If there’s one thing we’ve learned about pop music over the last half-century, it’s that while the boy band might not always be at pop’s center, it’s somewhere orbiting around it — and will be back soon enough.
From the early ’70s to the mid ’80s to the late ’90s to the early ’10s to now, boy bands have seemingly always arrived in American pop culture in waves, crashing onto our shores suddenly and dramatically. Sometimes they come from elsewhere — the U.K., Korea, even nearby Latin America — and sometimes they spring up locally, from unexpected hotspots like Gary, Indiana; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Orlando, Florida. But each time they come, pop music is never the same afterwards — nor are the lives of tens of millions of screaming young’ns whose early adolescences will come to be defined by their songs.