#I was in shock and just watched Backstreet Boys music videos until dinner

[awxareness]

A wonderful letter- but Loay should keep in mind that Gen Z doesn’t remember 9/11 because they were in diapers or not even a glimmer in their parents eyes.

It’s the asinine millenials (and to my shame I know there’s a handful), that should be reminded of 9/11. The youngest millennial would have been in kindergarten when it happened. They might not have remembered all of that day, but there’d be key points.

And then anyone older is just…..yeah, willful ignorance or hidden antisemitism.

[brishu]

Almost Everyone

My daughters were introduced to the music of the Backstreet Boys by camp counselors, so their only context for hearing some of their bigger hits (and they have an astonishing number of very big hits) was the enthusiasm of people about 10 years older than them. No anti-boyband snark, no snobbery that looks askance at performers who don’t play instruments. They began asking for specific songs to be added to their music players, and even requested “As Long As You Love Me” at my dearest friend’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah party. To them, the Backstreet Boys were as much a part of the pop canon as Elvis, only still out there performing.

Their response to the BSB’s seemed to be purely musical. It’s possible that they got high on secondhand boyband fumes, since their counselors’ enthusiasm was surely fueled by the gangbusters marketing campaign designed to make millions of kids fall in love with AJ, Brian, Nick, Howie and Kevin, which is probably even harder to pull off than it sounds. But as much as I’d like to, I can’t discount the quality of the music either. And if I’m shocked that five cute boys who first performed together in 1993 just hung another Number 1 album on the Billboard charts (which apparently also still exist), maybe it’s my shock that should be shocking. I also envied the girls their ready embrace of songs they liked without subjecting them to the battery of artistic litmus tests their sonically dyspeptic father does. 

The psychotherapeutic industry seems built upon the distinction between gentle and brutal. If you make the same, relatively harmless mistake repeatedly, steps toward correction are fine, but ease up on the internal machete. If you are too prone to lying to maintain valuable relationships or hold down a job, stop treating your dishonesty like fine china, you goddamn schlemiel. OK, I’m not a psychological expert but one of the things I’ve been working on in therapy is retaining a consistent striving for improvement while loosening an attachment to self-flagellation. So, occasional desire to make my children happy aside, was it a well-earned moment of transcendence or a mere boot to my own aesthetics that led me to sneak off to the Barclays Center to buy a trio of Backstreet Boys tickets while the girls were in Hebrew school?

I didn’t tell them about the tickets for several months, but ultimately I worried that surprising them on the day of the concert would pressure them to evince unnatural levels of appreciation for their loving father’s amazing gesture, so about two weeks before the show, I gave them a heads up. 

Another chronic difficulty I have is ordering food from people whose first language is not English. I don’t think it makes me Steve King to cling to the generalization that they never take me seriously when I say I want it spicy. So on the day of the concert I ordered Thai food and asked them to make it “extra, extra, extra spicy please.” In retrospect that was at least one “extra” too many. But by the time we had dinner before the show, I forgot about lunch and slathered everything I ate with hot sauce, which I believe contributed to my need of a bathroom that undermined my plan to arrive at the Barclays Center by 7:30 so we could get through the security line before the show started at 8.

I had looked up the setlists from Chicago and Detroit and noted that they opened the show with a song called “Everyone”, which I thought was the one where they’re like “Everybaaaah-day! Rock your baaaah-day!”, which in my self-conferred Masters in Backstreetology seemed like the only appropriate opener so I really, really didn’t want the girls to miss it, which brought on a sustained castigation of why I prioritized capsaicin over keeping promises I’d silently (and inaccurately) made to my children. 

We got into the arena at about 8:12 and, hearing noise emanating from the stage, rushed up several flights of stairs to our seats. That’s when we learned that there was an opening act named Baylee Littrell (it wasn’t until the next morning that I learned he was Brian Littrell’s 16 year-old son). What we caught of his set assuaged whatever guilt I felt about what we missed, but I did appreciate that he played with actual bass, guitar and drums (plus keyboards, horns and back-up vocals that could not be seen onstage). We looked him up on Spotify to see how many plays his songs had gotten and determined that the one with more than 300,000 would be the closer. Do you know how many great bands would harm the elderly for 30,000 plays??? Fruit & Flowers only have two songs over 20k. Look ‘em up, they rule. Anyway, we were right. It was a song called Boxes and apparently the girl Baylee loves checks off all 22 of them. 

I have shadowy memories of watching the Backstreet Boys’ debut on Saturday Night Live with this perfectly synced dance involving chairs that they may or may not have stacked at one point during their number. At the time I was appalled by them, but proud of myself for being sophisticated enough to label their performance Fosse-esque. Harboring the incorrect assumptions that “Everyone” was the song I thought it was, and that their act had not evolved in the 20 years since I saw them on SNL, I tried to share in the excitement of the folks around me. Our neighbors were a very attractive young man and woman who kept apologizing when they passed us to get to the aisle. I tried not to eavesdrop but I did hear the young man extol his therapist to his friend (somehow it was clear they weren’t a couple). Just before the show started the young woman asked if I was the fan bringing my kids along or vice versa. I said it was mainly the kids but I was stoked too. She said that she and her friend had caught the band in Vegas and it was so amazing that they had to go again in Brooklyn and don’t mind her when she sang along to every lyric, even the new ones. Our conversation ended abruptly when the lights went down and she joined the collective “WHOO!” volleying stageward. 

