and Lenny Kravitz, is one of the few black pop artists to reach pop
superstar status. But this “crossover” fame often comes at a price, as black artists were
often encouraged to become—or accused of becoming, depending on who you are talking
to—“whitewashed.” The entire concept of crossover music “inevitably raises questions
linked to institutionalised racism and ethnic particularity,” and, to borrow Hawkins’s
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phrasing, invites “race-based scopophilia” (Hawkins 2001: 159; 169). In other words, the
very fact that artists of colour must cross over into the “real,” white world suggests, quite
clearly, that black communities are peripheral and inferior to the “mainstream.” Increased
pressure is placed on people of colour who occupy space in the mainstream; they are
looked upon because they are different, and because they represent difference. That is,
they are forced to become a “race ambassador,” or someone who speaks for their entire
race.
The music videos of pop musicians such as Jackson and Prince become the
medium through which their racial identity is declared. Here the sounds of their music are
combined with the movements of their bodies (and any other images they choose to
include), even more so than in concert performance because the music video allows
close-up shots and intimate views of the performer’s body, and this marriage between the
performer’s body, the music and the technical production of a recorded song and video
“reveal important elements connected to questions of musical meaning (Hawkins 2002:
160). In particular, dance in crossover music videos plays a crucial role in creating a
racial meaning for the song. Dance is a “dominant feature of all African-American
music,” according to Hawkins, and the relationship between various styles of dance and
“mainstream” white North America has been tumultuous, to say the least. Fears of the
body and dancing “have often managed to combine a distaste for overt expressions of
sexuality, a fear of ‘civilized’ behaviour being corrupted by ‘primitive’ rhythms (usually
overtly racist) and a concern that young people are being manipulated by forms of crowd
psychology” (Negus 1996: 11). Will Straw argues:
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[F]ans of popular music often assume that there are connections between an
individual’s ability to dance and the way that individual moves in other contexts.
Such beliefs are at the heart of popular stereotypes about different social, ethnic or
racial groups and the degree to which they are at ease with their bodies. These
stereotypes include the belief that dancing is at its most sexualised and
uninhibited in non-Anglo-Saxon cultures, such as those of Latin-Americans or
African-Americans.... Dancing within the white middle class has usually veered
between the extremes of elaborate ritual and unbridled individual expression,
from the waltz, square dance and other forms popular in the nineteenth century
through the free-form abandon of hippy dancing in the late 1960s. (2001: 160).
In short, how a person of colour dances has the power to change the way his body is
understood as wild or tamed, sexually aggressive or demure, feminine or masculine. How
the black artist appears, in his music video, to experience his sound “somatically ... is a
matter of profound relevance” (Hawkins 2002: 176), particularly in articulating the black
male body as a gendered or sexed body. Hawkins argues:
[T]he display of dancing, sports and musical performance by black males
emphasises the physicality of the body as part of the ‘struggle’ to reinforce male
identity. However, in spite of the problems attached to machismo, it is interesting
that black male identity can be aligned to the feminine. Lynne Segal notes that
“the assertion of Black manhood is both macho and largely homophobic, and yet
at the same time, as we saw with earlier assertions of Negritude, more in tune
with Western notions of the ‘feminine’ in its claims to physicality, bodily
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awareness, emotional assertiveness, and a greater sense of communality.” (2002:
174)
To put it simply, the very fact that Jackson dances, regardless of his talent, is utterly
different from white boy bands’ imitation of his dancing—but, despite these vast
differences, there are vital connections to be drawn between the black male body as erotic
object and the white male body as erotic object in the MTV-era music video.
