Thursday, November 17, 2011

Admitting Guilty Pleasures II

Their time is long long gone, along with my teenage years. Those bands started falling apart, and each of the singers went after their solo careers (or NASA careers – yes, I'm looking at you, Lance Bass. What the hell were you thinking? NASA, seriously?! Yeah, right, you can sing Bye bye bye to that).
They all sang pretty well and the music in itself was always either rather groovy or quite pretty. But C'MON, have you listened to the lyrics?
The Backstreet Boys' I want It That Way: “You are my fire, the one desire, believe when I say, I want it that way”.
We've Got It Goin' On? “Jam on cause Backstreet's got it, come on now everybody we've got it goin' on”.
Incomplete: “Empty spaces fill me up with holes, distant faces with no place left to go”. How clever!
'N Sync's I Need Love: “I need love, you need love, we all really need love. All I want, all I need, we all really need love”.
Tearing Up My Heart: “It's tearing up my heart when I'm with you, but when we are apart, I feel it too, and no matter what I do I feel the pain, with or without you.” #U2feelings?
5ive's Everybody Get Up: “Everybody get up, singing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 will make you get down now!” Yeah sure, whatever British dudes.
And don't even get me started on Westlife.
No matter how well they sing those songs, the lyrics always remind me of a wine tasting session: whiny and cheesy. Those songs only talk about three things: a) a girl the singer loves but can't have – she's either friend-zoned him, or she's dating some jackass; b) a girl who left him cause of some stupid mistake he made, and now the singer's begging her to come back; c) a girl he used to love and now hates cause she left him (usually for some other guy with more money).
However, there's a reason why I know their lyrics well enough to write them down without having to google them. I still have all of them in my iPod, and yes, I still listen to them. Just yesterday I was cleaning up while singing It's Gonna Be Me. I like to listen to those horribly tacky songs, and I like to sing along, and make faces while at it.
In my iPod, all of those boy band songs are in a folder called “Things I'm not proud of”. But they're all there. And when the Backstreet Boys came to Brazil last year, I went to their show. Proudly. Or almost.
Also: I still have a HUGE crush on Justin Timberlake. Britney seriously lost the best catch in Hollywood. 


VanessaHudgens HAS to be one of the most annoying actresses I've ever seen. Her pretty face is too small, her voice is too pitchy, and everything she says sounds annoyingly self-righteous. Besides, her character in the movie, Gabriella, is ridiculously exasperating: she's pretty, she's part of the scholastic decathlon team, she can sing well, she's incapable of harming anyone, or saying anything mean, she's C'MON! If there's one thing Hollywood producers, executives and screen writers have yet to learn is this: perfect protagonists are impossible to empathize with. We like to see flawed characters, characters that mirror ourselves. Which is why most people end up rooting for the villain or the underdog rather than the hero/heroine of the story. A thoroughly nice beautiful girl that can do everything perfectly is definitely not the mirror of the average Jane.
Same thing goes for Zac Efron's character, Troy: he's abusively handsome, a nice son, a nice friend, a nice student, a nice boyfriend, the complete jock, captain of the basketball team, he can sing well, AND he's got loads of charisma (something Vanessa Hudgens definitely lacks). Again, not your average Joe.
The premise of the movie is also kind of stupid: Troy and Gabriella's friends have a hard time understanding that they have other interests? They can't accept the fact that those kids might be interested in something else other than playing basketball/studying Math? What kind of world is that where people can only like and be good at one thing??
And yet, I've seen the three movies, I've got the complete soundtrack in my iPod, and I can sing almost every song. And I have a blast every time I watch the movies/listen to the songs. A few things that occur to me in my defense: 1. Zac Efron is really handsome and charismatic; 2. the songs are nice to sing along; 3. the “villains” are funny as hell; 4. it's better for a child or a teenager to be watching this than some movie full of violence and sex. Am I right?


To be continued...

5 comments:

Ricademus said...

You're right...and Ashley Tisdale is always fun. I think I saw her once or twice on some Disney show--Saved by the Bell maybe? ;P

I have some BSB on my iPod. When I sing along to "As Long as You Love Me", I change "love me" to "comment"--I made it into a blog song. LOL, I've also done that to a Barry White song. Someday I need to share those.

You reminded me that I want to do a post asking people their favorite song that is NOT about relationships (romatantic or family), God, or partying.

PS - About my gut feelings, back then I MAY have been that suspicious of everyone. =)

Nashe^ said...

I totally still have N*SYNC in my music player, too! Cheesy or not, they were thoroughly ennjoyable. Boybands kept our generation sane!

Unknown said...

You're like a whole different person to me now.

Rml said...

Nah, c'mon Leo!

K7 said...

Prefer their musics back then in 90's... hardly can come across music that much good these days.