(That's immediately apparent on the cover of their 1997 eponymous debut, in which Chasez gets the center slot rather than Timberlake.) Early singles " I Want You Back" and " Tearin' Up My Heart" were midtempo soft-pop with Ace of Base-style production - a signature of Swedish songwriter Max Martin - and only slightly funkier than the lovelorn inoffensiveness the Backstreet Boys were already churning out. In a time when most pop albums were stuffed with filler to pad out killer radio singles, No Strings Attached was overflowing with ambitious ideas and hinted at where pop music, and pop culture, were headed.īefore No Strings Attached, Timberlake, Chris Kirkpatrick, Lance Bass, Joey Fatone and JC Chasez were plenty famous, if not yet fully realized as the group they would become. But when seen for its substance - its forward-thinking production, its genre-expanding collaborations, the videos and choreography that made it as much a visual presentation as an audio one - it tells a much more rewarding story than what the numbers show.
No Strings Attached is so often invoked as a point on a fraught economic timeline that it's easy to forget you can listen to it, too. As for boy bands, they would be off the radar until the boys of One Direction, almost the spiritual opposite of NSYNC, stumbled onto The X Factor a decade later. NSYNC's de facto frontman, Justin Timberlake, seemed to sense the change in the air early his 2002 solo debut, Justified, landed in a pop landscape that its super-producers The Neptunes had already begun to shape in their own image. As post-9/11 audiences embraced edgier sounds and internet accessibility collapsed the power of the industry establishment, not only were the teen idols of the moment nudged aside, but pop began to unravel as a category - its sounds becoming hybridized and democratized beyond recognition. Twenty years removed, the popular narrative around No Strings Attached goes something like this: NSYNC burned bright and fast, one of the last artists to benefit so greatly from the industry bubble before its spectacular burst. And then, barely two years later, it was all over. By the end of the week, that number had doubled to 2.4 million, a bar that no artist in any genre would clear for 15 years. When the boy band's sophomore LP, No Strings Attached, dropped on March 21, 2000, it sold 1.2 million units its first day. Those are impressive numbers, but they're nothing compared to NSYNC. Britney Spears beat that figure the following spring, with 1.3 million copies of Oops!.I Did It Again in its first week. In 1999, the Backstreet Boys' Millennium set an all-time record for first-week sales, with 1.13 million records moved. And on any given day, you could safely assume that one of a half-dozen teen pop artists was dominating the conversation.
Young people's purchasing power was matched with a measure of political power in MTV's Total Request Live, an outlet to vote for their favorite artists and have their picks ritualistically blasted into their living rooms every afternoon after school. Sales were the best the business had ever seen, with new releases averaging $18.52 at the peak of the CD era. When the 20th century came to a close, the music industry was booming, lucrative in ways previously unimaginable. Left to right: Lance Bass, Chris Kirkpatrick, Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez and Joey Fatone.
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