The video for Jackson’s single “Black or White” (1991), in particular,
demonstrates how racially loaded the web of pop music history is. The full video is
eleven minutes long and can be broken into two parts: “the cheerful singing part and the
angry dancing part” (Clover 2002: 166). The first part was often the only part shown on
television. Clover describes this first part as “committed to the erasure of racial difference
(‘I’m not going to spend my life being a color’),” while “the second reinstates it with a
vengeance as the black man, under the sign not of the police but of a black panther, does
what, in the American imaginary, black men do on dark and now policeless inner-city
streets: practice violence as an art form” (2002: 166). Clover connects this second part,
with its emphasis on black power (Jackson literally takes the form of a black panther),
racial segregation, dance and violence, to the appropriation of black dance styles by white
dancers such as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in Hollywood film musicals of the early- to
mid-twentieth century. Clover describes the second part of the video as follows:
we move to the street, day gives way to night, vivid color to something like dark
blue and white, fast cutting to longer takes, international flitting about to a single,
focused location, cheer to gritty intensity, racial harmony to black panther, and,
most strikingly, music to silence, or rather to silence punctuated by the natural
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sounds of Jackson’s movements (tapping, panting, hitting things) and a reiterated
scream.... [W]hen the camera pans and brings into view the telltale lamppost, and
when we then see, in closeup, Jackson’s feet stamping in puddles on a street that
at first seemed dry, we recognize the terrain of the [Gene] Kelly classic [Singin’
in the Rain]. The connection is sealed when Jackson interrupts his own dance
routine to tilt his hat forward, hoofer-mode, and indulge a quick Kelly-style tap
sequence. [Then] the dance turns increasingly sexual, as Jackson grabs his crotch
and thrusts his pelvis, and increasingly violent as he takes his ‘umbrella,’ a
crowbar, and starts smashing first car and then store windows. (2002: 166)
Clover cannot definitively say “what Jackson meant by putting his dance in the ‘Singin’
in the Rain’ frame,” but she proposes “that its eruption has all the force of a return of the
repressed, and ... it works to ‘un-cover’ or ‘de-blackface’ Singin’ in the Rain. It obliges us
to ask whether Kelly came by that street corner honorably and to consider what talent
sources might have been behind his ‘curtain’ and, by extension, behind the ‘curtain’ of
the white dance musical in general” (Clover 2002: 166-167; emphasis in original).
Taking Clover’s proposed argument a step further, and to remove it from the terrain of
film musicals, boy bands’ appropriation of Jackson’s style follows from Jackson’s
appropriation of Gene Kelly’s style, which is in turn an appropriation of jazz and rhythm
and blues dance styles of the early twentieth century. Black identity—and specifically
black masculinity here—is asserted and usurped through dance, and Jackson’s anger at
this repeated usurpation is articulated through dance in this video.
Returning to Hawkins’s point about the black male body being at once both
hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine, the “Black or White” video also complicates
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Jackson’s sexual and gender identity. Jackson is at once violent and sexually aggressive,
literally taking the form of a wild animal, destroying cars and storefronts, and repeatedly
grabbing his crotch and thrusting it forwards as if to demonstrate his masculine virility.
And yet his movements are so precise and refined, his clothes fit snugly against his thin
body, and his body emotes yearning, pain and sorrow as he caresses his own skin. His
violence has a feminine tenderness to it. Mercer describes him as “[n]either child nor
man, not clearly either black or white and with an androgynous image that is neither
masculine nor feminine, Jackson’s star-image is a ‘social hieroglyph,’ as Marx said of the
commodity form which demands, yet defies, decoding” (1993: 81). The emulation of
Jackson’s style in boy-band videos works to construct a similar, if less provocative or
scandalous, ambiguity for boy bands, and Jackson’s interrogation of racial appropriation
and whiteness in dance opens up boy-band videos to questions of race and ownership of
the body.
For example, the video for *Nsync’s “Pop” (2001) prompts viewers (again, not all
viewers, but those who are socially positioned to take a “sidelong glance” at the video) to
question the role of the racialized, gendered body in pop music. Like “Black or White,”
“Pop” opens not with the beginning of the song, but with a young person’s relationship
with pop music. Both videos almost seem to be commenting on people’s reaction to pop
music. In “Black or White,” actor George Wendt attempts to punish his son (played by
Macaulay Culkin) for listening to his music too loudly and is literally blown away by the
“power of pop,” and in “Pop,” Justin Timberlake is shown enthusiastically addressing a
young woman in her bedroom through her television, trying to sell her “pop,” a product
that “tastes good, and makes you feel kinda funny—not here (he gestures to his head) or
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down here (he gestures to his crotch), but all up in this area (he gestures to his midsection).” The physicality of pop is emphasized here. It is about the body, not the mind—
but also not necessarily about sex, which does add an element of sexual ambiguity to the
video, i.e. this music is not about heterosexual sex per se, but about enjoying the body in
whichever way you choose.