As though in response, the stage started to open with almost unbearable slowness, suspense mounting as aperture expanded to maw, and I realized that I am unable to experience a reveal like that without hearkening back to one of the earliest and most vivid aural memories I have- the hinges creaking at the beginning of the Monster Mash. On angled video screens, band members appeared, one by one, in slow motion. The way they fingered their hat brim or rolled their shoulders made me laugh very hard. My neighbor to my left nodded approvingly, the kids to my right briefly emancipated themselves. Finally the tectonic shifting ended and there, on a platform so receded that I thought they should be called the Backstage Boys, were five guys who had been crushing it for 26 fucking years.

My neighbor said, “They can’t really dance anymore but they can still sing!”

“Everyone” is not the song I thought it was.

The first concert our kids ever attended was Los Lobos in Prospect Park. Our younger daughter was 10 months old and happy anywhere that had popsicles. Our older daughter was nearly 3 and for months she would ask to hear more Los Lobos. I don’t think she recognized anything from the concert, she just wanted to be reminded of the special experience of live, loud music and how happy it made the people around her (including her dad), and our living room stereo system was the best portal for that. Los Lobos’ most popular non-fucking-La Bamba-song is Cancion del Mariachi, coming in at 15,898,494 plays. Nothing else cracks a million. 

This was their first time seeing a bigtime pop act, and though they only knew about 5 of the 30 songs performed, they were rapt for the entire show. Except when the band talked to the audience, which they did in a sort of schematic where every member got his five-minute lovefest with the audience while the other guys changed outfits. They were all some variation on how much love they felt in the room (it was pretty palpable), how much gratitude they felt to the fans for the longevity of their career, and how pleased they were to be Number 1 yet again. Oh and that music was important too. I don’t mean to demean their commitment to music. All five of them can sing quite well, they harmonize together beautifully (even though I’m pretty sure vocal enhancements were employed without remorse) and you can’t sing the same song over and over again for more than 20 years without losing it unless the song is half-decent. But without getting too grumpy about it, I neither could nor wanted to suppress a flare of anger that so many serious musicians are poor while these cutie pies are all multi-millionaires. I don’t know what the ultimate size of the music market is, and it was hardly revelatory to note that these guys’ share was not in line with the quality of their musical production, but I felt like I had to take my own tiny stand, to stand up for musicians less slickly managed, artists less adept at navigating A&R social hierarchies, bands whose universality is not predicated on cultural touchstones manufactured by MTV. Obviously, nobody buys a concert ticket in the hope that they’ll get scolded at the show. Another thing people try to avoid at concerts is taking a dump. And so more acutely than ever, my self-righteousness was supplanted by regret for that extra extra.

I thought about asking my neighbors to watch the kids, and even to make the joke “And don’t let them vape!” but opted not to because I didn’t want to suggest that I had a problem with their vaping (such is my social density that I tuned out all of their apologia and was so grateful for their friendliness that I just wanted them to like me, never realizing that maybe, just maybe they might really want me to like them too). So I just told the kids to stay put and made my way to the can. And I daresay BSB fans are as nice in private as they are out in the arena. I base this conjecture on my bathroom experience where, unlike most concerts I attend, I was able to tend to my digestive needs without feeling like I had to contort myself to avoid somebody else’s excrement. It shouldn’t be surprising that more banal music begets more polite behavior, hell even Plato cautioned against exposing certain segments of society to more inflammatory musical scales. But maybe all that bougie antisepticism is just proof of how truly un-punk Mr. Stand-Taker really is.

Returned to the seats where the kids looked sleepy. I told them they shouldn’t feel any pressure to stay for the whole show, which looked like it was going to end after 11. They looked at me like I’d just told them I was donating their college fund to Trump 2020. 

One of them said, “Just because we’re not dancing and screaming doesn’t mean we aren’t having an amazing time, Dad.”

OK then.

So that song I got confused about is actually called “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).” I pretended like I knew that the whole time and was pretty sure I got away with it. Then one of the girls said, “I thought you said they opened with this song.” And with no remorse whatsoever I said, “Yeah, that was in Florida.” Why I needed them to think I knew what I was talking about is almost a less interesting question than why I also lied about what states preceded New York on the DNA Worldwide Tour. 

There were more costume changes, more banter with adoring fans, more grinding reconfiguration of the stage, more neon mike stands shifting color in unison, something that probably seemed high tech in 1999, and more hits, at least four up-tempo numbers before they went into their big treacly ballad about which way they want it, which nobody can convince me isn’t about the supposed horrors of anal sex. Our neighbors checked and sure enough, both kids knew every word. A singalong ensued. Then I encouraged departure but the kids insisted on staying in case there was more. There was more. 

In fact, all five guys came out for what I guess was an encore wearing Nets jerseys. Knowing what a rabid Nets fan I am, both kids felt vindicated for insisting we stick around. And then they actually knew the second, and final song of the evening and were so exhilarated by the whole thing that they wanted to walk all the way home. But it was 11:15 and I’d been up since 4:30 and I was not above projecting my fatigue onto them so we took the subway one stop. We had gotten out quickly enough that the train was not packed with other BSBers or whatever their fans are called. And again, if we strip away the petty concern of my daughters’ happiness, was I glad we went to a Backstreet Boys Concert? Well, one kid said “That would have been awesome even if the band didn’t sing any songs. The lights were just so great!” So cool. I just spent the better part of a week’s pay on the magic of strobes that kept me up way past my bedtime. And two very happy daughters. And very pleasant interactions with attractive strangers. And a few moments of infectious beats and melodies. And the nicest shit I’ve ever taken at a concert. Would I do it again, even with smarter lunch ordering? Without hesitation.

By the way, this was written while listening to Face Stabber, the newest Thee Oh Sees album. It’s fucking awesome. They’re playing a club in a few weeks than can hold about 800 people.