30 People Who Came Back To Life Share What Passing Away Actually Feels Like
A Pennsylvania school district has voted against a parent’s request to launch a satanic group’s After School Satan Club at an elementary school for students who want to participate in an extracurricular program that is non-religious.
A devil may care attitude?
It was late 1997 and Hanson-mania had taken hold in Australia. ‘MMMBop’ dominated the airwaves and the boys from Oklahoma’s androgynous faces populated the magazine stands of every newsagency, corner store and petrol station.
I was in the thick of it, gobbling up all titbits of information available in those pre-internet days. This led to purchasing an edition of TV Hits that featured Hanson on its cover and included the printed lyrics to the Backstreet Boys’ latest single, ‘Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)’.
The song’s now such an immovable part of pop culture that it’s hard to imagine a world without it, but reading its lyrics for the first time raised a number of questions. Chiefly, who were “Backstreet” and why did the announcement of their return warrant an entire song? Not just any old song, either, but one of sufficient import to occupy precious column space in TV Hits.
It wasn’t long before ‘Everybody’ overtook ‘MMMBop’ in the commercial radio high rotation stakes and those questions faded into the background. The hits ‘As Long As You Love Me’ and ‘All I Have to Give’ followed in quick succession and now, 22 years later, BSB are the world’s most enduring and commercially successful boy band by a distance.
In Australia, Backstreet’s airwaves takeover had begun with ‘I’ll Never Break Your Heart’, which reached number 10 in the ARIA charts and appeared on their self-titled 1996 debut LP.
The group’s major heartthrob, Nick Carter, was just 16-years-old at the time of its release. The Guardian’s Kate Hutchinson has described Carter as the proto-Justin Bieber and accordingly, he soon became the object of many young girls and boys’ naïve fantasies.
Backstreet Boys’ fourth single, ‘Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)’, didn’t sell as rapidly as ‘I’ll Never Break Your Heart’, but it has become a resounding fan favourite in subsequent years. According to crowdsourced archive setlist.fm, it’s BSB’s fifth most performed song, with the top four all coming from later albums.
The Backstreet Boys have just announced 13 additional tour stops on their DNA World Tour in major US cities including Nashville, Portland and Memphis, as well as the addition of a European leg of the tour kicking off in Portugal…
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