Goth Boy Bands

Boy bands are traditionally marketable at the teenage-girl demographic, appealing to newly-awakened sexual instincts; however, boy bands miss another hormonal phenomenon of adolescence: rebellion and angst. Unless you live in the Bible Belt somewhere, a bunch of squeaky-clean boys singing about love isn't particularly transgressive. Meanwhile, there are fucked-up, angst-ridden, nihilistic, self-destructive goth artists, but none of them have the broad teen appeal of, say, the Backstreet Boys. Certainly, you get some girls (and boys, to a lesser extent) with crushes on Trent Reznor, but they're relatively small in number.

The phenomena of goth and boy bands could be combined for optimum marketability. Imagine five boys, dressed in black. One has shaved the sides of his head, some of them have facial piercings, and two or three look a bit thinner than is necessarily healthy, but otherwise they look clean and neat. They do the tortured, angst-ridden act a bit, with songs about hating the world and feeling worthless, but other than that, they stick to the time-honoured boy band formula, and exude the sort of well-scrubbed sexual magnetism that enraptures teenagers across the malls of Middle America and the American-speaking world.

Someone should tell Lou Perlman. Or Fred Durst.