I'm A Bad Boy But I'm Nice (Boyband 15)

[koganbot]

Inspired by Christophe calling Big Bang's "Blue" the greatest boyband song since Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way," I compiled a list of fifteen boyband tracks. Not a best-of, not a survey, but some stuff I think highly of, and enough gaps to call forth lists of your own:

The Jewels "Hearts Of Stone"
Dion And The Belmonts "I Wonder Why"
The Marcels "Blue Moon"
The Miracles "You Really Got A Hold On Me"
The Beatles "She Loves You"
The Temptations "(I Know) I'm Losing You"
The Monkees "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone"
The Jackson 5 "I Want You Back"
The Moments "Love On A Two-Way Street"
New Kids On The Block "You Got It (The Right Stuff)"
Bell Biv DeVoe "Poison"
*NSync "I Want You Back"
Backstreet Boys "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)"
Big Bang "Tonight"
MBLAQ "I Don't Know"

Watch on YouTube

I was extrapolating forward and back from early '90s usage; so, the male r&b vocal group taken to by kids and teens, with dancing. Orioles and Drifters not eligible, Frankie Lymon And The Teenagers are. "I Want To Hold Your Hand" eligible, "I Am The Walrus" not. "ABC" eligible, "Shake Your Body" not (among other things, vocals too much a Michael-only showcase). I count the Coasters, but I'd have chosen the Robins/Coasters' "Riot In Cell Block Number 9," which is a bit early and the content is probably insufficiently pre-teen (though I myself would've loved it as a tyke). I count the early Wailers, but my choice, "Jailhouse," is too late, and it reaches older than teen. I disqualified duos even though in my heart I'm sure the Everly Brothers belong for "Cathy's Clown" and "All I Have To Do Is Dream," and maybe even Simon & Garfunkel for the electric version of "Sounds Of Silence."

There are a whole bunch of reasons why country duo Brooks & Dunn aren't eligible, but going by sonics alone, "Ain't Nothing Bout You" would be right up our alley (or up the alley of Londonbeat's "I've Been Thinkin' About You," at any rate).

Enormous gaps in my knowledge, obviously; e.g., between "Two-Way Street" and "You Got It" and between "Everybody" and "Tonight." Along with the temporal gaps, there're the geographic (I'm missing Britain most notably, except for one minor band; also missing the Philly end of MotownPhilly, not to mention "MotownPhilly"; but hey, for once there's a genre where Boston matters, hurrah!), the cultural (for instance, I have no memory of what the Bay City Rollers sound like, or whether there were any freestyle boybands other than TKA), and gender (are there any all-women boybands other than Taiwan's MissTER?), not just gaps but vast missing expanses. Btw, there was a woman in the Miracles, Smokey's wife Claudette, though she tends not to show up on live clips.

The Marcels included two whites, but according to Wikip they left when it turned out that the group's being "mixed" meant it couldn't perform in the South.



Possibly the Moments had an audience that was too old; I wouldn't know, and without them the '70s go unrepresented. "Steppin' Stone" veers hard rock, but it's my favorite Monkees track. The Jewels may be just prior to the teen onslaught, but within a year the song was performed live by Elvis and hit the pop charts in versions by the Charms and the Fontane Sisters, and I felt like including it.

4/15 = 27% = titles with parentheses.

The big debate in my mind was whether to count Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz," which would have busted my genre wide open (speaking of Busted).

So have at it.

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(Crossposting at poptimists, to see if it's still a ghost town.)

Comments

[koganbot]

For my list I wasn't requiring either leadership or uniqueness, just the ability to look good on a list.

A whole bunch of Four Seasons tracks would've cut a fine figure on my list, esp. "Beggin'," "Walk Like A Man," and "Dawn."

Based on my very incomplete listening to SHINee, my favorite track of theirs is the very familiar-sounding "Juliette" (I think that by boybanding it they improved it). But "Sherlock" sounds adventurous to me, in that it's a mashup that waits a long time on its emotional release.

(I'd never heard DBSK's "Rising Sun"; I may take a while figuring it out. And until just now I'd never heard any version of "Magic Colors." Seems it's a song that trying-to-be-hip Greenfield & Sedaka wrote for trying-to-be-relevant Lesley Gore in '67. A total nonhit for her, which maybe indicates that Teddy Robin & crew were record collectors!)

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, most of Jpop boybands are still way too cheaply derivative. I suppose at least one standard Johnny's song should be heard to characterize their sound: a less obviously frat-boy douchey One Direction. (It's all about the synth strings with Arashi.)

I was wavering between "Dawn," "Who Loves You," and "Bye Bye Baby." Of course "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" is my favorite, but that's technically a solo single.

