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Stuff about a new boyband

There is a doc­u­ment­ary on Channel 4 next week. It's called Fame Asylum and it's about putting together a boyband whose members are four asylum seekers.

Asks the press release: 

"Can a boy-band made up of four asylum seekers cut it in the com­pet­it­ive world of pop music?"

Here's a clue: no, because these days a new boyband made up of five boys called Gary, Robbie, Jason, Howard and Mark couldn't even cut it in the com­pet­it­ive world of pop music.

Why do people in tele­vi­sion — the people who've brought us shows like Totally Boyband, Boys Will Be Girls and now this — think that
there is anything easy about putting together a boyband?

Well, the truth is that they probably don't think there's anything easy about putting together a boyband with a view to chart success — but they do know that it's easy to get a TV show com­mis­sioned by using boybands as a theme into which unlikely stars (boys dressing as girls, boys who used to be in bands, asylum seeking boys) are crow­barred, usually for the enter­tain­ment or amusement of the viewing public.

The whole Fame Asylum thing has been put together by a man called Richard Dedomenici. Here is some inform­a­tion about Richard from his website. (We think he might have written it himself.)

"Richard Dedomenici is a one-man sub­vers­ive think-tank primarily dedicated to the devel­op­ment and imple­ment­a­tion of innov­at­ive strategies designed to 

undermine accepted belief systems and topple existing power struc­tures. By approach­ing the limits of con­ven­tion­ally accept­able behaviour, Richard 

Dedomenici's poetic acts of low-grade civil dis­obedi­ence forcibly ask pertinent questions of society, while his subtle anarcho-sur­real­ist interventions 

create the kind of uncer­tainty that leads to possibility."

Of the Fame Asylum show, Richard's website also notes:

"The band is designed to alter attitudes towards immig­ra­tion issues among the difficult to-reach opinion-influ­en­cing female adoles­cent demographic, 

har­ness­ing pester-power and the trickle-up theory' to change minds, alter behaviour, shift paradigms, and transform societies."

For someone attempt­ing to shift paradigms, Richard seems bizarrely ignorant of the fact that if you want to appeal to female adoles­cents only a fucking idiot would think, in 2006, about using the boyband — a pop concept so irrel­ev­ant to most teenage girls that you'd be better off with knitting patterns.

As for the band them­selves — they're called Status - they can't sing, can't dance, have no stage presence, look dreadful and their song, 'A Guy Like Me', is com­pletely awful. 


HERE IS THE NEWS.


BONG!
There is literally no demand for a new boyband. That does not mean 'there is a gap in the market'. It means 'there are no big boybands simply because nobody 

wants a boyband'.

BONG!
Just because Take That are back, selling records to women in their late twenties, it is com­pletely illogical to think that this has paved the way for 

boybands, selling records to girls in the early teens, to succeed on any level.

BONG!
Don't start on the whole 'ooh, pop goes in cycles' business — if this was true we would have seen a skiffle revival by now. Isn't is possibly just the case 

that the boyband, in the tradional sense, was a his­tor­ical pop anomaly which made sense between 1989 and 2002, and that attempt­ing to revive its fortunes is 

just pissing in the wind? And that the only way the concept of the boyband is in any way appealing is as the basis of a TV show?