Most of the video takes place inside what appears to be a dance club, decorated in
the cheesy electro-dance pop-pap style of 1990s television shows YTV’s The Hit List and
MuchMusic’s Electric Circus. There are a number of circular dance floors, all of
different heights and all painted with multi-coloured concentric circles. The boys take
centre stage, singing and performing their choreographed dance routine, backed by a
number of young, attractive male and female back-up dancers. When the video cuts away
from this scene, individual members of *Nsync are shown alone, hanging out in the club,
often being groped by hot girls. So far, this seems like the most stereotypical pop music
video ever. But the video is interspersed with certain shots and elements that seem to
question the role of the body in pop music—and, more specifically, who has ownership
over his own body, and whose body is allowed to perform in the pop music video. In this
song, and throughout their entire final album, *Nsync dabble in hip-hop and “black”
music styles, and in this video the boys participate in many activities that are usually
associated with black music, and these activities are juxtaposed with the stereotypically
white pop elements of the video. The dances the boys perform often include moves
derived from break dancing, an “urban” style of dancing that, much like doo-wop
singing, originated in the black inner-city streets of the United States. The boys are
shown spinning and scratching records, a sound and style that has been adopted by the
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majority of disc jockeys by now, but was, in the early 2000s, directly linked to hip-hop
and rap music. Timberlake, about two-thirds of the way through the song, also comments
that he’s “tired of singing,” and the boys stop singing (much like Jackson halts his music
in “Black or White” to perform his Kelly-esque tap dance) and Timberlake proceeds to
beat box, another sound that is tied to hip-hop and rap music.
It could be argued that all of this is just evidence that *Nsync, like many white
pop music acts before them, rely heavily on black music styles. But I want to suggest that
while they do appropriate these black styles, perhaps more than any other white boy
band, they do so somewhat self-consciously. They, as I have demonstrated, repeatedly
cite Jackson as a huge influence, and have collaborated with him as well as numerous
other black artists and producers in their attempt to move away from pure pop and create
a more hip-hop sound, which Timberlake carried forward into his solo career. Also,
throughout the “Pop” video, *Nsync also question the pop music “machine” in many
ways—Timberlake parodies the selling of pop music as a drug to make your body feel
good, the boys’ outfits repeatedly change as they are dancing as if to point out the
constructedness of their image, the lyrics of the song criticize the pop music industry for
focusing on celebrities instead of the music that people enjoy, and the over-the-top nature
of the video makes it appear more like a pop music video parody rather than a serious
production. Reading this video alongside Jackson’s work, the viewer is led to question:
who has ownership over certain sounds and styles? Do pop artists have ownership over
their own bodies, or are they merely puppets to the celebrity culture machine? These
questions are complicated by the constant reminders in the video that pop music is music
of the body, it is performed through the body and experienced by the body, and yet the
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pop music is not owned by the bodies it is experienced through. The 1990s pop music
body is sexually and racially ambiguous, therefore, because the identity of the music is
not grounded in the “real life” identity of the performer, but in the identities and bodies of
those who have come before him. And these identities and bodies, in the racially
prejudiced Western world, will always be caught up in the constructions, reconstructions,
and deconstructions of blackness and whiteness.
3.2 Androgyny and Queer Monsters in “Thriller” and “Everybody (Backstreet’s
Back)”
While *Nsync is the boy band most explicitly linked to Jackson, I want to look at
the Backstreet Boys’ video for “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” (1998) in comparison to
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (1983). The “Thriller”-esque style of “Everybody,” I argue,
plays a large part in constructing the Backstreet Boys’ queer or sexually ambiguous
image. Mercer argues that Jackson’s racial ambiguity also led to “a sexual ambiguity
bordering on androgyny” (1993: 81), as Jackson tried to move away from the sexually
aggressive, hyper-masculine black male image as well as the hyper-feminine, physical
and emotive black male image. He is described as “a Peter Pan figure” (Mercer 1993:
81), not heterosexual or homosexual but somehow “presexual.” By emulating Jackson’s
“Thriller” style, the Backstreet Boys, and Nick Carter in particular, are able to play with
androgyny, presexuality, masculinity, (homo)eroticization and animality in their music
video performances. Throughout the early career of the Backstreet Boys, Carter was
constructed as the “Peter Pan” of the group. Rifkin’s describes Carter as “seem[ing] to
spend more time on the basketball court or in front of his video games during his free
time than he does taking girls out on the town”—but, she reassures his female fans, “that
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will probably be changing quite soon” (1998: 182). She presents Carter as affectionate,
but still undiscerning about where that affection comes from: “He loves getting hugs,
though, whether from his fans or the other Boys” (Rifkin 1998: 101-102). When she does
comment on Carter’s relationships with girls, he comes across as experienced and sure of
himself as a ten-year-old boy attempting to ask out a girl on the playground at recess:
“When he likes someone, he gets really quiet around her—and almost ignores her!
