Against Boybands

Ages ago I was asked to write for the For and Against section in my college magazine this month. I was against, and the subject was boybands. The version below I unfortunately had to scrap, because it was too long and jumbled for proper publication. But I liked it too much just to get rid of it, so here it is.

I hate boybands - I don’t think my DNA would have it any other way. I hate ‘pretty-boys’ (jealousy), I hate pop music (snobbery), and I hate solely-for-profit art (early exposure to punk music), and boybands are the saccharine mixture of all of these things. They are bred solely to harvest money from the pockets of teenage girls while not scaring the mothers of those girls – cheeky, but not threatening (this is probably why Charles Manson failed his Monkees audition). It’s all naive smiles, colour-coordinated chinos and expensively ruffled hair, leave any talent at the back door, out by the bins. If more teenage girls were cynical Darias we wouldn’t have this problem.
Gareth Campesinos, frontman of my favourite band and a man who, let’s just say, has to rely on his charms when dating, wrote an article a few months back in which he outlined his belief that ugly people made the best songwriters and lyricists.

If you were ugly, you had nothing to lose by trying to become interesting. Writing songs and poetry is personal, and can be embarrassing, so why risk humiliation and losing the friends that your face had won you. For example, Paul Heaton, who is quoted extensively in Gareth’s article, is one of the great British lyricists, and a man obsessed with his own ugliness. (He feels like London, but looks like Hull. When he was born, the doctor says ‘we’d had some ugly babies, but none were quite you’ then ‘looks as if the nose and chin are definitely here to stay’.)

On a similar note, Morrissey, probably the only British lyricist of the past few decades who was better than Heaton, was obsessed not with his looks but with his own loneliness and misery.
This point segues rather clunkily into the main crux of my argument - against boybands. Boybands are not staffed by men like Stephen Morrissey, Paul Heaton or Gareth Campesinos. Boybands are staffed by pretty-boys who have songs written for them, and instruments played for them, and their smiles, ruffled hair and chinos selected for them.

They might very well have been through some emotional turmoil, but all memories of it have been cast aside (unless it can help to shift a few more copies). It’s not just talent that has been jettisoned by boyband members - their personality has been thrown over to join the shards of flotsam drifting in the sea. Every member of every boyband has the smug veneer of someone who has been popular and had an easy life since they were hurried off to school by their parents. They haven’t risked those friends won by their faces, and they never will.

And I know I’d Paul Heaton, with his chin like a tramp’s juke-box, over them any day.