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although they are generally considered a flash in the pan their staying power and popularity is ever present they make the masses swoon and sway as they sweep us off our feet with their swagger [Music] we are going backstage past the buff bouncers as we blow the lid off boy bands on this week's episode of f y i welcome to for your info english you got it [Music] hello hello hello amigos and welcome to another exciting edition of fyi for your english the topic-based podcast where we look at
a lot of different topics and we delve into them in hopes to teach you some english and by the looks of it it seems like a lot of you are learning english and you're excited about all the other things you're learning aside from english because one of my taglines for this podcast is learn so much more than english and as i say if you're paying attention you're learning about harley-davidson's you're learning about baseball beer wine and all other interesting topics
and let's be honest the more things you can talk about the better you are at conversation and one of the good things about the topics we look at here on this show is they don't tend to be too controversial they're topics that you could talk about in any environment and today we're going to tackle boy bands or as i said in the intro we're going to blow the lid off boy bands and to blow the lid off is exponer because if you think about it the lid is la tapa or stapar vamos a
i don't even know how you would translate them in spanish and we're going to look at that term because that term well some boy bands consider derogatory so let's take a look at our intro because as always i put a lot of expressions collocations and different concepts in there for you to learn i started out by saying although and remember all though is alm ke but you can also say although or even though so even though or although they are generally considered a flash
in the pan so considered as obvious obviously considerado we could also say thought of they are thought of as a flash in the pan and a flash in the pan when i looked at the translation is flor de undia so something that's really popular for a short time then i said their staying power and popularity is ever present and the word staying power means stamina it means the ability to endure aguante or resistencia their staying power and popularity is ever present and the word ever
present which is a hyphenated word means siempre presente constante so yeah what am i getting at we love to make fun of boy bands todos nos borlamos but in the end there they are selling albums selling out stadiums and who's laughing at who the expression we use in english is they're laughing their way to the bank then i said they make the masses like the masses or las masas swoon and to swoon is to become overcome with emotion it says here embelliarse oh that's a new one for me
extasiarse it can even be used to say des maiarse de la emotion to pass out or to faint and the word sway means me thirsty vamos to sway s-w-a-y as they sweep us off our feet and to sweep somebody off of their feet is to cause people to fall in love with them i think in spanish you say cair a los piece de algien and it's literally the word sweep is barret it's an irregular verb sweep swept swept so they sweep us off our feet with their swagger and swagger is this kind of wok
it says here it's kind of walking around like you're important but hey that's part of the image then you heard my attempt at singing with a little auto tune and we're going to talk about how boy bands use auto tune to sound better and finally i said we're going backstage remember in english we don't say i was in the backstage we just say acekas i was backstage so we're going backstage past the buff bouncers and the word buff we looked at in the harley-davidson episode
it means abri yantar but it also means muscular right musculoso so the buff bouncers and the word bouncers we learned in the nightclub episode so what's the moral of the story what's the lesson here you need to listen to all the fyi episodes this is our 44th episode so you have 43 other episodes and topics that you can learn about and remember the bonus audio that is usually reserved for my patrons eventually a la laga i make it free so if you're patient if you can wait a few months
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guys want more information check it out at patreon.com alberto alonso will be expecting you testaremos esperando let's start off then where we should start off at the beginning what is a boy band let's look at the definition of a boy band and i'm gonna read it right off google here it is loosely defined so loosely is important it's loosely defined so again this is a loose definition and it's a vocal group consisting of young male singers and we're going to talk about
girl groups too don't worry i just thought it would be easier in the title to call it boy bands so i should change that definition to male or female singers usually in their teenage years or in their 20s at the time of formation singing love songs marketed towards young women and men as well as we know it says many boy bands dance as well as sing usually giving highly choreographed performances so i think that makes sense you know a group of people singing and dancing together