Sometimes, if he gets too close to the object of his affection, he not only clams up, he
gets a tingly/queasy feeling in his stomach, too” (Rifkin 1998: 106). This is justified
because “Nick was very young when he first became a member of BSB.... None of the
Boys had previously experienced the kind of attention they now get from thousands of
female fans as BSBers, but Nick in particular hadn’t had a lot of experience with girls
before setting out on the road to stardom” (Rifkin 1998: 182). At eighteen, one would
expect most boys to be sexually and physically mature (or at least sexually aware), but,
like Michael Jackson, Carter is no longer a child, but definitely not yet a man. This
presexuality is what allowed for the highly publicized homosocial relationship (fraught
with homoerotic tension) between Carter and Brian Littrell, but it takes on a new
dimension within the spectacle of the music video.
The “Thriller” video is iconic, and the majority of people would easily be able to
draw a connection from that video to “Everybody.” “Thriller” does not begin with the
opening notes of the song, but instead with a narrative that frames the action of the video.
First, the viewer watches Jackson in a horror film, in which he turns into a werewolf, and
then the narrative changes, and Jackson is watching his own horror film on a date with a
girl. The girl is frightened by the movie, so Jackson leaves the theatre with her.
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Gradually, the viewer discovers that the “real” narrative of the film is also a horror story,
and Jackson turns into a zombie, and performs the famous Thriller dance with an entire
group of zombies. “Everybody” also begins with a framing narrative. The Backstreet
Boys’ bus has broken down and they are forced to spend the night in a very creepy castle.
After the boys fall asleep, they each transform into a different monster: Brian Littrell into
a werewolf, Kevin Richardson into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Howie Dorough into
Dracula, A.J. McLean into the “Phantom” from The Phantom of the Opera, and Carter
into a mummy. The viewer follows the individual monster as he travels throughout the
castle during the first part of the video, occasionally interrupted by shots of all of the
boys, accompanied by a throng of back-up dancers, performing a dance that is eerily
reminiscent of the famous Thriller dance in the ballroom of the castle. At the end of the
video, the boys leave the castle, all excitedly talking about the “dream” they had—and
Carter excitedly talks about the girls he dreamt about, but the older boys ignore him as if
he is a pubescent boy who has not yet learned not to discuss his dirty dreams in public—
until they encounter their bus driver, who reveals himself to be a zombie, and all five
boys scream dramatically into the camera.
The video is much sillier and much less frightening than the “Thriller” video, but
the use of animalistic monsters in both is significant. Mercer argues:
Animals are regularly used to signify human attributes, with the wolf, lion, snake
and eagle all understood as signs of male sexuality. Jackson’s subversion to this
symbolism is writ large on the Thriller LP cover. Across the star’s knee lies a
young tiger sub, a brilliant little metaphor for the ambiguity of Jackson’s image as
a black male pop star. This plays on the stars’ ‘man-child’ image and suggests a
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domesticated animality, hinting at menace beneath the cute and cuddly surface.
