“It’s Gonna Be Me” by *NSYNC, Thursday, May 4, 2023

The '90s certainly wasn't the first the world saw of teen pop, but today bubblegum pop is synonymous with several '90s acts, whether it were Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, *NSYNC, or demigods in the pantheon like 98 Degrees or Spice Girls. Being a middle school student in the era of boy bands and subtly sexualized teen girls, peer pressure dictated a lot of what I thought was cool. It's about how in one year, the boys at school thought that Backstreet Boys was good music because it was for boys to a sudden wave of realization that Backstreet Boys were actually for girls and Britney Spears' music sucked, but not like her music videos meant you were gay.

MAYBE THAT'S WHY. In that rather toxic dichotomy that pushed us boys into listening to Nickelback for about a year, *NSYNC was of course grouped with Backstreet Boys. Still, somehow my peer group missed the three major albums the Justin Timberlake-fronted boyband released between 1997 and 2002. Of course, *NSYNC was just as popular if not more popular with other friends I met later in life. A few of my peers admitted to owning a copy of No Strings Attached or Celebrity when Millennium was the album passed around in my peer group. Then, there were the Christian teen pop knockoffs, which will probably get their shame-posting later. Plus One, True Vibe, ZOEgirl, Shine--these were just a few acts that popped up in the '90s and early '00s, and for a year I listened to some of these groups because I didn't like the "worldly" way I felt when listening to the radio. Teen pop flooded Christian charts and Christian bookstores and even some of the adult contemporary acts that looked to rock and country started incorporating Max Martin-style R&B beats in their song. Certainly DC Talk's remix of "Say the Words" was influenced by teen pop, despite the band being in their mid-thirties in the year 2000. 

THERE AIN'T NO TIME TO WASTE. By now, I'm sure that everyone has seen the meme interpreting "It's Gonna Be Me" as "It's Gonna Be May." It's a cheap enough shot that got me remembering a musical guilty pleasure. And while I wasn't a huge *NSYNC fan, the melody of "It's Gonna Be Me" was one that I wouldn't mind listening to if I heard it on the radio. I didn't care for Justin Timberlake's nasally voice on later songs like "Pop," but "It's Gonna Be Me" was smooth. The video for "It's Gonna Be Me" inspired a parody by Fall Out Boy in 2016 for the song "Irreplaceable." The band even used the same director and creative team. Of course, this wasn't the first time that the punk would parodied teen pop. In 1999, blink-182 premiered their video for "All the Small Things," in which the trio imitated Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.  The '90s and early '00s teen pop feels twenty+ years later feels somewhere between an aged wine and the embarrassing photos of that Halloween you dressed up as Barney the Dinosaur. Maybe it's like an aging cheese, only palatable sometimes; it's a memory that you dear not open too often, but on occasion, it's important to see where you came from musically.

 

Read “It's Gonna Be Me” by *NSYNC on Genius.