The Orlando Phenomenon – Boy bands and bad girls made to order (III)

“The incredible thing is,” noted Artie Ripp, “the majors at the time – Columbia, RCA, Decca – were not in the business of selling music by kids to kids. The independent guys, like George , discovered kids actually had creative value. And what’s more, you could put that value on record.”

Bubblegum also had built-in promotion that could completely change the labels’ relationship with radio. Television made this music popular, and radio actually had to come to the record companies for it because people wanted to hear it.

By the 1980s, this relationship became more codified, albeit more subtle. The performers got on TV and became popular. The 1981 advent of MTV certainly accelerated this process. One of the biggest stars to spring forth from MTV’s copious navel was Madonna, who promoted an image at the time that was safe enough for TV yet sleazy enough to make parents of young women look twice before their girls went off to school. This became the way, the Zen of pop star development.

Nowhere was this effect more evident than with the New Mickey Mouse Club, which turned out two of the hottest female performers in the record business, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. Both bounce around between a bad-girl image, a stab at “artistic integrity,” and even occasional moments of quasi-humanity (Britney posing naked and pregnant). The teen idol had transformed.

In the wake of the success of young hip-hop groups (some called them “bubblegum soul”) like New Edition (Bobby Brown’s first recording group), came the pop phenomenon New Kids on the Block. Produced by Maurice Starr, who had also done the honors on the New Edition albums, and managed to land two chart-topping albums and three #1 singles, selling millions of records.

This impressed Lou Pearlman, who took note of the group when he booked them a private jet through his company. Amazed at what looked like a billion-dollar business built around the New Kids on the Block, Pearlman called his cousin Art Garfunkel to confirm it. “Artie told me, ‘You’re in business; you like music. You should do something like that.’ So, as a weekend goof, we decided to do a little audition, and one thing led to another.”

The main thing it led to was a group of Orlando kids he dubbed the Backstreet Boys. Breaking them in Europe before unleashing them on America, Pearlman discovered the formula alchemists had been searching for since time immemorial – he turned dross into gold… and platinum. Continuing to draw from this Orlando talent pool, many members of which had performed at the theme parks (Justin Timberlake of the Pearlman creation *NSYNC had once played Frankenstein’s monster in the Monster Revue at Universal Studios theme park) and – like Spears and Aguilera – in Disney properties like The New Mickey Mouse Club, Pearlman’s Trans Continental Entertainment became a teen pop factory, and remains one as of this writing.

“The Mickey Mouse Club was a big source for a lot of big things,” Pearlman said, “and we’re going to help keep cultivating talent… . A lot of people want to be singers but can’t without the right help.” Again, Pearlman recognized the advantage of momentum: keeping something rolling takes a lot less effort than getting something rolling. By using former Mickey Mouse Club stars, he already had traction and recognition among the target demographic. It cost less to realize more.

Pearlman has fallen onto a basic, even open secret that Marcucci, Ripp, Kirshner, and so many others have known but guarded: teen pop idols will not go away, at least, as Pearlman is often quoted as saying, “until God stops making little girls… . These kids, they’re fanatics. We don’t have any fans. We have fanatics. They’ll buy anything that has to do with their band or their picture on it. And they have loyalty. If they love somebody, they’ll stay with them.”