May 21, 1999
Music

Where The Boys Are

Backstreet Boys and C Note offer studio-sweetened confections that are pleasant enough, but sometimes hard to swallow.

Review by Jim Farber

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At least those formulas prove worth repeating: The faster tracks recall the best of '80s Michael Jackson. A slow one, "I Want It That Way," ranks as the bubblegum ballad of the year. It's so likable, it doesn't matter that the group's voices are the sonic equivalent of warm milk.

The Boys take one significant risk with the lyrics. Teen acts normally can't acknowledge their romantic power. They have to remain the longing ones in order to seal the twin fantasies of purity and accessibility. Yet in "Don't Want You Back," the Boys do the rejecting! Don't worry, girls. The group more than make up for it with goo like "The Perfect Fan," a salute to their mothers that could make even Pat Robertson wretch. There's also "Larger Than Life," a howler casting fans as the superhuman force in the exchange between listener and star. Luckily, with a group like the Backstreet Boys, the more cheese appeal, the better.

You'll find slightly less flavor on C Note's debut, Different Kind of Love (due out May 25). The quartet just came sweeping off the assembly line of Louis J. Pearlman, the guy who taught the B-Boys and 'N Sync what to say and do. For a twist he cast Hispanic kids this time, and while the guys warble a few lines in Spanish, they end up seeming about as Latin as the huevos rancheros at Denny's. They do have one irresistible single, "Wait Till I Get Home," cowritten by Full Force. You'll also find a few more aggressive ditties than on most such efforts. But otherwise this could come from any dream-boy act of the minute.

If such artists mainly offer innocuous fun, there remains one depressing angle to this whole teen stampede. Whereas 20 years ago young people searching for vulnerable emotions listened to writers as sophisticated as Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, all too many of their modern equivalents tune in to fluff like this. Far from robbing kids of their youth, current pop actually threatens to keep them naive longer, turning the complicated dramas of adolescence into crass fantasy. Millennium: B- Different Kind of Love: C+

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Source: Entertainment Weekly