Compared to Bieber....

[Unocal 76]

The 1990s boy bands and male singers of that era that some of us weren't too fond of never seemed to get any of the backlash that Biebs got.

If anything, they never seemed to get under our skin. Now, granted, it helped they were prominent in an era before Twitter/Facebook/MySpace and we lived and died through message boards and chatrooms.

That generation seemed to have it a lot better- hell, I have most of those songs on my Ipod instead of what we have nowadays (I Want It That Way, Bye Bye Bye, etc.)

[Clash, Never a Meter Maid]

Oh, all the 90s boy groups had the obsessive weirdo haters that would make the obsessive fans look better by default. With a wider social media umbrella, they get broadcast more now.

[Deleted]

I personally don't bother giving Bieber the time of day unless Todd in the Shadows has just brought him up in a video or something, but give them this - at least the Backstreet Boys and N'Sync didn't insist on cramming the horrible, awful, downright evil word "shawty" in every one of their songs.

[chazraps]

90s Boy Bands got every bit the hate that Bieber gets, if not more as the music industry was such a larger beast back then. Let's not act like The Marshall Mathers LP didn't sell over ten million copies, or how many people at Woodstock '99 destroyed Boy Band effigies, or the countless Angelfire/Geocities/Simplenet hate sites.

[Cela]

They were quite hated, but the internet made the Biebers, Jonas Brothers, and Chris Browns that much harder to avoid, and that much easier to express displeasure. It brought together communities on both side of the aisle. (Note, not saying Bieber is the same as Brown, just that Brown or his crime would have been much more easily forgotten in the 90s)

So, is Bieber worse that the boy bands of the 90s? Yes, he's a little douche. But the backlash against him is worse, and it's possible the boy bands would have been much worse with total access to fans and 24/7 news cycles devoted to them, as opposed to just TRL.

[tekkenguy]

1D doesn't seem to be getting much hate.

[Mozenrath]

Boy bands got a lot of backlash, to the extent tons of radio stations aired parodies of their songs calling them gay, etc, so they were an easy target, just like Bieber is, but fans themselves were harder to hear from outside of your own life. Youtube comments, facebook statuses, tweets, etc, make it much more prominent.

[SsnakeBite, the No1 Frenchman]

When it comes to pop stars and boys bands in general, I agree that people are waaayyyyy too harsh on them, especially people who have n reason to give even half a shit about them and who could easily just ignore them. I swear, the number of middle-aged assholes who actually believe that getting their panties in a bunch over the fact that teenagers listen to One Direction actually makes them badasses...


However, in the specific case of Bieber, dude's an asshat. See, the thing about people like the Jonas Brothers is that it at least feels like they enjoy doing what they do and genuinely love interacting with their fans. Bieber, on the other hand, is a self-centered twat who feels he is owed love and attention but only offers contempt in return.

[Stu]

Did the Backstreet Boys or Nsync ever have a pet monkey, get carried up the Great Wall of China, visit a Brazilian massage parlor, say Anne Frank would be a Belieber ....

[Regal Stretch]

Jan 2, 2014 4:13:53 GMT -5 tekkenguy said:

1D doesn't seem to be getting much hate.

Oh they get their fair share, at least in England anyway.

[EvenBaldobombHasAJob]

you're just looking at it with rose-coloured glasses. people f***ing hated boy bands.

[Reflecto]

The problem isn't that there was hatred for "boy bands", but in the genre as a whole:

-Most of the most vicious boy band/Bieber haters are [predominantly male] rockers, who hate them because they truly believe that if Bieber died tomorrow, every album he made vanished from existance, and damnatio memoriae was placed on him, the next day rock music would immediately rule the pop charts (and not "Nickelback" either, but REAL! Rock, like [insert band that specific person loves]!)

In the '90s when people hated boy bands, the music scene as a whole wasn't as homogenous as it is in this era. If you really hated Backstreet Boys/N'Sync, you could find popular acts in whatever genre you liked, and not have to listen to them at all. People still "hated" them, but you could find popular acts from a number of different genres and listen to them instead without a problem.

