Why an idol group isn’t a boy band

One of the arguments I’ve been making for a few years now is that boy bands are not the same as idol groups. They appear the same on the surface--the form is the same--but the contents are different. 

I wanted to dig a little deeper into this argument today because I think the conflict caused by the adoption of BTS by fans in America and the West can only be properly understood through this framework. To give an analogy that probably only makes sense after a glass or two of wine: Boy bands and male idol groups are like lions and tigers; both in the cat family but different species. Of course, lions and tigers can produce hybrid offspring but ligers only exist in captivity. And the hybrid offspring of boy bands and idol groups… well, let’s get to it.

What am I talking about when I talk about boy bands? Is it a performance style or a marketing label? Or both?

Boy bands in the West are traditionally traced back to the Beatles and Beatlesmania in the 1960s. 

The Beatles were a rock’n’roll band but what made them a “boy band” is how they were packaged and sold to an audience of teen girls as essentially Elvis x 4. 

These are the roots of the boy band in the West.

I mean, why buy one doll when you can collect all four, right? The appeal here is obvious for both teen girls and the music industry. All of the schlock from the teen idol industry was copy-pasted onto these English rock bands. Instead of solo dreamboats like Paul Anka and Frankie Avalon driving sales of 16 or Dig magazines, you had an explosion of bands essentially filling this exact same function. There is little difference between the hard fought battles between fans of Cliff Richards and Elvis and the battles between fans of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. 

Of course, the Beatles (and the Stones) had no desire to be “boy bands” and fled from the teen magazine circuit as soon as they had the clout to do so. The Beatles, especially, were also extremely influential musically on a generation of young people. I talk about this in my episode on the group the Tigers but the idea “a band” that wasn’t just a lead vocal and some guys but four equal participants on stage was mind blowing. Add in their ear for a good hook and producer George Martin’s creative melding of classical elements with their blues-rock and skiffle roots and there’s a reason we still talk about them today where equally popular “boy bands” of the era like the Dave Clark Five have been essentially forgotten to the mists of time.

Were there teen girls who loved the Beatles for their musical abilities? Of course.

Was that their main appeal to the shrieking teen girls in the early to mid 1960s who (allegedly) pissed themselves in excitement at concerts? No, and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. There is nothing shameful about being a teen girl with a massive crush on a handsome and funny idol.

The Monkees were formed in the wake of the Beatles specifically to act as a “boy band” and perhaps they should really be classified as the first true boy band because their primary function was not as musicians but as entertainers, to act as a focal point for that erotically charged teen girl energy (and pocket money). That didn’t stop the Monkees from having some killer jams (and Mike Nesmith is a genuinely talented songwriter and musician) and anybody who would dismiss their discography is a fool but they were a boy band first and artists second.

You get that boy band energy with some of the family groups through the 1970s like the Jackson Five, the Osmonds, the Cowsills, even the Partridge Family… and then there were the Bay City Rollers with their Tartan-mania. 

But the form of the “boy band” that we’re most familiar with today only dates from the early-mid 1980s and is the creation of Maurice Starr who took a Jackson 5 style vocal group called New Edition and turned them into teen idols… well, Black teen idols. Maurice Starr was no fool and knew that the big money was in the pockets of America’s white teenagers, which is how we ended up with the New Kids on the Block aka white New Edition who essentially set the mold for mainstream Western “boy bands” for the next 30 years. 

TL;DR what we consider “boy bands” today have dual origins in that old school teen idol pissing your pants fan culture combined with Maurice Starr’s updated (and white) version of a Jackson Five style singing and dancing all male vocal group. 

Make sense?

This contemporary “boy band” form goes in and out of style but there remains is a very real niche in the entertainment market that needs filling: teen girls and their horny moms. 

That’s why these boy bands only last about as long as it takes those teen girls to finish high school. That’s why you have these waves of popularity in fandoms. High School Musical, Twilight, One Direction… they all filled the same market niche. There is no expectation that interest in these properties will last beyond senior year (or your daughter’s senior year) and then everybody moves on to the next thing.

Male idol groups in Asia, on the other hand, have their roots in Japan’s Johnnys, a 1960s-era boy group started by Johnny Kitagawa (and check the episode on that era if you want more details). Johnny Kitagawa’s vision was rooted in musical theater, not in rock or doo-wop. He brought in modern dance-inspired choreography and had his groups perform in stage plays instead of music clubs. And Johnny’s idols were integrated into mainstream show business. It was expected that they weren’t just singers but would also appear on variety and game shows and act in dramas and films. And especially within the past 30 years or so, they don’t age out of their groups. SMAP, Arashi, V6, Kinki Kids, Tokio in Japan and TVXQ, Shinhwa, and now SHINee (and hopefully 2PM and BigBang) in Korea show that fans really like the model of the legacy idol group where the members come back to work together on music a few times a year but are also kept busy with acting and other show business work. 

And the fan culture that developed around these groups is very different from the teen girl culture in the West. This includes fan-written manga, as well as development of things like the adoption of member colors to support your favorite, fan codes of conduct around attending stage plays and concerts, formalization of rules in fan engagement from agencies, and so on that just doesn’t exist in the West. 