Jackson’s sexual ambiguity makes a mockery out of the menagerie of received
images of masculinity. (1993: 89)
Jackson’s transformation into a werewolf at the beginning of the video, and then later
into a zombie, is also a subversion of this symbolism. The werewolf, a half-human, halfwolf murderous monster, can also be understood as a sign of male sexuality—a
particularly virile and aggressive male sexuality. It is interesting that Littrell is the
werewolf in the “Everybody” video, as he is perhaps the least sexualized of the group,
but this werewolf is oddly non-violent—Littrell spends the majority of the video backflipping and performing other acrobatic tricks. But it is Carter’s monster that I am most
interested in here, not the other boys’. A mummy is, for all intents and purposes, a type of
zombie, much like the zombie Jackson becomes in “Thriller.” And, Mercer argues,
“[u]nlike the werewolf, the figure of the zombie, the undead corpse, does not represent
sexuality so much as asexuality or anti-sexuality, suggesting the sense of neutral
eroticism” (1993: 89). Unlike Dorough/Dracula (the vampire being another excellent
monstrous metaphor for male sexuality—both heterosexual and homosexual) whose
coffin opens only after it is stroked and licked by three women, Carter emerges from his
coffin alone. It takes three separate tries for Carter to eventually come out of the coffin,
and the camera zooms in on him as if to emphasize his struggle. This focus on Carter’s
laborious “coming out” could be understood as a sign of his struggle with
homosexuality—and certainly, the line of the song where Carter sings, “Am I sexual?”
and the other four boys answer, “Yeahhhhh,” certainly does not help to discourage this
understanding.
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Carter’s dancing throughout the video is distinctly asexual or anti-sexual like his
costume. While the other boys (although not Littrell, as much) stroke their own skin,
move their hips seductively, and dance suggestively with women, Nick’s dancing as a
mummy are borderline silly: he flails his arms about, he moves his face toward the
camera causing it to distort as if he were in a fishbowl, and he does some odd dance that
is a cross between the robot and a zombie walk. At one point, he thrusts his pelvis à la
Jackson or Elvis, but he moves back into the safety of his coffin to perform this move. He
does have two female back-up dancers, but for the most part they mirror the robotic
dance moves he performs. At one point, they turn and stroke his side, but instead of
reciprocating, like Dorough and McLean do with their respective harems of back-up
dancers, he awkwardly wiggles his hips and keeps dancing as before. In the ballroom
scene, all of the other boys have their dress shirts hanging wide open, exposing chiseled
chests, but Carter’s shirt is buttoned, like always,13 and he even has a vest on over top.
Like Jackson informs his date in the “Thriller” video, Carter is “not like [the] other
guys,” prompting viewers to question: “is he homosexual, transsexual or somehow
presexual?” (Mercer 1993: 89).
3.2 “The press be askin’ if I like sodomy / I don’t know, yeah, probably”:
Physicality and Homoeroticism in the Boy Band Video
As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it was not only the image of the
male body as presexual or antisexual that led to sexual ambiguity of boy band videos.
Pop music videos of the 1980s and 1990s embraced a “bricolage of masculinity” and the
It was said that Carter’s mother refused to allow him to be shown topless until he
turned 19, and he would have been 17 or 18 in this video, depending on when it was
actually filmed.
13
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eroticization of the male body created a “the fetishism of maleness” within popular
culture (Hawkins 1997: 120-121). Hawkins argues that “[i]mages of men through the
1980s and into the 1990s signified a subtle blend of the soft and hard: a chiseled
muscularity framed by beautiful clothes, makeup, and flawless complexion” (2006: 280).
This was the birth of the “metrosexual,” the sexually attractive and available (to anyone
young and attractive, regardless of gender) young men who indulges in “feminine”
behaviours (shopping, beauty regiments, etc.) to maintain his appearance. The immense
popularity of boy bands coincided with the mainstreaming of the metrosexual male, and
Paul McDonald, in his essay “Feeling and Fun: Romance, Dance and the Performing
Male Body in the Take That Videos,” argues that “the look at the male in music video
cannot be dissociated from a historical context which has increasingly produced the
eroticised spectacle of the male body as one of the common signifiers of contemporary
consumer culture” (1997: 280-281). That is, while “[m]usic video has routinised the
erotic spectacle of the male body, so that it has become a convention of the music
television performance” (McDonald 1997: 280), one cannot ignore how this “fetishism of
maleness” is the result of the emergence of a new consumer culture focused on the
appearances of young men.
