"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.

"Chalk White and Oh-So Frail."

I really lucked out in elementary school. I was a super scrawny, goofy redhead with a temper and a bad mouth. In theory I should have gotten way more kicks to the ass than I recieved. Marin Elementary was pretty friendly though. I was a class clown and only the real assholes hated me for being the absolute worst kickball player they ever played with. At school I spent a good long time getting to know everyone, so I wasn't judged solely on my pale, brittle exterior.
When I started going to the Berkeley JCC after school in the 3rd grade, things changed drastically. I was the shy new kid. No getting-to-know-me period, that's just what I was. I'd be walking down the hall and the bullies would spot me. Boom, headlock. I remember once getting locked in a full nelson right in front of my dad when he came to pick me up. My dad asked me about it on the way home, and I told him not to do anything about it because I felt like it would just make the situation worse. Classic bullying.
They picked on me for weeks. I was pretty much exiled from the outdoor area after a game of soccer where I proved to be a devastatingly ineffective goalie. I hated the way they pushed me around and I wasn't going to take it anymore! So did I wise up and tell an adult? Better! I ran and hid.
One of my favorite ways to avoid bullies at the JCC was to chill with the lazy counselors who kicked it in the little indoor lounge area while the big guys played sports. Inside was where the snack was kept, and there was a radio that I was free to tune to any station I wanted. So I would eat chips and salsa (sometimes for snack they just set out a huge pot of cold white rice. What?) and do arts and crafts while rocking out to The Z: Z-95.7.

Eve 6 |MTV Music

Trends Spotted: Crazy bright colored set pieces.

I remember this song well for several reasons: First of all, it's catchy as hell. The chorus just stuck with me. Also, they played the crap out of this one. One time a counselor asked me if I just brought in a tape with this song every day and put it in the radio. Nope, the DJ at the Z loved him some Eve 6.
Also, they played the video a bunch on MTV's Say What? The show where they had a side-scrolling bar of the lyrics at the bottom of the screen. This show was doubly awesome because you could learn the lyrics AND have a little 30 minute karaoke session in your room once you knew the song well enough.
The final reason this song and video sticks out in my mind so well is at the time, my brother and the lead singer looked fairly similar. The faces weren't an uncanny match but my brother used to have short red hair like the guy in the video. I remember telling him this as our mom drove us home one day, and he just kind of shrugged it off like he didn't want to hear me say that. I meant it as a compliment because I thought the song was cool. Later in life, I would come to realize that he reacted the way he did because it's simply never fun for a guy with red hair to be given the news that he looks like someone else with red hair. This is because there are no handsome red heads. It very well may come from a sincere, well meaning place in your heart as a compliment. But the truth is we already know we're all just goofy looking. So save it and just tell your ginger pal that he's got cool sneakers on or something equally harmless.