#boybands

[johnlennonhauntingthenarrative]

something something gayest boyband of all time idk

[voxina]

Where have all the boybands gone? This is the question Simon Cowell sets out to answer in his new documentary, Simon Cowell: The Next Act. Yet it seems the one he really wants some answers to is: where has Simon Cowell gone?

In the documentary – partly an attempt at reputation rehabilitation, and partly, for anyone under 25, an explanation of who this vape-honking ghost of reality TV past actually is – Cowell grapples with his decline. Less than 20 minutes into the first episode he stares down his image in a more literal sense as he stands by the side of a road, personally pasting his face on to a billboard advertising his latest talent search. (Don’t worry, he has a QR code and he’s live on Instagram.)

All Cowell’s Avengers team of staff and songwriters (here talked about in terms of how many “billion-plus” streams they have to their name) have to do is sit back and wait for applications to roll in. Instead what happens is that 9,000 people visit the website, and of those only 160 apply. Actually, “to be perfectly honest, only 93 of them are candidates that are actually possible”, says James, PR firm, no known streams, because a bunch of applicants in their 40s didn’t read the age range was 16-18.

“Well this is a disaster,” Cowell says. And he’s not referring to the fact it took assembling a crack squad of music industry experts to realise that few teenagers want to read five minutes worth of text before they get to an entry form. Guys, did anyone try this on mobile?

All of this makes for great entertainment: not for the intended reasons, but because it is fascinating to witness someone becoming aware of their irrelevance in real time. For those who grew up watching The X Factor, there is a schadenfreude to seeing a kingmaker reduced to a jester, begging for attention from TikTok influencers. “Since One Direction decided to split up I haven’t signed a successful boyband and I miss it,” Cowell says in a rare moment of authenticity. “I miss it so much.”

Eventually he does get enough applicants to host auditions, but for anyone who can recall the camera panning the snaking queues on The X Factor, the sight of a slow trickle of boys and young men with guitars on their backs is tragic. This isn’t Cowell’s fault. While he was away, fame has warped into something else. Young people no longer need someone to make them a star, they can become one themselves. They are also more likely to list “influencer” than “popstar” as their dream career. Being in a boyband is hard work, as Cowell reminds the applicants. But if his last success was a boyband who split up almost 10 years ago, what exactly is he asking them to work hard for?

The fate of One Direction member Liam Payne is the elephant in the room. News of Payne’s death, after he fell from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, interrupts the production. Cowell debates whether to continue with the show.

Cowell’s grief is evident, but the series has no real reckoning with the role of the machine that makes stars and then spits them out. To do so might in some way implicate an industry boss like Cowell, so instead there’s a meeting called with the parents and hopefuls where he decides to continue because “I want you to have this opportunity”. Cowell opens up the floor to their queries, yielding one revealing question: what would he be telling his own son to do? “My first question would be, honestly, do I really, really believe my son can deal with what comes when you become well known?” he says, deftly passing the responsibility to the parents to make an assessment of the pressures of fame in an industry they have no experience of.

This kangaroo court inquiry, and a dedication to Payne at the end of the episode, is about as much soul-searching as is offered here. Cowell is not responsible for what happens to people 10 years after making them famous, as he has said, but there is a duty of care when you expose young people to a reality-distorting world. Now he has a son of his own, that seems to have just hit home.

This next act – one that speaks in the language of care, but uses the same methods to extract something marketable from young people – sees Cowell attempt to address his pantomime villain era. We see shots of the boyband hopefuls cleaning cars or working in Nando’s, as though Cowell is a wealthy benefactor whose Midas touch can lift them out of poverty. The promise he made to them is his reasoning for carrying on. Honestly, this is all about them.

The show comes after a glut of soft, self-produced documentaries from celebrities such as David and Victoria Beckham, and Prince Harry and Meghan. Next year Gordon Ramsay will put out Being Gordon Ramsay, produced by Studio Ramsay Global, which he co-owns, presumably in the hope that few of us remember that being Gordon Ramsay once involved abusing staff and having critics thrown out of his restaurant. Perhaps the TV villains of the 90s believe if they simply pump out enough footage of them with their children and talking about how much they have changed it will erase what came before. For a reminder watch Boiling Point, the 1998-9 series which Ramsay didn’t have the final cut on.

