Teen pop in crisis

Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls

by Sean RIchardson

Spice Girls

The new Backstreet Boys album, Black & Blue (Jive), is not a dud. It's the third-fastest-selling CD of all time, behind only 'N Sync's No Strings Attached (Jive) and Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP (Interscope), both of which were released earlier this year. It will surely flood the airwaves for much of 2001. But it wasn't supposed to have anything less than the biggest opening ever, and for the first time in their career, the Boys are staring down underachievement. Just a year and a half ago, you'll remember, Backstreet kicked off the teen-pop sales sweepstakes by blowing Garth Brooks's existing first-week record out of the water with the release of their second disc, Millennium (Jive). Now their new single, the pleasant-to-a-fault "Shape of My Heart," is languishing on the fringes of the Top 10, and they can't even outsell Eminem -- let alone dreaded archrivals 'N Sync.

Not that this is good news for 'N Sync. The reason the rivalry between the two is so intense, after all, is that their pedigrees are completely indistinguishable: same home base, same spurned svengali, same record label, same songwriting and production team. It almost makes more sense to think of Black & Blue not as the new Backstreet album but as the third album this year by Sweden's Cheiron Studios team, which also made significant contributions to No Strings Attached and Britney Spears's Oops! . . . I Did It Again (Jive). Cheiron's head songwriter, Max Martin, has had a pretty consistent year (I'd single out 'N Sync's "It's Gonna Be Me" and Britney's latest single, "Stronger," as highlights), but it's hard not to argue that he peaked with his first two hits, Britney's " . . . Baby One More Time" and Backstreet's "I Want It That Way." The Swedes themselves seem to agree: Black & Blue was the last blockbuster to come out of Cheiron, which closed its doors in August.

Most music fans over the age of 13 are undoubtedly hoping Black & Blue's false start does indeed signal the beginning of the end of the latest teen-pop explosion. I'm not really here to say otherwise; I'm as tired of all the dancing twerps and their overwrought ballads as anyone else. But I will be a little upset to see Backstreet go when their time comes, and I'm totally saddened by the demise of the Spice Girls, whose new Forever (Virgin) all but disappeared upon its release. As the two groups directly responsible for bringing dance pop back to the US charts in '97, they set a standard of vapidity for everything that followed. But when I want to hear stupid, glossy, happy pop music, I want it to sound like "Wannabe" and "I Want It That Way."

Backstreet Boys

There's plenty for fans of those two galvanizing singles to enjoy on both these discs, regardless of their sales numbers. Backstreet, in particular, are in fine form on Black & Blue. The Boys and 'N Sync were interchangeable when they started, but a crucial difference has emerged -- on disc, at least -- since the two independently severed ties with manager Lou Pearlman and went their separate ways. Once 'N Sync got the two Cheiron-produced lead tracks out of the way on No Strings Attached, they grabbed the biggest American R&B guys they could find and started spouting all kinds of hip-hop clichés. Backstreet do invite Rodney "Say My Name" Jerkins and Babyface along for a song each on Black & Blue, but overall they stay far truer to the pure pop ideal.

And it serves them well -- almost too well. "Shape of My Heart" is a shining pop gem, but its polish is so fine that it's merely sonic wallpaper on the radio. That's a problem that runs throughout the entire disc: Backstreet don't embarrass themselves with inane rapping the way 'N Sync do, but they don't really distinguish themselves either. The first ballad kicks in at track five; the disc pretty much hits cruise control from there on out. The Boys aren't about to challenge the reigning wedding-song champ, Shania Twain, and they've got to be scaring off most of their teenage fan base when they crow about starting a family on "Yes I Will."

They also seem to be suffering from a bit of an identity crisis. In a move that's more careless than brave, neither the group's name nor their picture appears on the cover of the disc. Inside the booklet, pin-up boy Nick Carter looks as if he were going through a Psychedelic Furs stage, and part-time rocker AJ McLean sports a Led Zeppelin shirt with the sleeves cut off. The rest of the group also try their hand at the rock thing on the cover of Rolling Stone, where Kevin Richardson flashes the metal sign and unshaven longhair Howie Dorough looks more J Mascis than a teen idol. But inside they reveal themselves to be the same old softies, a God-fearing crew of Southern good ol' boys who've found salvation in Disney and marriage.

