What's Happened to the Boy Band?

After reflecting on the untimely death of Stephen Gately and how his bandmates were out in Majorca quicker than an X Factor winner getting the boot from the record label, it made me wonder what ever happened to the good ol' fashioned boy bands of the '90's? These bands were essentially my childhood and although I didn't have my walls adorned with pictures of them, I still worshipped these guys as sort of role models.....(I did not just admit I'm gay).

Boyzone, Take That, Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC (the stupidest punctuation of any proper noun EVER), Westlife. These were the kings of the '90's. While girls had their own little musical 'revolution' with the Spice Girls, us lil' guys gazed at these plastic and mainly manufactured bunch of males in awe. Even our mum's got involved with the worshipping, and most went a lot further than just singing along to a few hits. Virtually every single Top of the Pops had at least one of these boy bands on, and you could see that the crowd went mental, even when they were just miming like puppets on a string (I refer to *NSYNC's first album).

So despite their epic popularity in the '90's, why do virtually no boy band's exist today? I think I know the answer. See bands like Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, Muse etc. are basically modern-day boy bands. But they have talent. They can play instruments. They write their own music. They probably formed in a cafe rather than being told by Simon Cowell that the random bloke in the studio was your new bandmate. Nowadays, everyone is a critic (hell, they've even got Amanda Holden judging talent), and the old school boy bands where a career was handed to them on a plate and all they had to do was smile for Smash Hits magazine, are now pretty much ridiculed for having no artistic credibility. Even the old past-timers like Take That have had to break out the piano or dare I say, an acoustic guitar on the odd occasion to make them appear as though they have talent.

So there we are. Snobbery and ridicule has killed off the boy band and now we're left with rap music. Oh f*cking dear. Over and out xD