Hey there! First things first: TATBB has a logo now!
I know I mentioned I wanted this newsletter to come out once every two weeks, and I really tried to stick to it. I was especially eager to make a gift guide since we’re in the midst of the holiday season, but I have to confess: it's hard. Making a great gift guide is a bit like cultivating a bonsai, and I gotta be honest, I'm not feeling up for doing that this year.
This is why there has been no new post for a while! I was trying to hype myself up to do this gift guide and kept putting it off and off until I had to be honest with myself and just chuck the idea and figure out something new to do.
And that something new is something I'll call ESSENTIALS.
For all that I complain about how frustrating I found the guide process, I do LOVE gift guides and primers and Must Lists. This particular style of post is inspired by A Sea of Songs, a blog where music lovers submit a song and talk about what it means to them. It can be a short, bittersweet tale (see this tale about BSB's “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely”) or something longer and reflective.
Essentials will be me doing something like that! Sometimes I'll talk about how a certain song made me feel, other times I'll dust off my music theory and criticism cap and break down what works about it or why I believe it's worth being acknowledged as a Great Boy Band Song. I know there are several iterations of this list, but those are coming from the perspective of professionals. We’re fans, and we’re here for the deep cuts. The B-sides. The tunes that are lost to the general population but hidden on a soundtrack for a midmarket romcom.
And yes, sometimes we'll talk about those big hit songs.
In fact, the first song I'm featuring is one of those huge songs. If you were exclusively a top 40 listener, you might not know that it was a cover of a country song. And, by most metrics, the group that performed it has been added to the boy band category retroactively, much in the same way that Boyz II Men have been. While there are aspects of boy bandom present (matching outfits, four men in their teens/early twenties with a young adult fan base), they were closer to Adult Contemporary than teen pop. This is not a bad thing, but it can affect the shelf life of a group that is ostensibly more youth oriented.
But for me, this song and its sentiment were something like a gateway to those late 1990s groups that dominated the end of the decade. It gave me a frame of reference for the kind of music that, to this day, is my comfort listening.
So join me in a few days when I do a deep dive into 1995’s “I Can Love You Like That” by All-4-One. Please feel free to spread the word, and don’t forget to keep the boy band pride alive.