Backstreet Boys

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

The Backstreet Boys were put together in 1993 in Orlando, Florida: Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, AJ McLean and the cousins Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson. They were a vocal group, not a band that played instruments itself. With Take That and *NSYNC they belong to the cast boy bands of the 1990s. According to Billboard they are the best-selling boy band ever.

Music and breakthrough

Their first single, We've Got It Goin' On, did little in America, but reached the top five in several European countries. The debut album Backstreet Boys (1996) made the group popular first in Europe, especially in Germany, and only afterwards in its home country. Many of their hits came from Cheiron Studio in Stockholm, where Max Martin and his colleagues made the music and the singers dropped by to sing their parts. I Want It That Way, written by Max Martin and Andreas Carlsson, was recorded there in November 1998. It became the first single from Millennium (1999), which sold about 1.13 million copies in America in its first week. In England I Want It That Way became their only number 1 hit.

Influence

In 2006 Richardson left; in 2012 he returned. The group kept performing, with concert residencies in Las Vegas, and in 2013 received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Backstreet Boys show how the hit factory worked in the late 1990s: American singers, Swedish songs, and an audience of teenagers who bought albums by the million at a time.

Listening

• 
  I Want It That Way · Backstreet Boys, 1999
  Apple Music ↗

Discography

Studio albums

• 1996Backstreet Boys
• 1997Backstreet’s Back
• 1999Millennium
• 2000Black & Blue
• 2005Never Gone
• 2007Unbreakable
• 2009This Is Us
• 2013In a World Like This
• 2019DNA
• 2022A Very Backstreet Christmas

In School of Rock

The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.

• Mixtape 2: Youth Cultures 1950-1980^NL Reader
• Mixtape 12: The Hit Factory^NL Reader
• Mixtape 13: From Cassette to Cloud^NL Reader

Mentioned in other articles

• Stockholm pop (Max Martin) GenreIn Cheiron Studio in Stockholm, from the mid-1990s Max Martin and his colleagues wrote and produced the hits of the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC and Britney Spears.
• ...Baby One More Time SongMax Martin first wrote ...Baby One More Time for the Backstreet Boys and the American group TLC, who both turned it down.

See also

• ...Baby One More Time
• Black & Blue
• Never Gone
• This Is Us
• In a World Like This
• Boy bands and girl groups
• Stockholm pop (Max Martin)

Sources

1. Wikipedia (en): Backstreet Boys
2. Wikipedia (en): Max Martin
3. Wikipedia (en): I Want It That Way