"Oh my god we're back again."

Alright, it's high time that I start writing about the other side of the music coin. Let's take a trip to the Backstreets, shall we?

Before the huge breakout of macho backlash to all of the boy bands became a movement in of itself, before I hated every band Kid Rock and Eminem told me to hate, the Backstreet Boys were...just a group. They were just more of the same junk that a van full of kids would listen to on the way to their after school program. Pretty much everybody recognized them for what they truly were: harmless, run-of-the-mill pop. A bunch of 4th graders didn't hate it, but we'd probably be happier if that Eagle Eye Cherry song was playing.
Before The Backstreet Boys were my favorite bands' sworn enemies, I saw this video. At that age, there was no way that I'd ever admit to watching and enjoying it. I was no fan, but I deemed the video watchable. As long as nobody else was watching with me.

Trends Spotted: Huge Choreographed Dance, Back-Up Dancers, Bleached Hair
I landed on the on The Disney Channel while flipping through the stations and this was playing. What can I say? A dancing mummy is a pretty effective attention-grabbing concept for a kid. Then I heard that mummy sing "am I sexual?" and I wondered why this was on The Disney Channel.
As much as I love keeping this blog as devoted as possible to old memories, I simply don't have as many memories about the Boy Band videos compared to the other stuff I've been writing about. So, in absence of a funnier anecdote, I'd like to take this time to do what I did while watching Boy Band videos ten years ago: Unfairly deconstuct them piece by piece.
I'm this close to filing this video under "doesn't make any goddamn sense." Ideally, the video would just have the guys singing and dancing while dressed as monsters. But no! We need a story to go along! It's ironic that the little bits before and after the actual song that try to give the video some context raise more unanswered questions than if they just weren't there. Or maybe the extra 45 seconds only cause me to ponder with such detail because I'm writing a blog about bad music videos from my childhood. I better cover all of my bases just in case and get this out there.
We're introduced to our heroes. They're all distressed because their bus has broken down (What concert-holding stadium is located on top of a stormy mountain? You're pretty much asking for spooky times at this point.), and the only advice they get from their driver (known to hardcore Backstreet fans as the 6th Boy) is to chill out in this fucking mansion that doesn't belong to them while the bus gets fixed. Now, it's one thing to just stroll on in and hang out, but Brian, the adventurous one, takes it one huge, stupid step further and decides to head up to a bedroom to lay down to get some sleep. He finds a dead animal under the sheets, and that's when things get crazy.
Each one of the five dudes morphs into a hip, dancy version of the classic Universal monsters! Except AJ, who is dressed as the Phantom of the Opera. And Kevin is some kind of amphibious Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde who spends all of his time in a laboratory turning back and forth so you can never see both halves of his face at the same time. Brian is the Wolfman, and for some reason that gives him these crazy gymnastic abilities. He kind of upstages everybody else by jumping through the different setpieces behind everybody else near the end. He also has gigantic fake teeth that make his lipsyncing look equally difficult and hilarious. Howie is Dracula. As Dracula, he carries a cane and can turn invisible. He also has a thing for girls who blankly stare into cameras. Nick is the aforementioned sexual mummy. I've been thinking about this for way too long, and in my mind, if Nick gets the one line in the song about being sexual, shouldn't he have dibs on getting to dressed as Howie's monster? Name one mummy that is more sexual than the least sexual vampire. That sarcophagus clearly has no room for a dancing mummy and a female mummy back-up dancer. Meanwhile, it's common knowledge that vampires spend all of their time at night. There's got to be nights when vampires stock up on neck blood and just have terrifying orgies in their manors. And furthermore, there's just a certain aura of weird kinky shit that comes naturally with vampire territory. Final verdict: "Am I sexual?" Outlook not so good. It's obvious that mummies can't say shit about being sexual if there's a vampire in the room.