in sync hey wait did i just do that on purpose yeah you caught me in sync synchronizado and we're going to find out a little bit later on where in sync got their name from it's not only a play on words but we need to start at the beginning where did all this start what was the first boy band well according to our definition we could say the fab four who's the fab four well the fab four is another way we say the beatles i know i know don't kill me don't crucify me not yet let me explain
well think about it i just read you the definition a vocal group consisting of young male singers usually in their teenage years they sing love songs she loves you yeah yeah yeah and i wanna hold your hand i mean right there they even had a specific look and an image and they had a choreography you know it was it was planned so i know i know what you're thinking you're thinking but the beatles is is rock it's not pop yeah but nowhere in the definition does it define the kind of music that a boy
band makes so technically the beatles are the quintessential boy band i mean they had everything they had that staying power they made the masses swoon and sway and they swept the whole world off its feet with their swagger so no better boy band than the beatles now we have to clear something up though the word boy band didn't exist then so nobody called the beatles a boy band but if we look at the definition that's what it is and obviously they inspired many other boy bands many of you know
the monkeys the monkeys was a band that was put together for a tv show and they ended up obviously forming a band and touring in the end but they started as a gimmick for a tv show hey with monkeys and people say we're monkeying around they were inspired by the beatles and my mother you wanna you wanna know how popular the monkeys were in their day and the beatles and these kind of boy bands my mother went to go see the monkeys in florida and do you know who the opening band was
you're not going to believe this jimi hendrix just to show you how popular these boy bands were in that moment in time but then i guess you could argue that there were four runners ante predecessors forerunners and these were these barbershop quartets hell everybody go everybody go everybody go you know these barbershops these are called barbershop quartets and they sing acapella so these were uh very popular in the earlier part of the 20th century so even before the beatles
what were the original boy bands well these guys who sat around a fire and would sing blue moon you saw me standing a blue moon blue moon and they would harmonize think about the the doo-wop bands of the 50s so i guess we could break it down this colossal we could break it down into four waves cuatro holas we have the boy bands that peaked in the 1960s and perhaps the most popular boy band from the 1960s easy as one two three abc baby you and me girl jackson five of course
they weren't a boy band they weren't singing pop music uh dancing and singing in sync melodic songs about love that's that's a boy band another very popular one from this era was the osmonds this was a popular tv show in the united states and one of my favorite songs is by the osmonds i think i love you but what am i so afraid of and as you can see the songs are all lovey-dovey they're innocent songs and i think that's what people miss too because nowadays with reggaeton and rap
music well music has lost its innocence and this music has a certain innocence even if it's part of the plan then the the 90s and the early 2000s and this one i lived through yo esta in fact in the bonus part of today's show i'm gonna tell you about how i met some of the members of in sync when i lived in florida and i had no idea who they were it was very embarrassing and i'll tell you about that in the bonus part of today's show but that's the the era that i think
everybody thinks about when they think about boy bands they don't think back to the beatles or they don't think of the jackson five but those were the predecessors but the ones that came out of the 90s and early 2000s well you've got take that the one with robbie williams backstreet boys backstreet is la scala the backstreet boys in sync boyzone west life these were dominating the pop charts at that time and then there was a little lull and there was a new emergence in the 2010s
and this we started seeing bands such as one direction and more importantly now the the kings of boy bands these k-pop acts which i think right now is if we had to talk about the future of boy bands it's asia it's k-pop and as i said before i didn't want to leave out omit i didn't want to leave out these girl bands because they've had a huge influence as well just think about it all these do-op groups all these groups from the 30s then through the 40s 50s and 60s and we had the temptations
with diana ross some of the greatest bands ever and they were girl bands and the most successful ones i believe are the spice girls uh with 90 million in sales if i'm not mistaken that was the the figure i saw it was a figure from 2020.