The “erotic spectacle of the male body” in pop music videos is, as Hawkins,
McDonald and Daryl Jamieson argue, one of the primary contributing factors to the
queerness of boy bands. Hawkins makes an important distinction here between queerness
and homosexuality, arguing that “queering makes expressive a space between sex and
sexuality, for queer culture is urban, bold, and postmodern while as the same time it can
be sexually transgressive” (2006: 282). “Queer,” he says, is a term that, in the 1990s
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context, signifies next to nothing, as is “gay” (2006: 286)—in fact, Robbie Williams
(formerly of Take That) was named “a bona fide gay boy” in the November 2004 issue of
Attitude, a popular British gay magazine (qtd. in Hawkins 2006: 284), without actually
ever saying he was gay (the quote in the title of this subsection is from a song of his—by
saying that he “probably” enjoys sodomy, he seems to be suggesting that he would be gay
if the opportunity presented itself). If queerness itself is sexually ambiguous, then queer
codes in music videos at once become easier to manipulate and more difficult to pinpoint.
Hawkins argues:
Accepting that the fetishization of bodies in pop videos produces meanings, we
need to ask how pop performances encode meanings that can be read as queer. At
this point, I am keen to argue that the packaging of desire in music videos does
more than produce pleasure and states of gratification. It externalizes the idea of
spectacle in terms of the discipline it imposes on different gendered bodies. In
brief, music videos provide us with an apparatus for considering the
objectification of men and women in specific social and cultural frames. (2006:
283)
In other words, the eroticization and objectification of the male body (and, as I have
demonstrated, the white male body specifically) in 1990s pop music videos constructs
desire and pleasure in a completely different way than the eroticization and
objectification of the female body in the same time period, or the male or female body in
any other time period. As I have been arguing throughout this entire project, the
queerness of boy bands is historically specific.
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McDonald’s case study of Take That videos (Take That was an early to mid1990s British boy band) demonstrates how “the male body is presented and performs in
ways that do not conform to the construction of phallic power” in boy band videos (1997:
283). He argues that in these videos, “the male body was given to the viewer and acted as
the centre of performance spectacle” (1997: 278), and, not only that, but these male
bodies were not given to the viewer as bodies that do, but “as ... spectacle[s] to be desired
... [as] bodies that feel” (1997: 279). These bodies are “a form of ‘excess’,” partially
because “they amplify meanings which are already present in the lyrics,” but also because
“the exaggerated gestures of the body in these [videos] represent an excess of feeling”
(McDonald 1997: 285); the motions these bodies perform—through dance, narrative
actions, or any other kind of emotive performance (what McDonald would call
“yearning”)—are not necessary actions, but physical representations of words and
feelings for the sake of spectacle. These actions also functioned to advertise these bodies
as sexual objects; often the bodies were only partially clothed, “or appeared in tight
ribbed lycra to show the lines of the body even when clothed,” and were shown dripping
wet. But the queerness of the eroticized spectacle of the male body is not only rooted in
the fact that the objectification of the male body “does not conform to the construction of
phallic power,” but also in the homosocial atmosphere of the boy band video, as I
mentioned earlier in my discussion of Carter and Littrell’s relationship. McDonald argues
that while Take That videos were often read as queer, their contemporaries 3T’s were
often not, because “the potential homoerotic implications of ... [their videos] are therefore
contained by the figure of the woman” (McDonald 1997: 293). That is, the focus of their
videos is on the female love interest. While Take That and the Backstreet Boys, who
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McDonald does not mention (largely due to the date of his essay’s publication), often
feature women in their videos, the women often hover around the group and “the boys
only interact with one another.... Their enjoyment results from the performances of the
other boys ... therefore sanction[ing] male-to-male looking as part of pleasurable
performance” (McDonald 1997: 290).14 The group structure of the boy band allows boy
bands to explore homoerotic performance in even more ways than the solo male artist.
One video that demonstrates how queerness is constructed through the spectacle
of the male body and the homosocial structure of the boy band is the Backstreet Boys’
“Quit Playing Game (With My Heart)” video (1997). The videowas recently named “the
hottest moment in boy band history” by After Elton, a pop culture web site for gay men
(Virtel 2012). The video is one of their very early releases in the United States, and
Jamieson argues that it was the first to really capitalize on the homoerotic potential of the
boy band video. First of all, the “most obvious difference between this video and the four
previous is that only the Boys are in it—there are no women in the video, nor are any
women mentioned in the lyrics of the songs” (Jamieson 2007: 250). Second, Jamieson
describes how Carter is set up as the sexual object of the song—and as we already know,
Carter’s image was much more queer than that of the other boys, and, notably, the release
of this video coincided with Carter appearing on the cover of xy magazine, a magazine
for queer young men, connecting Carter directly to “something unambiguously gay”
(Jamieson 2007: 251):
Nick’s first solo shot is a fuzzy one (which could be meant to imply fantasy or
dreams) which quickly resolves to show him brooding, with his head down and his
14
This trend is repeated in One Direction’s videos for “What Makes You Beautiful” and
“One Thing.”