There's no rock on Black & Blue, either, but when they lay off the ballads, the Boys once again prove themselves teen-pop's pre-eminent practitioners. The disc's punchy opener, "The Call," is a playful mix of hard beats and celestial harmonies with an awesome choral bridge lifted from Madonna's "Like a Prayer." "Get Another Boyfriend" is a superior rewrite of 'N Sync's "It Makes Me Ill"; the Jerkins-produced "Shining Star" gets things jumpin' with its vaguely acoustic-guitar-sounding "No Scrubs" synth hook. The Boys even ditch their song doctors on "The Answer to Our Life" -- which, improbably, turns out to be one of the best tunes they've ever done. They've been paying attention, it seems: the track's killer minor-key electric-piano riff recalls the recent Max Martin-penned Bon Jovi hit "It's My Life," and its lyrics are every bit as inscrutable as those of "I Want It That Way."

THE SPICE GIRLS' decline began more than two years ago, when Ginger, the group's most outspoken member, up and quit on the eve of their world tour in support of Spice World (Virgin). The tour was successful anyway, but the girls dropped out of sight in the US after releasing the symbolic "Goodbye" single in late '98. They've remained in the spotlight in their native Britain, where Sporty had a hit with her solo debut, Northern Star (it stiffed here), and Posh has been a tabloid mainstay ever since she married Manchester United soccer star David Beckham. But in America they're yesterday's news, as Forever's rotten sales numbers attest.

It's sort of perverse to wish that a disposable pop group like the Spice Girls would stay in the game longer than they already have. But to me they'll always be the cream of the current teen-pop crop, regardless of how sketchy their Girl Power manifesto was, how badly most of them sing, and how much the Spice World movie sucked. Caterwauling soccer babe Sporty and white-voiced Christine McVie type Baby were always my favorites, but as prefabricated pop stars go, they all seemed refreshingly down to earth. And they lucked into a lot of good music on their first two discs, most of it courtesy of their private songwriting and production team of Matt Rowe and Richard Stannard. There's the epochal "Wannabe," of course, and pretty much all of Spice World, a glittery teen-pop pastiche that almost made up for the atrocities of the movie.

Rowe and Stannard have been replaced by Backstreet/Destiny's Child associate Rodney Jerkins on Forever, but the quality of the music doesn't suffer much. "I'll give you rules to folla," the girls sing on the kinky lead single "Holler," whispering their slyly suggestive come-ons over Jerkins's bumpin' groove. The producer ups the funk on the midtempo break-up song "Tell Me Why," which turns out to have the album's most indelible chorus. The girls once again use their modest vocal talents to advantage, trading off lines during the verses and leaving all the fancy stuff for steel-throated Sporty. Scary throws in a few corny raps for good measure, milking her thick Northern England accent for all it's worth.

Like Backstreet, the Spice Girls have a few image problems to sort out. They at least have the good sense to put their picture on the album cover, but it's a dreadful shot of them in evening gowns and tacky jewelry that probably should have ended up on the cutting-room floor. The world definitely isn't ready for the grown-up Spice Girls, even if it was ready for their grown-up music. Jerkins's production can get a little heavy-handed at times -- he opens "Holler" and just about any song that isn't a ballad with the same damn "No Scrubs" synth hook he used on the Backstreet album. And he litters the disc with shout-outs to his Darkchild Entertainment group, making an advertisement for his services out of an album he probably already regrets doing.

Still, Forever is hardly as much of a musical disaster as it is a commercial one, though it does get bogged down by ballads at the end the same way Black & Blue does. The best one is "Goodbye," the Rowe/Stannard chestnut that closes off the album. Two years ago, Sporty already sounded a little wistful when she sang, "So glad we made it/Time will never change it." Now that the Spice Girls are all but officially over, the line sounds positively elegiac.