I mean, from the beginning, teen fangirls in Asia formed clubs to support their favorite stars. The president of the Osaka chapter of the Beatles fan club plays a pivotal role in the Tigers story. My guest in episode 25 talks about rival fan clubs of Cliff Richards clashing in Seoul when he came to perform there in the 1970s. Western fangirls of these groups simply don’t organize themselves the same way.

So even though a group like Shonentai emerges in the 1980s around the same time as New Edition/New Kids on the Block, their roots are different and the culture around them is different. When NKOTB dipped in popularity fans moved on (until the nostalgia tour 30 years later) but even when Shonentai stopped putting out new music their fans kept going to the group’s annual stage play year after year. You don’t need to know anything about a “boy band” to show up at the stadium and scream your head off until you pee in your seat--duh, that’s kind of the appeal. Stanning these groups is an individual experience before it’s a collective one. Go to an idol group concert and you had better know the fan chants, the penlight/light stick choreography, and all of the fan manners or risk annoying and infuriating the people around you.

Kpop idol culture has its own specific rules of engagement but it’s still tied to Asian girls culture rather than to the fan culture around boy bands in the West. You can listen to Episode 25 I linked above for a taste of popular music in the 1960s and 70s in Korea but long story short, the K-Pop we know today has its roots in the mid-late 1980s. It was a modern, trendy, optimistic, and specifically Seoul-based music made to appeal to the growing market of middle class teens. This early “K-pop” includes teen idols like tomboy Lee Sang Eun, the dancing king Hyun Jin Young, and the heavily Shonentai-inspired trio Sobangcha. It was fun and frothy music made for Korean teens to dance around to and have fun. What’s not to like?

Seo Taiji and Boyz (now mythologized as the first Kpop group) were like the Beatles (mythologized as the first boy band) in that they were musically innovative but they were also at the root of a real boom in teen culture and their infamous first appearance on television can be likened to the Beatles going on the Ed Sullivan show in terms of impact. You can hear more about them in episode 4. 

But the mold for Korean idol groups was set by Lee Soo Man with H.O.T. in the mid-1990s. I think Westerners get confused trying to parse the origins of these groups because of the surface level similarities in performance style. Boys singing and dancing? H.O.T. must be just like Take That! Thanks in large part to Hyun Jin Young and Seo Taiji’s “Boyz” the choreography used by the early Korean groups was more hip hop influenced than the modern dance background of Shonentai but that doesn’t make them boy bands.

H.O.T. may have had musical influence from Seo Taiji but they were explicitly put together by Lee Soo Man to be the Korean SMAP. 

(And please understand that I don’t mean any insult by saying this. There’s no shame in having an origin story in being the Korea SMAP just like Take That was explicitly put together to be the Manchester NKOTB and so on. These groups all evolve and grow into their own unique selves, no matter their origins.)

The fan culture, the way the groups work, the way the idols interact with the broader Korean entertainment industry… all of these things developed from those early SM Entertainment “Korean SMAP” seeds. 

Look at BigBang, arguably* the most popular and well known idol group in Korea over the past 20 years. They all have strong solo careers in music, acting, variety, fine art, and so on and--as we form our prayer circle for new music--come back together to make music as a group and tour every few years. That’s not how a boy band works. Boy bands are there when you are peeing your pants because you’re 16 and so in love with JC Chasez and then are too embarrassed to pack your *NSYNC notebook to go to college two years later. Idol groups are when you and your 16 year old friends go sing “Lies” at noraebang after a concert and imagine it’s you they’re singing about and then you all go and sing “Lies” at noraebang after every concert for the next ten plus years… only with more alcohol and need for babysitters as you all get older.

It’s just a very different vibe.

So, where I am going with all of this?

The thesis I want to put across is this: BTS has been adopted by the West as a boy band. 

There was a gap in the market with the disbandment of One Direction and BTS (for better or worse) filled it.

Conflict between the fans coming from the idol group side and those brought in as boy band fans (the “BTSpop not Kpop” fans) was inevitable because we’re essentially looking at two different groups and it’s as headache inducing as those magic eye pictures used to be. This could not have been more clear to me attending BTS concerts in Seoul surrounded by Asian fans and again in America surrounded by American fans. One was an idol show; one was a boy band concert.

Idol fans are distressed at not seeing the signs of a healthy and stable career that would be expected of a group approaching a decade together and so they perform collective action, like sending trucks to loudly express their displeasure in front of the agency headquarters. Boy band fans have no concept of an idol’s career beyond the next group comeback and are distressed at the idea of their “emotional support OT7” being taken away from them before finals and are bitterly fighting everyone to maintain the status quo.

Unfortunately for the idol fans, the game was rigged for the boy band fans about 3 years ago. 

Unfortunately for BTS, being a boy band comes with a strict graduation time limit. 

BTS is that liger in my (pained) metaphor at the top of this post and despite assurances I’ve personally received from their fans that they will still be touring stadiums singing and dancing to “Fake Love” in 25 years time, my jaded eye sees their future as really unclear at the moment. Will they fade into boy band obscurity along with fellow travelers Take That, Boyzone, O-Town, and so on or will they manage to claw back careers in the Korean industry post-military enlistment? Only time will tell…

* And I do argue this.