so the spice girls but you can't leave out tlc which we've learned means tender loving care el toke de mama tlc or destiny's child oh i love destiny's child are you kidding me oh thank you destiny's child for making the 90s more bearable mas aguantable but it's interesting the last two i said there they were trios instead of quartets they were trios but it doesn't matter how you slice it or dice it we think of them as fleeting komalgo fugath but they're not they're here to stay and
even their older albums are still popular it reminds me of that expression that andy warhol coined uh they're 15 minutes of fame everybody has their 15 minutes of fame and that's the thing when you think of a boy band you think that it's fleeting that it's not going to have a long life span duracion and according to an article that i saw according to his segun the average life of a boy band is five to seven years so you've got five to seven years to make that money
and why do boy bands why don't they last well first they they rely on siapoyanen trans tendencies and we all know if you see a movie from the 1980s with a lot of different trends in it well it's outdated so it it it doesn't age well knowing but also because there's always one member of the group that stands out that's head and shoulders above the rest and if you don't believe me i'm about to give you a bunch of examples the first one the jackson five who stood out michael jackson that's right
the next one in sync who stood out justin timberlake destiny's child beyonce the temptations diana ross in the osmonds donny osmond was the most famous one and the super latin group muy popular in los estados unidos menudo yo seculostoy perunciado perlunciando americana but minuto where ricky martin and mark anthony came from and menudo was always interesting because they changed members amenudo now one of the criticisms of these boy bands is that it's not them it's fake they
don't write their own music it's just add water no anya de agua lotienes as we say just add water it's really the work of executives record executives and managers who may or may not be taking all the money but we do know one thing they are pulling the strings and that's very funny because in sync had a video where they were puppets and they cut the strings and this video was based on real life because uh lou pearlman now this is you can't talk about boy bands
without talking about lou pearlman now he was a manager from the united states and he founded the backstreet boys in 1993 in sync and lfo in 1995 uh oh town in the year 2000 uh us
five in 2005. so this guy i mean his job was producing super boy bands and he did a great job but there's just one problem in 2006 he was accused of running one of the largest and longest-running ponzi schemes you say piramides right a ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme in u.s history and he left over 300 million u.s dollars in debt 300 million dollars in debt and he was apprehended he pled guilty se de claro to plead guilty impasado he pled guilty to conspiracy
money laundering uh blanqueo de dinero and making false statements during a bankruptcy proceeding so uh let me sum it up for you teloresumo this guy was a crook criminal and nobody knows that more than the boys who worked for him he stole tons of money from them and uh they took him to court many of them took him to court because they wanted their money this guy was a crook and in 2008 this guy pearlman lou pearlman was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison and in 2016
he died in federal custody now i don't like to be cruel but i imagine that not too many people were mourning his death to mourn there is a documentary you guys can check out if you can't find it let me know but it's about lou pearlman and well the whole boy band thing i haven't seen it in a long time but i remember it being very interesting and some other controversy aside from the fact that they don't make their own decisions and somebody else is there doing everything
for them picking out their clothes writing their songs in fact some have even been accused of having session musicians or session singers recording the vocals and it's no secret that the music industry has overused asobre usado this auto-tune effect and we're going to wrap up but remember if you want the bonus audio you can become a patron or you can find out i'll give you a free sample just contact me remember if you're not following me on social media you should do that too because i'm
constantly posting content to help you in english so another reason that boy bands get this bad rap malai machen is well everything i said before that they don't do their own work which it seems like that's changing now now the boy bands of the future are realizing the importance of writing their own music and making their own decisions that artistic freedom that any artist is looking for such as katy perry and all these who write their own songs but also remember it's based on image
and what happens as the years go on we get older we get fatter we get slower maslintos so you're not gonna be that sexy heartthrob buenoro that heartthrob that pinup boy no the poster is from what you guys had as super pop don't think i don't remember super pop and i remember i remember these guys on the cover of every magazine they were the biggest thing since sliced bread an expression in english [Laughter] but no stone is left unturned is the expression no stone is left unturned they even
give them roles to play such as the baby the bad boy the shy one look at the spice girls scary spice posh spice and you know what i'm gonna end this episode right now remember there is bonus stuff but the free part i'm gonna end it by saying we love to mock them we love to make fun of them but occasionally you'll find yourself singing along with them and on that note it's time to say