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blonde hair hanging sensually over his eyes. When he is singing, Nick is usually
shown alone, with the focus going in and out, his head thrown back and his eyes
closed. This is a clear semiotic evocation of sex—in Western culture, through the
indoctrination of Hollywood films, sexual pleasure is often implied by shots like
this one. In a very striking moment, Nick abandons the pseudo-sexual ecstasy for
two words, ‘for you’, where he looks straight at the camera, directly addressing the
viewer and even pointing at them. (2007: 250)
Nick’s body is displaying an excessive of emotion and sexual energy; he is not doing
anything, but he is putting his body on display for the viewer, adding sexually-charged
meaning to the vague romantic lyrics of the song, and directing this physical display right
to the viewer, regardless of the viewer’s gender or sexual orientation. Although, as
Jamieson points out, “there has yet to be any serious queer implications (other than the
underlying homosocial sexual tension), Nick is clearly being set apart as the object of
desire in the band” (2007: 250).
The second half of the video is unequivocally queer—at least to those who are
inclined to take a sidelong glance at it. Jamieson describes it as follows:
Approximately half way through the video, which takes place at night in a sort of
concrete-covered public park, it begins to rain, and the Boys, who hitherto had been
sitting on a step socialising with one another, decide that this would be a good time
to move to the basketball court. So the soaking wet Boys, now in various states of
undress (except for Nick, who remains fully clothed) proceed to congregate and
dance on the basketball court. Except, again, for Nick. Nick is never shown on the
court; he is always on the bleachers watching the other Boys, who never leave the
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court from this point in the video. What is being enacted here, in an abstract way, is
a ‘fear of the locker room’ and ‘fear of sports’ scenario, of the type that keeps many
gay boys from participating in organised sport. Nick sits on the sidelines and
watches the older, mostly shirtless Boys ‘play’ basketball. Regardless of whether or
not he has the ability to play, he does not, because he is afraid of being looked
down upon for being perceived as gay, perception being everything in high school.
No matter how good Nick might be at basketball, he is young, thin, blonde, and
androgynously pretty, therefore he must sit and watch, not participate. Whether he
is watching the ‘game’ or the players is up to the viewers to decide—queer viewers
will likely assume the latter, and straight viewers, if they even consider the
question, the former. (2007: 250)
As McDonald describes, the boys are “active,” but they do not “conform to the
construction of phallic power”; although the four boys are playing basketball, it is
impossible to follow the game at all—what is important is the half-naked rain-soaked
boys in close physical proximity to one another, not whether or not they can play—and
the shots of the game are intermixed with close-up shots of the boys’ faces. Littrell is
often shown singing dramatically to the camera, pointing at the viewer as Carter does,
looking wistfully off-camera, or letting the music wash over him, eyes closed.
Richardson, Dorough and McLean are shown less often, but they also point at the camera
and run their hands seductively through their dripping wet hair—and, in the second half
of the video, there are close-up shots of their undulating, wet, bare torsos.
This video, like the Take That video “Pray” that McDonald analyzes, “the boys
[do] not dramatise a narrative situation but rather a sense of feeling. Their bodies
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[perform] on screen as the indices of desire. By their looking, holding, touching, arching
and stretching, the boys [show] that desire is felt by the body” (McDonald 1997: 279).
This performance of desire disrupts conventional masculinity and heteronormativity by
putting the constructions of masculinity on display; “gendered identities are produced and
performed in forms of doing, and there is no gender identity separable from the
performance” (McDonald 1997: 281), and by drawing attention to the performance of
masculinity in these videos through displays of physical and emotional excess,
masculinity is shown to be just as “made up” and inauthentic as femininity (McDonald
1997: 282). Thus, as Hawkins argues, queer performativity is not so much about being
queer or homosexual, but about
expos[ing] the arbitrariness of gender and its social construction. The ‘self’
creates the ‘other’ when queering is constructed in order to define straightness. In
most pop forms of the late twentieth century, performance is predicated upon a
form of visual display in which the focus falls primarily on gender and sexuality.
