The first time I heard this was from a young girl reacting to provocation from older women. She was quietly enduring the mockery of her favorite musical group and said that the Beatles were the first boy band with that haircut, matching suits and good-guy attitude. It may have been an exaggeration and a misinterpretation, but it shut up those people who were having fun at her expense.
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Given the educational demands being made at that age, they’re not getting the education they could be, though.
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Yeah, that’s the point. The Beatles weren’t any less marketed and shaped for public consumption than any other major pop band. Even their shift to a more countercultural position was calculated to appeal to a demographic. They changed with the times, because that’s what the market demanded. The demographic that grew up on their music was aging and had new tastes and the Beatles were keeping up with that. It’s true the band had some control over their image later and more input, but they were still very much being shaped by the demands of the industry.
Also, the surviving Beatles don’t even own the rights to their music. So, they were naive right up to the end of the band.
Neither were New Edition. 
But people are weird about the Beatles, especially men. Because if you call the Beatles “a boy band” they see it as some sort of slight or attack on their artistry or the hard work they put into their art. I’m really confused about that. Are people under some sort of illusion that the kids in bands like BTS today don’t bust their ass for what they do? Is it a gendered thing? The stuff that women and girls enjoy are somehow lesser than, so we need to forget that the Beatles were brought to fame on the screams of teen girls? We can only properly understand the Beatles via Sgt. Peppers? The Beatles, despite being one of the most famous band in history (at least in the west) don’t exist outside of the industry in which they found fame. They are very much a byproduct of increased teenaged buying power and the industries desire to cater to that demographic. They had the right sound, the right look, and they got the right people behind them to be a success. They lucked out, and were able to put their artistry to work in order to succeed. How is ANY of that a “bad” thing?
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This makes me wonder how much worse it must be for young performers to go through years of trauma, only to discover they were ripped off financially, too (especially if future career prospects aren’t good):
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The important point here isn’t whether the Beatles or the Monkees were a boy band. It’s the fact that industry organisers exploit young people, and the stalkerish behaviour of a minority of fans empowers that.
I’m sure the problem has got worse thanks to modern networked social media. Back in the 1960s, organising a fan campaign required a significant investment of time and money to write letters, make phone calls and so on. Now it can all be done on your smartphone with a few taps.
Society is still catching up.
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About the only part of that I object to is calling them the first, maybe the first big one?
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K-Pop fans’ organising skills are legendary.
So I was having a nice Saturday generally off K-Pop Twitter and the Internet in general while getting a new bed (it’s great, btw), and apparently I’ve missed a lot. Today was Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma and it had surprisingly low turnout, but not because of the pandemic but because people essentially trolled his campaign with fake reservations, and leading the charge on that front was K-pop fans.
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The idol scene gets so, so much creepier than all that.
TL;DR Version: Creepy men will spend a lot of money just to shake hands with an (often) underage idol.
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That still wouldn’t legitimise the underlaying concept.
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Oh, it’s more than just a concept. It’s in her contract. And the courts have upheld the “no dating” clause. Her agency could have sued her.
The idol industry is much more twisted than people imagine. Toru Fujisawa is not exaggerating in his depictions of the industry in GTO. It’s really like that.
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In the anime series Aggretsuko, there’s a story arc where Retsuko joins an idol group and this obsessed fan buys a ton of tickets for a handshade event so he can hold her hand for minutes on end while berating her on why he doesn’t like her. It’s rightfully played as a creepy scene which leads Retsuko scared. I was quite impressed that the show was willing to criticise idol culture like that, though it was very often critical of Japanese urban life, especially office culture in ways that you seldom see in mainstream media.
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Back Street Girls: Gokudolls
Yakuza, Gender reasignment and Idols.
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First of all, this is the kind of stuff that get’s talked about in the open because of an intense ‘saving face’ culture over there that also bled into japanese law. Things are more likely to be so much worse that being let on for Momoka. That rot goes very deep making it difficult bring about needed labor law and meaningful ethics reform inside of companies. Speaking out even if everything you say is 100% accurate will get your ass sued into oblivion because you hurt somebody’s feelings. It’s not just idol agencies but entertainment companies structured like idol agencies and anyone else who decides to act like a victim to weasel their way out of accountability for their own cruelty and/or stupidity. Adding onto what @lorcan_nagle said a few minutes ago, Oshi no Ko is another example of japanese media starting bring up these sort of issues which are also completely freaking out entertainment companies over there for just merely bringing up these issues to the wider public along with the outright classic anime flick Perfect Blue.
This example (3 comment long thread) I gave back in February in the assholes thread shows an much more extreme case than this BB article. Things for that company have gotten worse over there with more people starting to speak out against the company which led to their CEO saying at shareholders meeting yesterday that they’re in the works of attempting to apply japanese defamation law overseas to silence critics from both former employees and folks online (which will ultimately blow up in his face again haha).
As for the parasocial exploitation practices mentioned in this article, unfortunately it’s not exclusive to asian countries with a notable example of Twitch streamer Amouranth concealing that she had a husband (keyword HAD) who was also her manager who came up with that idea to hide their relationship in the first place to rope in guys. Still completely fucked up no matter where’s it’s done, to which sexual orientation of an audience it gets applied to, or heck even when it was done. This is hardly a new practice at all
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There’s no regulation or oversight of the industry, and a lot of these talent agencies are small, fly by night operations in bad parts of town. The idol to porno pipeline is an open secret.
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I wasn’t talking exclusively of the smaller companies. The example I provided was done by a company that was valued at one point being worth 2.5 billion dollars USD. Word got out about how shitty they were and it cratered their stock so bad, the folks at the TSE had to stop trading of it several times to prevent damaging short selling.
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I disagree with several of your points and assertions. But I’m not going to provide a detailed riposte other than to say that for me there is a difference between a band that assembles itself for musical reasons and a band that is assembled (ETA by others) (or self-assembled) for marketing/demographic reasons. The area in between may be grey but there are many egregious examples of the latter and they fit my definition of ‘boy band’ (or ‘girl band’ for that matter); those that self-assemble for musical reasons don’t.
Pretty much every band forms for marketing/demographics reasons.
Usually, they’re playing to other young people. But they can be an oldies band or a Beatles tribute band.
““If you wanna make a hit, you’ve got to make it fit/So they cut it down to 3:05.”
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I simply do not believe that is the case. Some bands form for purely musical reasons. Some do it as a hobby/part-time. Some want to try and make a living out of their music which may sometimes (but not always) lead them into marketing, etc. and lead them to adapting their art to demographics. And once the industry gets hold of them well, yeah, all bets are off re not being ‘packaged’. But it is not necessarily the reason they form.
But we are way off topic now.
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They went from leather boys to Teddy boys for marketing. Sure there are several motivations for most endeavors. But if you want to get paid - money is a prime one.
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