Boy bands: The next generation
Why Don’t We provide an up-to-date snapshot of the state of a 50-year-old formula
While Toronto was getting frozen in ice, fairy-tale curse style, last Saturday, school friends Lily Getachew and Michelle Fabjan, both 15, spent nine hours standing outside the Danforth Music Hall, first in line for American boy band Why Don’t We.
The teen five-piece was playing its first of two sold-out shows, and Getachew and Fabjan arrived around 9 a.m. in the hopes of being within hand-grasping distance at the general admission show.
Michelle discovered Why Don’t We on Instagram Explore last year, though she was familiar with band member Daniel Seavey from his top 10 placement on American Idol in 2015. Lily knew Zach Herron, her personal favourite, from his cover of Shawn Mendes’ “Stitches,” a viral smash that garnered a combined 20 million hits on Instagram and Facebook. “Everyone knew that!” she says.
Inside the theatre, the group members — Jonah Marais, 19, from Minnesota; Texan Corbyn Besson, 19; Seavey, 19, from Oregon; Pennsylvania’s Jack Avery, 18; and Texan Herron, 16 — grab seats in the balcony.
Each member came to the band with a fan base the size of a small Canadian city: besides Seavey’s and Herron’s individual successes, Marais and Besson were popular stars on the live videostreaming site YouNow, and Avery had a following singing Ed Sheeran covers on YouTube. Jon Lucero, an impresario for the social-media set, brought them together for a hang in Los Angeles, where they played the FIFA soccer video game in their underwear and ate powdered grocery-store doughnuts.
That was in 2016. They’ve since released five EPs, including last fall’s “Invitation,” which topped the iTunes chart in Canada. Their videos have been viewed over 150 million times on YouTube in two years, roughly dou-
ble the total for the Tragically Hip’s entire discography.
As a member of an internet-famous supergroup, Marais appreciates how different his position is today from when the Beatles’ secretary Freda Kelly was serving fans by mailing strands of the Fab Four’s hair to them. “I can send a tweet on my phone and it will go to every single one of (the fans’) phones,” he says.
The intimacy of the connection works both ways. Marais says a fan recently brought him a hat from his childhood baseball team. “They’ve found your grandma’s best friend’s former roommate’s picture of you on Facebook that you didn’t even know existed,” Seavey says with a laugh.
Jessica Leski, the Melbournebased director behind “I Used To Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story,” which will have its world première at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival on April 26, fears that access pierces the illusion. “Part of the allure of a boy band is what you project onto them,” she says.
Leski, 37, understands that appeal. She surprised herself at age 31 by becoming a late-in-life Directioner, as One Direction’s fans call themselves.
“With One Direction, to have that enormous fandom online and interacting not just with other fans but with the boys directly just felt so huge and different from any other time of being a fan,” she says. “You could write love letters to John Lennon but whether he would actually see them, who knows? You could tweet at Harry Styles and, especially early on, it felt like there was a chance that he could see it.”
One of Leski’s subjects in the doc is Dara, a Take That superfan who outlines some shared characteristics of boy bands: they should be between the ages of 17 and 21 with three to five members, covering archetypical personalities including “the mysterious one,” “the sexy one,” “the cute one,” “the older-brother type,” and — sorry, AJ McLean — “the forgotten one.” She considers dancing and colour-coordinated outfits to be canon, though One Direction broke with those traditions.
With One Direction disbanding in 2016, could it be too soon to revive the boy band cycle again? Leski doesn’t think so. “Once they become men, it changes,” Leski says.
“Two of them (Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson) have children! Why would someone who is 12 feel love for someone who already has a child?”
At Why Don’t We’s show, the stage is choked by teenage girls who scream when the boys perform such moves as forming a semicircle and delivering a synchronized kick backwards, as if they have just survived an explosion created by their friendship. Behind the girls there is a gap and then, along the back, is another group: bored parents clutching beers, some of whom aren’t even looking at the stage.
It’s a reminder that ever since the Beatles were wearing matching suits and singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on The Ed Sullivan Show, there have been scowling adults who don’t get it.
“As an outsider, you look at it and think, that’s not as good,” Leski says. “But for (teenagers today) it’s going to be the biggest thing ever.”