The album that changed my life: Backstreet’s Back

Do albums influence me? Do pies influence me? Albums are products, like pies or Spam burgers, and irrespective of how good an album, or how wet and rigid the Spam cake, it does not influence me. Hello, it’s not a burning bush. My life is my own. Then again, my external world, usually, isn’t.

At what point, for example, did I say, “Oh, I think I’ll spend this year [1997] just listening to ‘Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)’ on a continuous loop?” Oh, yeah, that’s right — I DIDN’T. I specifically requested white noise. But my wishes, it seems, were entirely moot. To wit, when Howie et al instructed listeners to “rock yaw bod-ay right / Backstreet’s back, all right!?”, the world would seize its collective butt and eagerly vibrate. Why? Because they could rhyme “right” with “right!?”?

— Hey, yo, punkass, what rhymes with “right”?

— Duhhh, “right”?

— Yo, punkass dunnit! He rhymed da word with da word! RAY-IIIIIGHT!

Indeed. But punkass’ perpetual burps of wisdom notwithstanding, my own arse would remain fixed and rigid. I was 12, brooding, and refused to listen to anything other than woks being hit at random intervals. But BSB were omnipotent. Even now, I can recall being in SOSE, watching a girl cut a poster of Nick from a magazine, then drag her tongue over his face. “You’re licking a duotone, you stupid whore!” That was what I wanted to say; I didn’t, because I already knew she was mental. (This girl told me on her first day that her mother would push her head in the microwave, then turn it on. “Soooooo. Your mother microwaves you … let’s be friends!”)

In any case, the microwaved head was little more than a cog, and I knew that. BSB were broadcast by every medium, everywhere. All assemblies included a BSB component; either some girls would sing “I Want it That Way” (“you are my fi-yer / my one dee-say-er”), or a greater collective would completely re-enact “Larger than Life”. And no amount of dry retching would earn me succour; I was forced to watch every performance to its end. “What the fuck is this? Ludovico’s technique?” I demanded. And, in a very real sense, it was. To date, I can recall “Larger than Life” shot for shot (BSB are cryogenically frozen and shot into space, the music begins, pah pah pah, they are resurrected, they wear black vinyl pants, they dance with robots, “and that makes you larger than life!”).

I cannot remember albums that I actually like with this level of precision. Yet here I am, a full decade after the fact, able to name the complete track listings of Backstreet’s Back , Millennium and (to a marginally lesser extent) Black and Blue.

An interesting tid: Brian suggested they call the album Black and Blue during a photo shoot, in which he noticed that the band were wearing black clothes and standing against a blue screen. No doubt, if Brian had been standing outdoors at the time, he would have certainly named the album Tree and Dirt or Brick and Wall or Fly and Shit.

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