There’s no shame in the boy band game.
Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands, a new documentary from Paramount+, looks at the evolution of the magical male music groupings, ranging from the Beatles and the Jackson 5 to One Direction and K-pop’s Seventeen. While some members were never fond of the term, the film is a musical celebration of the successful groups — and how their female fans, dismissed as overemotional “fangirls,” helped make them what they are.
The doc features a star-studded list of boy band faves — New Kids on the Block’s Donnie Wahlberg, NSync’s Lance Bass and Chris Kirkpatrick, Backstreet Boys’ AJ McLean, 98 Degrees’ Nick Lachey and Jeff Timmons, New Edition’s Michael Bivins, as well as Donnie Osmond and the brothers Hanson — sharing their reflections.
Tamra Davis’s film also gets into the drama — group rivalries, bad blood over artists going solo (looking at you, Justin Timberlake), crappy contracts and con man managers.
A different ‘boy’ for every fangirl
Larger Than Life is a quick and catchy-tuned look at how, after the success of Elvis Presley, all-male groups blossomed. Having four and five members, they had an even broader appeal because there would be a cute, talented guy — the wholesome one, the bad boy, the sensitive one, the fitness buff — for every fangirl out there.
“The Beatles deserve all the credit in the world because they gave birth to so many boy band groups over the years,” Bivins said.
Though the guys themselves admitted they sometimes bent to fill the bill.
“Archetypes of boy bands [are] hilarious,” Bass said of NSync. “Justin was the ‘young heartthrob.’ Chris was the ‘crazy one.’ I was the ‘shy one.’ Then you read it so many times that then you started falling into that trope. You start feeling like, ‘Well, this isn’t me, but this is what people want.’”
McLean laughed about being branded Backstreet’s bad boy: “I’m the biggest pushover in the world.”
Bivins talked about how the members of New Edition each worked to stand out from the others with their signature moves and styles, like Bobby Brown’s “pelvic thrusts,” Ralph Tresvant’s pop locking or Ricky Bell tipping his hat.
Bad deals and no breaks
Backstreet Boys and NSync were created by Lou Pearlman, who was sort of a boy band mastermind in the 1990s and turned out to be a scam artist. The members of those groups talked about being overworked and short-changed financially. Pearlman — through his Trans Continental company — was taking huge cuts.
“The first contract is never going to be in your favor,” Johnny Wright, who managed both Backstreet and NSync, said.
That’s an understatement. McLean talked about touring and recording “for nine years straight,” then burning out and battling addiction.
Bass said his group, who lived and worked together at the start, didn’t get a paycheck until “years later.” When Kirkpatrick saw the check — for $10,000 — he realized he had been making more money working at Outback Steakhouse in his pre-fame days.
Bass said they were “working for free for these guys.”
Wright explained that Pearlman was taking 85% of his groups’ earnings, with the talent getting 15 percent. Pearlman also got a piece of the 15% because he negotiated it so that he was ⅙ member of the band.
“On top of that, [the contracts are] very, very hard to get out of,” Bass said. NSync and Backstreet Boys were both in legal battles to break free from Pearlman and eventually won.
“Every boy band has a sore spot in their career with somebody,” said Bivins. “The manager, the producer, the record label. It’s just the nature of the beast, man.”
Band vs. band rivalries
The film looks at how NSync began as a Backstreet Boys clone. The group was created by Pearlman using the same manager, producers and essentially, the same formula. In the early days, Pearlman didn’t tell the Backstreet Boys about NSync, using a code name (“B5”) to refer to the band.
The Backstreet Boys blew up first. After they landed a Rolling Stone cover, they decided to turn down a Disney special they planned to do, thinking their audience had evolved, Wright said. NSync stepped in for the special.
“The Disney special was their launching pad, and like overnight they blew up,” said McLean, whose Backstreet Boys saw their fame eclipsed by NSync.
Wright said the Backstreet Boys were “upset,” explaining, “They felt like: We were the first. You went and got these second guys. So we feel like now you kind of betrayed us.”
The two groups had to be seated apart from each other at awards shows.
The bands talked about how MTV’s Total Request Live drove competition between the groups — and other boy bands.
“Every video we put out, it was No. 1, No. 2, No. 1, No. 2,” McLean said. “And then NSync came out, and then you had 98 Degrees. It was just this nonstop battle.”
Kirkpatrick added, “The bigger the rivalry got, the bigger each band got.”
Bass wished it had all been a little friendlier.
“Friendly competition is great,” he said, “and I wish it would have stayed like that. I would have loved this to have been a Motown. Back in the day, all the [Motown] groups were signed together, they would tour with each other. They would do songs. It was a family affair.”
With NSync and Backstreet Boys both under Trans Continental it “was not a family affair.”
“Every boy band has to have that rivalry,” said Bivins, whose New Edition went up against Menudo.
Bitter feelings over breakout stars
As a member of a boy band with big dreams, you want to be the first person to break out if you have solo aspirations. Think: Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown and Justin Timberlake.
“There’s always members of the band that feel that they could step up and go solo,” Wright said. “Usually you might get one, maybe two” that make it, “but for everybody else, sometimes it’s the end of the career.”
Bass talked about NSync taking what was to be a temporary break in 2002 after a grueling schedule. Timberlake didn’t rest. He recorded solo music and blew up as a solo artist. The rest of the band was left flapping in the wind.
“Justin was going to start his solo album, which we were super supportive of,” Bass said. “I thought that was a great idea. The label told us, ‘Look, come back in six months,’ and we were supposed to go right into the next album. That just never happened. So [NSync ] just phased out without any fanfare at all, with no goodbye. We just never got back together.” (In 2023, they reunited at the MTV VMAs. They recorded “Better Place” for Trolls Band Together.)
Kirkpatrick admitted it “was hard” when Timberlake left. “There was a lot of animosity at first. There was a lot of anger. There was a lot of resentment. I remember thinking: Are we ever getting back together again?”
Wright said from “Justin’s standpoint, when he’s got the No. 1 album in the country and he’s got offers to tour the world, it’s like: How do you come back to that? I gotta fulfill this. It’s not that I’m saying goodbye, it’s just that I can’t stop this.”
Bass said, “Businesswise, I get that. Justin has the most talent in the world, and we wanted to give him that respect. But tell us that.”
Female fans are boy bands’ superpower
From the days of the Beatles, where the Fab Four gave up touring because they couldn’t hear their music over shrieking girls, female fans have been dismissed. The film pushed back on that narrative. Yve Blake, who wrote the musical Fangirls, asked, “What if we didn’t undermine young women expressing enthusiasm for things they care about?”
Wahlberg said “much of the criticism … leveled at boy bands” was “because of the screaming fans. Everybody was so bothered by these female fans, and it was like: Do they not have eyes and ears? Do they not have taste?”
McLean said, “We would not be who we are without the fans,” with Bivins calling them “the most successful piece in the common thread from the Beatles all the way to K-pop… Without the young girl, there’s no scream[ing], there’s no audience, there’s really no poster, the lyrics don’t have no one to sing to.”
While people may have mocked boy bands and their fans, they are a loyal audience. Today the girls are women who spend their money on reunion tours, cruises and fan conventions. They go with their old childhood friends or bring their kids, making it a multigenerational experience.
“The beauty of having young fans who grew up on your music is that they grow up with you,” Lachey said.
Wahlberg said, “The fans of boy bands all get the last laugh. They’re mothers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, politicians. They’re in positions of power all over the country. Our fans have grown up to be the new gatekeepers.”
Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands is now streaming on Paramount+.
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