Backstreet Boys and the mad rush of the comeback tour

From left: AJ McLean, Kevin Richardson, Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, and Brian Littrell. (Photo by Glenn Francis via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

Of all the international music stars making a beeline for India in 2023—Jackson Wang to John Legend—the one we were probably expecting least was a complete blast from the past. Pop icons Backstreet Boys (BSB) are coming to India after 13 years, screamed headlines.

Even more surprising was the reaction: the Internet was on fire. There were memes, there was snark. A lot of “we should go” was exchanged, a lot of it was ironic. But there was also unmasked anticipation.

For a pop music icon that debuted 30 years ago, and saw their stock dip early in the new millennium (not long after their multi-platinum album called Millennium) this kind of engagement is unusual. Not nearly as many people cared when BSB contemporaries and yester-year legends like MLTR and Bryan Adams came through. So does that really mean that Backstreet's back, (alright?!)?

It makes sense, even though it defies logic. All things Y2K are back again, the fashion, the hairstyles, the pop sounds. There is ongoing debate over whether Gen Z is Y2King better than millennials, the generation that witnessed the actual Y2K event. Plus, there’s a suspiciously direct link between throwbacks and comebacks now. Did you say you missed Frasier? FRIENDS? Hera Pheri? Here it is, bigger than ever before.

There are some reunions that seem genuinely hard to pull off and that much more valuable for it. Speculation continues over whether The Spice Girls will reunite for King Charles' coronation—may he live long if he does pull this off. But otherwise, it all seems to have come to the point where stars who haven’t really even exited the news cycle, are being fashioned shiny comeback vehicles. K-Pop band EXO, which has been on hiatus, has announced details of their comeback. Rihanna is ready to return to the stage with a world tour after that smash Super Bowl event.

Pop diva Rihanna at her first live performance in seven years at the 2023 Super Bowl.

It’s common knowledge now that Pop stardom is achieved only through well-greased machines; and it doesn’t take a genius anymore to figure something’s brewing when suddenly, a grizzly Suneil Shetty is staring down at you from billboards all over town, advertising reality shows about warrior hunts. Or when five white guys that you used to love in your adolescence are all over TikTok: Indirectly when fans working at Marks & Spencer synchronised dance to a BSB anthem; more directly when they collaborate with arch rivals N*Sync and spawn the era of Back-Sync.
Even as word went around of the excellent Backstreet Boys’ Las Vegas residency—a variety show which has them stripping on stage even—the band was preparing their ninth studio album. When DNA dropped in 2019, it debuted on top of the charts. The song “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” scored the band a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Duo/ Group performance.

DNA’s success, despite not being the freshest of music, proved two things. That harmony-driven pop music will always find an audience (it also fuels much of K-Pop today). Why mess with perfection? Instead, just throw in trending sounds, a bit of country-pop, a bit of R&B, to highlight their greatest asset: The quintet’s collective vocal prowess. Second, and more importantly, nostalgia’s potency seems not to wane. It might even be the new opium of the masses as the yearning for a simpler, less uncertain time—for escape—runs at an all time high.

Of course, the executives scripting these very lucrative comeback tours and reunions know this well. Back in 2000, riding on the monumental success of their album Millennium, Kevin Richardson was ranting to a Rolling Stone writer about being screwed over by Lou Pearlman, the man (and super-manager) who had conjured BSB (and later, N'Sync) out of thin air. On that cover, the five of them had stood wearing traditional suits and ties, but with their pants pooling around their ankles. It was one of the greatest musician covers in history.

That iconic image was recreated by the Backstreet Boys in December 2022 as a holiday campaign for an underwear brand, also a cheeky inside joke and a doff of the hat to a unique phenomenon of BSB live shows when the band was at their peak, where people flung their underwear on stage. Around this time, BSB also released a—wait for it—Christmas album.

All of which is to say, if it feels like the BSBs’ sudden presence in your life feels manufactured, that’s because it is a finely-engineered accomplishment. They’re pals with some of N*Sync, they are husbands and fathers now, they are self-aware about how they look and they don’t shy away from joking about it. They’ll always be the Backstreet Boys to you, but just like you, they grew up too.

So who exactly is this fanbase that’s stuck around for 30 years? Back in 1999, even here in urban India, only philistines hadn't heard of the Backstreet Boys. Your personality type could be determined by the specific Boy you crushed on; and your fandom was judged by how far back your knowledge went. It couldn't have been too far back, because our exposure to Western pop had only just begun—and when it wasn't MTV and Channel V playing that video for “I Want It That Way” in heavy rotation, we were drinking coke and wearing out that one cassette tape that only the richest of our public school friends could afford.

The last time the Backstreet Boys were here in India, they were headlining the Rock 'N India festival 13 years ago, playing to a crowd that was not their target audience. The other headliner was Richard Marx—at a festival that had previously hosted metal legends like Iron Maiden, Megadeth and Machine Head. It was the year that the festival was accused of diluting its identity; and would die a quiet death in 2012, after Carlos Santana couldn’t get the crowds out.

These stops in 2010 Delhi and Bangalore also corresponded with the This Is Us tour. Even then, music critics were lauding the Backstreet Boys for playing to the nostalgia factor—keeping their Millennium era flame alive in their wardrobe and setlist.

A lot of this vibe has been parlayed into the DNA world tour, which will also make stops in Israel, Bahrain and much of the Middle East this summer. And yet, given that the DNA tour has been on since 2019 (give or take a couple of years due to the pandemic), there's enough on the internet to help you do your due diligence. The Guardian called their 2022 set in London flawless, and suffused with the awareness of the death of Nick Carter's brother Aaron. Variety found their a-capella numbers endearing, plucked straight out of memory.

BSB are part of that lineup of stellar performers that make up pop boy band history—they learned from The Beatles; BTS learned from them. DNA might not be Millennium (how can it be?), they may not arrive on stage on hoverboards anymore. But they’ll still sync up perfectly and do the moves to “Everybody”. Their fans will do it with them—and the Backstreet Boys know it.