Accordingly, it is the body that inscribes politics of representation. Put differently,
the aestheticization of the body is part of politicizing style and expression. This
implies that politics configure narratives that, in turn, allegorize libidinal positions
of desire. Following on from this, representations of queerness, androgyny, and
gayness in pop are inextricably linked to the technical and stylistic properties of
sound that lock into music composition. (Hawkins 2006: 282)
In other words, “queering” in the mainstream white male pop video in the 1990s was
about the “symbolized disruption of gender and sex norms” (Hawkins 2006: 282), about
allowing signifiers of identity to float through the performing body but not reside within
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it. The male body is the spectacle of the boy band video, but it is an unstable spectacle—
it is a masquerade, working at once to queer and to “dehomosexualize,” allowing artists
such as Michael Jackson, Robbie Williams, Nick Carter and Justin Timberlake to be gay
and straight and “presexual” (not to mention black and white) all at once, “because
masquerading is all about constant change and deviation” (Hawkins 2006: 284).
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4. “Which Backstreet Boy is Gay?”15 Concluding Thoughts on the Queerness of Boy
Bands
One of my fellow students in the Cultural Studies and Critical Theory MA
program asked me why, if everyone already used “gay” as a homophobic insult against
1990s boy bands, it was important to study the queer masculinity of boy bands. In other
words, didn’t everyone already think boy bands were gay? And if so, wouldn’t that make
my argument here a moot point? On a basic level, I understand my classmate’s point, and
I hope that throughout this paper I have been able to demonstrate that queer decodings of
boy band songs and videos are not the sole domain of queer male fans. The homophobic
insults directed at these groups were often based in the very same examples that I have
been using throughout this paper. But my aim was not to prove that boy bands are “gay.”
I have not been speaking of queerness simply as homosexual desire, but also as the
absence of normative masculinity and heterosexual development. I have argued that in
the social, political and, most importantly, in the musical context of the 1990s, boy bands
and their producers were able to construct a very specific queer masculinity that appealed
to girls and young women, young gay men, and everyone’s parents through the
manipulation of homosocial spaces and of the eroticizing, objectifying space of the music
video.
From my perspective as a straight female boy band fan, I have taken a sidelong
glance at boy band texts—and the social context of these texts—and throughout this
paper I have demonstrated, drawing queer and feminist theorists such as Judith
15
If nothing else, I hope that you have learned from this project that the next time
someone obnoxiously asks you this question to the tune of “I Want It That Way” (1999),
the correct answer is, “None of them, and all of them, but mostly Nick Carter.”
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Halberstam, Sara Ahmed and Jeffrey P. Dennis and popular music scholars such as Stan
Hawkins, Gayle Wald and Susan Fast, how these texts, and the social interpretations of
these texts, are inextricably connected to pop music texts of the past and to
understandings of normative (and nonnormative) sexuality and gender identity within
specific social contexts. That is, while the queer masculinity of the 1990s boy band was
markedly different from anything that came before, it also relied heavily on everything
that came before, and has influenced everything that has come after.
In the 2010s, British boy bands have begun topping the charts in North America,
and North American boy bands are beginning to re-emerge. Old favourites have started
touring again—Kevin Richardson has recently rejoined the Backstreet Boys and they are
working on a new album and planning a tour—and new groups such as The Wanted, who
have adopted more dance beats into their music, have formed. Many of the elements that
helped construct the queer masculinity I have been discussing here have remained the
same, but new styles are emerging as well. The older groups have had to deal with aging,
marriage, children, and have had to consequently “come out” with their sexuality,
whether it is heterosexuality or homosexuality or something else. Younger groups that
are blending teenybop pop with club or dance music styles have incorporated the
language of heterosexual hook-up culture into their lyrics, and are appealing to older
audiences as a result. But always an element of queerness weaves its way into
understanding of these (primarily) white male bodies, and it is how and why these bodies
signify as queer within the context of their historical moment that has interested me here.
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