Songoftheday 3/16/21 - It's hard to say I'm sorry it's hard to make the things I did undone, a lesson I've learned too well for sure...

 

 

"I Want You Back" - *NSYNC

from the album 'N SYNC (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #13 (three weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 21 

 

Today's song of the day comes from the boy-band *NSYNC, who were put together by record producer and future inmate Lou Pearlman in the mid-1990s, as a way to create a second success in the manner of Pearlman's other discovery, the Backstreet Boys. With two former New Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers - JC Chasez and Justin Timberlake - along with two Universal Studios theme park singers - Joey Fatone and Chris Kirkpatrick, and adding late replacement Lance Bass, the group was groomed for eventual success just like the Backstreets by shipping them off to Europe, where the music scene was much more receptive for a "boyband" vocal group. Their first single, "I Want You Back", was written by two Swedes, Denniz Pop and Max Martin, who would soon dominate pop music in the upcoming years. With a dance-pop style almost identical to Backstreet Boys, the yearning for an ex-girlfriend bop was engineered for the teen girl market, and it worked, first in Europe, where it had its success at the end of 1996, and then eventually to America, where it was released in the beginning of 1998...

"I Want You Back" became *NSYNC's first top-40 pop hit in May of 1998. Internationally, on its original European release the single reached the top ten in Switzerland (#5) and Germany (#10); in 1998, the re-release got the song into the top ten in the UK (#5), New Zealand (#5), and Canada (#6). It also just missed that level in Australia and Austria (#11), as well as making the top-40 in Sweden (#14), the Netherlands (#22), and Ireland (#22). The 'N SYNC album, released in the States in March of 1998, ended up spending 109 weeks on the Billboard 200 sales chart, with three of those at #2, going on to sell over ten million copies. 

(7/10)

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The original music video, filmed for its European release, is in retrospect quite laughable, with the five guys green-screened onto a weird spacecraft-like setting, trying to get the attention of a woman who seemed to be in her thirties at least. The edges of the boys are distorted (but it does show how slim Fatone started out)...

and the boys making a British TV appearance...

 

and lastly in concert at the Madison Square Garden in New York in 2000...

Up tomorrow: British "girl-group" has the scene down pat.