With a Nickelodeon series bringing these four together, Big Time Rush was essentially the modern-day Monkees with their goofy antics and good looks. With the help of hitmakers Ricky Reed and Teddy Geiger, the guys switched their rowdy electric guitar for a summery Nile Rodgers-style riff and gang-vocal harmonies that had everyone floating to the disco dancefloor.
5 Seconds of Summer, "Girls Talk Boys" (2016)ĥ Seconds of Summer already won our hearts with their modern take on pop-punk, but 2016’s “Girls Talk Boys” (from the soundtrack to the Ghostbusters remake, of all things) was a refreshing dive into funk. The Chipmunks, "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)" (1958)ī2K reshaped the concept of the black boy band in the ‘00s with a sound that leaned more toward TRL-era pop than the standard R&B of the time, beginning with their catchy '01 debut single “Uh Huh.” The buzzy synths, lead singer Omarion’s sensual vocals, their feathery harmonies and that booty-popping bassline made the track one of the biggest highlights of the band’s short-lived career.
(To see us hash out the "Are They a Boy Band?" arguments for all three of these cases and several others, click here.)īut enough trying to be Webster's, let's get to the songs - with a Spotify playlist of all 100 of 'em at the bottom. They're original, they're the only ones, they're (occasionally, unthreateningly) sexual, and they're definitely everything you need.ġ00. Others, like The Beatles - yes, The Beatles - were given the boy-band OK for early stretches of their career, but a hard cutoff was instituted for after they matured and self-actualized as just a "band." And some, like modern self-identifying "boy band" BROCKHAMPTON, were just a little too far outside the conventional sound of a boy band for us to make the mental leap - for now, anyway. Some groups, like 5 Seconds of Summer, were deemed eligible even though their structural makeup wasn't classically boy band, because the way they were marketed and fan-devoured was. Ultimately, we took every boy band argument on a case-by-case basis, and came to some difficult conclusions. If anything, what really unites boy bands throughout history comes not in their conception, but in their reception: How young, rabid and ear-splittingly friggin' loud was their fanbase? If the answer is at least "very" to all three of these, you're already 80 percent of the way there.
This week, Billboard is celebrating this venerated pop institution with a week of boy band-related coverage, starting with our list of the 100 Greatest Boy Band Songs of All Time - spanning nearly the entire Hot 100 era, and recognizing the absolute tops in innocent male harmonies and synchronized dance moves.īut what is a boy band, you may ask? Ask any two music fans that question and you might get answers as varied as if you asked a 47-year-old FM DJ and a 19-year-old SoundCloud rapper to define "hip-hop." There are common elements most everyone can agree on as being obviously boy band-core, natch: the aforementioned harmonies and dancing, as well as matching outfits, major pop choruses, a puppet-string-pulling svengali behind the scenes, a general sense of ridiculousness (and a relative lack of self-consciousness), and of course, youth.īut aside from basic membership - by pretty much all definitions, boy bands need to have at least three members and be all male - there's no one unifying factor that links every boy band in history name any classic trope of the format and we can name at least two obvious boy bands who it doesn't apply to.
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