The one responsible for Shinee's "boyband harmony"-type songs (Sherlock, Juliette, Love Like Oxygen) seems to be mostly Remee, plus or minus different co-writers and arrangers. Since their other signature sound is relentless beats (Ring Ding Dong, Lucifer) I liked how "Sherlock" appeared to be trying to combine the two styles, going for an ultimate epitome of Shinee.

Wow, I didn't realize that the Teddy Robin song was a cover! Their "Gloria" cover is pretty fun, too.

[koganbot]

Not only is "Magic Colors" a cover, it's a cover of a song that failed to chart and that had its album canceled. So, if you're Teddy Robin & The Playboys, you'd likely have had to have been an extreme fan of Lesley Gore to even know it existed, unless you were connected to some producer or talent scout who's scouring America for available material. This assumes that Hong Kong did not remain a major market for Gore after the U.S. faded. In any event, she'd seem not to be the sort whom a psychedelic band — if that's what Teddy Robin & The Playboys were — would be likely to pay attention to, not even during her aborted attempts at being "with it" herself in 1967 terms.

(Gore's major impact had been back in 1963, and her sensibility and style and musical world had been wiped out by the British Invasion; if the person who posted this on YouTube is correct, the Teddy Robin version didn't come out until 1969, which was a different planet from 1963.)

[koganbot]

Hmmm. I'm assuming that Hong Kong's hipsters followed the same musical demarcations as America's, but this is not necessarily a good assumption. Hong Kong in 1969 could have been mashing together sensibilities that in America had sharply diverged.

Their "Gloria" copies the Shadows Of Knight version in substituting "Then she called out my name" for Them's original "Then she came into my room." Presumably the Shadows Of Knight thought her coming into his room would be a bit risky for American radio in 1966.

[koganbot]

If Wikip is right, Remee didn't have anything to do with "Sherlock," though his sometime collaborator Thomas Troelsen is on board (Troelsen also there for "Love Like Oxygen"). As far as I know, "Deal With It" was written with Jay Sean originally in mind as the performer, though the song sure screams "We need a boyband to do this justice." I read somewhere (think it was Wikip, though I'm not seeing this info in current postings) that it was Jonghyun's idea to cover "Deal With It." He's the one credited with the "Juliette" lyrics.

[koganbot]

For me, most J-pop is in the category "I don't get it." Which means that I'm not generally able to identify what groups like Arashi derive from, as opposed to my being able to hear whom SHINee sound like.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

Apparently, The Runnaways were more famous in Japan than they were in the States, so it may be the case with other artists having some unknown momentum overseas. But you're right, it does seem an odd choice for a psychedelic band to cover, much less in the direction they arranged it with.

The information section on the "Magic Colors" names some fellow bands from the era. I don't have enough knowledge to know if the songs I sampled from the list were adventurous the way you're characterizing current Kpop, and it all fell under "60s sounds" to my ears, but bands did seem to cover whatever sounded cool, and not necessarily trying to adhere to one particular genre. The Mystics sounded less British Invasion and more crooner, though. Of course, these bands were mainstream popular in Hong Kong at the time, and may not count as hipsters, other than in their defiance of the government's condemnation of Western music.

LLO: Remee, Troelsen, Lucas Secon, and Yong-Hun Cho
Juliette: Remee, Mich Hansen, Joe Belmaati, and Jay Sean
Sherlock: Troelsen, Rocky Morris, Thomas Eriksen, Rufio Sandilands, lyrics Jo Yoonkyung
Remee and Troelsen seem to be pretty able to replicate each other's sound, so Troelsen was probably following the precedent Remee had set for Shinee.
With a side-by-side comparison, I'd say the arrangement also played a role in how much better "Juliette" sounds. "Deal With It" is sparse and thus requires more of its performer, which Corbin doesn't quite deliver. "Juliette" not only has more members to cover for that, but the arrangement has its own heft as well, allowing Shinee to sing in more of a whisper-y style, doing a charming laid-back serenade instead of the forceful angry rant of "Deal With It." The arrangement for "Juliette's" bridge even has some little disco touches for extra glitz and glamor.
But the main melody of both songs could work for a soloist given a Guetta-style arrangement with electro squiggles. Including the Shinee vocal adlibs, it has Enrique Iglesias written all over it.

My first instinct for Jpop is 50s-70s, where Kpop tends not to go further back than 80s, (unless mining for disco) but the longer I think about classic Jpop bubblegum the murkier possible composition influences get, other than the fact that some of it definitely developed as if the 80s/90s/00s never happened.

[koganbot]

Ah, Wikip informs me that Lucas Secon was on hand for both "Echo" and "Lazy Girl"! And he's not even Scandinavian. (Is British.)

Two months ago I'd have had zero name recognition for each of those three.

EDIT: Wait! Secon lives in London but was born in Denmark. So Scandinavia takes it back!