If I see another boy band …

Being Frank, by Frank Ameduri

Back in the late '80s, tennis star Andre Agassi was the front man for an ad campaign for a major camera manufacturer. The tag line was, "Image is everything." Back then, Andre spent a lot of time working on his image. He had a lot of curly hair, he dressed more flamboyantly than the other players and he cultivated a kind of bad boy persona. He also lost a lot of tennis matches. These days, now that male-pattern baldness has caught up to him, Andre sports a nearly shaved head and more subtle attire on the court. His head now resembles a sort of peach/gourd hybrid. He also spent a lot of time working on his game instead of working on his image. He wins a lot these days. Maybe image isn't exactly everything.

In our culture, form is often valued over substance. It's why Jerry Springer gets more viewers than Bill Moyers. It's why a Las Vegas casino that looks like a cartoon of Paris gets more visitors than the Smithsonian. We've built a version of reality that's a lot like a music video shot at Disneyland. People in big cities drive giant SUVs that never touch rubber to dirt. We eat in restaurants that serve the same food, cooked exactly the same way in New York and Reno. The idea of something authentic actually scares some people. A few years back I took my in-laws to Montreal. It's the second-largest French-speaking city in the world. I wanted to take them to a cafŽ that served some of the best country-style French food on this continent. "I don't know," my mother-in-law said. "They eat all those snails and stuff." We ended up at a place called Pete's. It was kind of like a truck stop -- chicken-fried steak and mushy vegetables on the plate and antacid in the display case at the counter.

One of my favorite examples of the artificial reality we feel safe in is this phenomenon called boy bands. You know, the new hottest boy band features five clean-cut looking, dreamy-eyed pubescent males who have been taught to almost sing and almost dance. Young girls squeal and record companies and bop magazines cash in. One of the first clues that this is an artificial phenomenon is the use of the word "band." Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a band a group of people who play instruments? Sometimes they don't even sing. Singing is the only musical thing the boy bands do, and not very well.

In my book, you don't get to call yourself a musical performer unless you can at least jiggle a tambourine with some proficiency. I like a musician who writes songs and plays them on an instrument -- preferably a guitar. If you just bounce around like an idiot, sing somebody else's songs and mug for the audience, you're not a musician. You're a karaoke geek. I don't care how loud teen-age girls squeal, these guys are karaoke geeks.

Another clue is the fleeting nature of boy band popularity -- the-flavor-of-the-month-thing. Once these guys are old enough to opt out of college in favor of fame and fortune, they're not boy bands anymore. They've graduated into the realm of silly-looking almost-man bands. At some point, their teen-age fans do something interesting. They grow up. In no time at all, pre-teen girls become teen-agers, and then they become young women. One of the most notable changes in their maturation is that they develop a wonderful thing called musical taste. They stop buying CDs, posters and magazines featuring the Back Alley Boppers, and they seek out music with a little more depth -- a little more authenticity. The next crop of teenyboppers takes one look at the Back Alley Boppers and says, "Who are the old dudes with the lame clothes?" These girls seek out their own boy bands to adore, and the silly-looking almost-man bands break up and the members are forced to learn a trade.

I guess I'm getting old and grumpy. When I was a kid my parents complained about the music I listened to. "That's not music," they said. "That's just a bunch of guys with long hair screaming." Maybe I'm becoming my parents. I don't think so, though. Those long-haired guys screamed with meaning … and they could wail on a guitar.

Frank Ameduri just wishes he had as much attention as the boys in the boy band.