Simon Cowell: The Next Act instead does something I imagine Cowell thinks is very clever: distracting from this personal PR push by saying he “just wants to change young boys’ lives”. It is hard not to wonder, given the emotional cost and short shelf-life of being a boyband member, if they might be better off at Nando’s.

[x]

[leahuzumakisblog]

My new favorite genre of pics is The police being a trio consisting of one shared braincell. Like each of these pictures make you think, "what tf is going on...?"

[sunshineandlyrics]

✨ Louis Tomlinson ✨ and ✨ One Direction ✨ inspired an awakening.

[vanillablankcanvas]

[twopoppies]

another day another boy band exposing simon cowell for the horrendous human being that he is smh

https://x.com/hlarryious/status/1901302147322392720?s=46

Oh man. I just hate reading this stuff because you know so much of it never changed. And so much of it sounds so similar to everything the 1D boys went through, too (except, shockingly, no one seems to have been closeted).

[…]Jason “J” Brown laughs as he leads the boys in, wearing a hat to show he’s the eldest. Spiky-haired, chain-wearing Abz Love, the naughtiest one, turns off the power to the room. Then in comes the blond one, Ritchie Neville, along with gobby Scott Robinson (who throws an evil little grin to the other lads) and baby-faced Sean Conlon (obviously the sensitive one). Each has a different role within Britain’s biggest new boyband, but their joint identity has been crafted to appeal to teen girls for whom the other boybands seem too wet, too girly. Three years and 11 Top 10 singles later, it will all be over.

[…] Sean had a brief break from the band to get counselling and their team told the world that he was resting up from glandular fever.

[…] Scott marched into the record label’s office and got into an escalating physical fight with one of their team who refused to let him quit the band, pinning him against a desk. Simon Cowell had to intervene, nearly punching Scott. Following that was a meeting between Scott and the band while they were getting ready for a Top of the Pops performance; Scott had planned to tell his friends and bandmates he was going to leave.

[…] all five of them were emotionally and mentally suffering. “We should have had six months off,” says Ritchie. It’s a shame, J adds, that the industry didn’t recognise they were struggling and support a hiatus; if they had, they might have been able to have a much longer career. “It’s taken us 25 years – I’m not even joking – literally 25 years to be able to even get my head around it,” adds Ritchie.

“It’s almost like we’ve been traumatised,” says Sean, as if coming out of a daze.

“No, we are traumatised,” says Ritchie, with a look directly at me.

[…] They were thrown together to live in the same house by their management, but their ages meant that Sean, the youngest at just 15, was cohabiting with J, who was about to turn 21.

[…] Five were instantly famous, their debut album not just No 1 in the UK but seriously successful on a global scale. Fans camped out all around the madhouse, so the band felt constantly observed; they’d often do an “SAS job” and pretend to be out, just creeping around in the dark to get some “mental headspace”, says Richie.

[…] It sounds like the female attention warped their young minds with paranoia. […] Then Ritchie adds about the touching and grabbing: “I didn’t know if somebody was overstepping – obviously certain boundaries, I did – but if somebody’s taking the p***, I didn’t have a good gauge of what that was.”

[…] They’d constantly wake up and not know which continent they were on, having to look out the hotel or car window for clues. J in particular suffered with this. “I went through the whole [experience] with chronic insomnia, from about three months after it all kicked off,” he remembers. “Most nights I was getting maximum three-and-a-half-hours’ sleep. Sometimes I’d go four or five days on an hour and a half, and then have to get up at five in the morning and film a new video.” It had a diabolical compounding impact on his mental, emotional and physical health.

[…] Sean compares their situation to being in early retirement. “I had that at 20 years of age: I had some money in the bank and enough not to work,” he says. “In your mind there was no Everest, because whatever I do it’s not going to be bigger or better than Five. And you’ve still got an ego and want success at that age, so it’s a really troubling, conflicted time.”

[…] “The industry’s attitude towards this 90s era of pop was, ‘It’s bubblegum pop, it’s not going to last, it’s superficial,’ especially after the wave of indie bands before that,” explains Sean. “We internalised that attitude, too, thinking, ‘Oh, we’re not really doing anything meaningful, it’s not impacting anyone’s life, it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s not real music.’ It also ties back to why we were so overworked and stressed – because of that mindset. The focus was on making as much money as possible and moving as quickly as we could. At the time, no one would have expected that, 25 years later, there would still be interest in the band and our music.”

Full article here

[everythinglover4l]

why have one bitch when you can have five? why have five bitches when you can have nine?