Cut to now, and the pop charts are more homogenized to enough of a point so that rock music is more marginalized than any other genre on the charts. There's just not a lot of big ROCK albums that became mega hits for the year 2013- and popular music's melted enough in the melting pot of the charts so it's not likely to change any time soon. Justin Bieber gets the blame for all of it, despite the fact that Bieber's hate doesn't even translate to incredible success on the charts like most "most hated" bands (Bieber's charted 25 singles in the US- but has only had five hits make the top 10 in the US. Only three hit the top five...and despite the hatred being channeled primarily to him as the representative of bubblegum crap/the pop scene today, Justin Bieber has NEVER had the number one song in America in his career. (By contrast, most of the other "hated" pop acts at least have a number one, or at least sustained chart success, to their names.)

[Kevin Hamilton]

As a 35 year old dude, I'm aware of who Justin Bieber is, but I couldn't tell you even one of his songs or any of that. It's easy as hell to avoid stuff about him or pretty much anyone else unless you actively are looking for it/wanna rage against it.

But in my day (I'm old), New Kids got the same sorta backlash.. it was just localized as there was no internet.

[angryfan]

Jan 2, 2014 16:35:08 GMT -5 Kevin Hamilton said:

As a 35 year old dude, I'm aware of who Justin Bieber is, but I couldn't tell you even one of his songs or any of that. It's easy as hell to avoid stuff about him or pretty much anyone else unless you actively are looking for it/wanna rage against it.

But in my day (I'm old), New Kids got the same sorta backlash.. it was just localized as there was no internet.

Bingo. Boy bands took so much heat back in the day it's not even funny. With the exception of New Kids, they all hit following the Millie Vanilli scandal, so when you combine groups who sing and do nothing else then add in overproduction and mass saturation, aim them at the young, female audience (almost exclusively), and push them as some pure and wholesome alternative to the devil worshiping rockers, you're guaranteed backlash.

Thing is, I could be on a long trip in the car, flipping radio stations in the late 80's and early 90's, and if a song by NKOTB, or Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch came on the radio I could find the latest by GNR or any rock band I wanted. Now, when I turn on Gen X radio (the nickname of the station) that plays pop and rock, I am guaranteed to hear the same three songs ever hour, if not more often.

I turn to a different station that plays "variety" or "mix" and I get the same three songs.

I don't have an ipod converter in my car, so if I turn on the radio, I'm bombarded with songs by artists I don't like. This will easily breed annoyance where disinterest used to be.

[SEAN CARLESS]

The difference is that those bands in the past existed within their own little niche bubbles (where it belongs), wherein you knew they existed, maybe heard a song or two, but were not constantly inundated and bombarded with them to the point where the media talks about them constantly or tries to convince you they're legitimate superstars outside their own fickle, moronic fanbase. In my day, all talk and obsession was relegated to the lockers of vapid teenage girls or food courts or malls where they gathered. You could easily get away with never having to ever hear this idiotic blather. But today's era of social media has given a virtual megaphone to these types and the people who hate them in turn. And it, along with the media manufacturing, makes it all annoying and unavoidable. None of it should be heard. Its not being allowed to fizzle out and die as its supposed to.

[Welfare Willis]

Jan 2, 2014 9:08:35 GMT -5 Stu said:

Did the Backstreet Boys or Nsync ever have a pet monkey, get carried up the Great Wall of China, visit a Brazilian massage parlor, say Anne Frank would be a Belieber ....

No, but I think we just need to attribute that to children who really didn't get childhoods and as a result have super-inflated egos. There will come a time just like Leif Garrison, Danny Bonaduce, etc. when no one gives a s*** about him. It'll be up to him wither he goes down the Joseph Gordon-Levitt path (of respectability) or the Lindsay Lohan path (spiral of drugs and chaos).