B.D. McClay on falling late — but hard — for the otherworldly joys of commercial pop. ‘I felt like if I could understand pop, I would figure out something important about other people, build a bridge between my island and the rest of the world. This idea was very stupid.’

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It’s funny what you remember. I know where I was the first time I heard the name “Backstreet Boys.” I was in a backyard — not mine — and I was doing crafts with other girls my age. I don’t remember the year or the girls’ names. I didn’t know them. They knew each other because they went to the same girls’ prep school, easily recognized by its pastel uniforms. I did not go to the prep school — I was homeschooled — so I didn’t know that its students hated the uniform, which I (silently) coveted.

To break the ice, one of the girls had a question for me: “*NSYNC or Backstreet Boys?”

And I said, “Who?” And that was the end of that.

They meant well, I should say. I didn’t realize that at the time. I experienced these questions as a form of aggression — a signal, like the pastel uniform, that the girls were part of something, while I was part of nothing. They were just trying to figure out a way to be friendly and failing. But when I said “who?” I wasn’t trying to be aloof. I had no idea.

I don’t know how to explain the degree to which I didn’t interact with practically any of the pop culture of my childhood and teenage years. It wasn’t on purpose. Somehow — despite being everywhere — it just never came my way. My only exposure to Britney Spears during her heyday was when a neighborhood kid, horrified by my ignorance, dragged me to her room and played me “Toxic.” It made me feel sick. I’d never heard something so loud and overwhelming.

When, in college, I started listening to pop music — I mean “popular” music, not pop in some strict genre sense — it was with an outsider’s fascination. Pop culture in those years was colorful and knowingly, winkingly dumb: it was the age of Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream (and her pyrotechnic bra) and Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster (and her pyrotechnic bra). You were always being exhorted to put your hands up. What fascinated me about pop music — and still does — was the pop part. I was obsessed with the ambition it took to try to make things that were huge — that had to be both intimate and anonymous, for everybody while feeling, somehow, just for you.

Nothing pop songs described was remotely like my life. I was still the person on the outside and I would still never be a part of this big bright colorful world. But that was all right. I just wanted to understand it. I felt like if I figured out pop I would figure out something important about other people, build a bridge between my island and the rest of the world. This idea was very stupid. But the affection for pop music stuck.

So: *NSYNC or Backstreet Boys? The data say Backstreet Boys. According to stats.fm, I have now listened to them on Spotify 600 times since 2012. In contrast, I have listened to *NSYNC just 34 times. But I don’t really care about either band. All but six of those Backstreet Boys listens were just one song: “I Want It That Way.” 

There’s a specific kind of greatness only mass-produced pop music delivers. It’s like the old studio system movies — or, to stick to music, the old Brill Building hits. Somehow the colliding interests of various people who are mostly out to make a buck produces something so pure of personality that it’s almost angelic. 

“I Want It That Way,” for instance, is only incidentally a Backstreet Boys song. It’s really a product of pop wizard Max Martin, a Swedish producer and songwriter. It’s been speculated that Martin doesn’t especially care about the English meaning of the words — and that this explains why so many of his hits have strangely awkward lyrics. The famous “hit me” in Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time” is supposed to mean “call me,” as in “hit me [up on the phone].” Instead, “hit me” takes what might have been a normal sentiment about pining by the phone and creates a masochistic subtext: the reason I breathe is you; my loneliness is killing me. Maybe, people argue, not-quite-sensible lyrics are part of what makes a Max Martin hit so memorable. Since the words are just a little off, they stick in your head.

The lyrics of “I Want It That Way” are infamous in this respect. There’s a whole section in the song’s Wikipedia page about how little sense the words make. A lot of the confusion comes from the ending:

I never wanna hear you say
I want it that way
Cause I want it that way

You can see the problem.

However, I am here to say that the lyrics to “I Want It That Way” actually make complete, perfect sense. The song is about a relationship that is falling apart. Communication is breaking down. So the drama comes from the meaning of  “I want it that way” being up in the air. The singer wants it that way meaning together, and he dreads hearing that his beloved wants it that way, meaning apart. 

That the Backstreet Boys are a boy band — and so the actual person singing keeps shifting — though despite my near-600 listens I cannot tell them apart — helps underscore the theme of trying to hold onto a shared language spoken now by only one person. Can you even tell anymore that it’s me, singing to you? Or I am now just some guy you can’t really place?  Ain’t nothing but a heartache, ain’t nothing but a mistake: they’re ventriloquizing what they’re afraid to hear. But maybe that shared language is still there — the song keeps it ambiguous, and the way it’s simultaneously upbeat and sad, triumphant and defeated, is part of its weird magic.

I don’t think anybody listens to the song without understanding what it’s about emotionally, anymore than people are confused about what “…Baby One More Time” is about. You know it’s about trying to keep a relationship together despite the odds. The lyrics make perfect sense — when you hear them. But without that guitar arpeggio and that insistent drumbeat, without the harmonies, it’s all just words.  Part of why I’ve racked up so many listens to “I Want It That Way” is that it’s a good song. But usually when I listen to it I end up looping it for hours — a form of listening that nobody involved could have anticipated becoming so easy — and I think it’s because I want to know how this situation turns out, if the person being addressed keeps on drifting away or if they’re reeled back in. When it’s over it never feels over. 

I don’t have any regrets on missing the pop culture of my childhood when it was actually happening. For one thing, a lot of it was actively malign. I’m not sorry to have skipped the trends meant to showcase perfectly flat stomachs or the hand-wringing over this or that pop starlet’s virginity. Looking back, I know that the girls hated those pastel uniforms because they were terrible: a horrible mixture of stiff and short, practically designed to make adolescent girls feel frumpy and exposed. The uniforms were ugly, they forced conformity, they cultivated self-consciousness. Picking one boy band or another performed the function for the girls I wished that uniform would perform for me — it gave them a group and it set them apart. 

If these songs had been the background soundtrack of my adolescence, I don’t think I would appreciate today how oddly, almost mystically pure they are. Despite their ubiquity, they feel like they were written by aliens. Max Martin himself reportedly stays away from cameras and barely listens to the radio. He lives like I did. Somehow the people who make the culture don’t always live in it. They’re like me, always looking in through a window. ✹

B.D. McClay writes at Notebook.

Dept. of Receipts

When You Think About It

• The piece you just read is a smudged mirror image of Michael Agger’s recent piece about trying to abandon the pop of his youth.