On December 5th, twenty years ago, a new boy band launched their first single. It was 2000, the turn of the millennium, and most groups of their kind relied on emotional ballads as their lead singles. In the UK, Westlife made a career of key changes and ballads. In the US, Backstreet Boys had the monopoly on making puppy dog eyes at the camera. The tactic seemed to be clear: release a song that your target demographic – the teenage girl – can imagine is all about them, and success is yours. And so, when O-Town decided to make their first mark on the music industry with Liquid Dreams – an up-tempo number centred, unequivocally, around sex - made its mark immediately. It was a top ten hit on the US Billboard charts, and reached number 3 in the UK, the result of a concerted effort by the band and their team to think outside the boyband box.
‘With all the other boybands currently out at the time, we wanted to do something different right from the beginning to set ourselves apart,’ Jacob Underwood tells Grazia. The group – Jacob, Erik-Michael Estrada, Trevor Penick, Dan Miller, Ashley Parker Angel – were formed on MTV’s Making The Band, and so had the then-unique status of a band already famous without having so much as a song on the radio. This provided an opportunity to do things differently.
‘We knew the current climate [for] bands like ours,’ Jacob recalls, ‘and wanted to have something that put us in a new area of our own. I think we all liked the idea of being the R-rated boyband at the time... Doing something a little more risqué.’
Risqué was the word. The title alone is unapologetically masturbatory. The video is filled with mercurial forms of siren-like women, drawing the band’s five members toward them. The song begins dramatically. The beat pulses. The tympanies quiver. And then, the first verse sets the scene:
‘Posters of love surrounding me, lost in a world of fantasy. Every night she comes to me, and gives me all the love I need…’
This girl, the bridge asserts, is not your average girl. Vitally, she is not the target demographic of the average boyband. She is an imagined, merged creation of the average man’s fantasies.
The slight silliness of the whole concept was not lost on Jacob, whose vocals and self-assured swagger lend power to the song as it hurtles toward its chorus. His use of the word ‘morpherotic’ – ‘now this hot girl, she’s not your average girl, she’s a morpherotic dream from a magazine – is surely a first.
‘At first I thought, “oh man, my mom is gonna hate this song”’, he recalls. ‘I’ll say it’s not her favourite so I’m glad we had a chance to release more. It’s funny to talk about it now with fans, and how they can’t believe their parents let them sing those lyrics at such a young age.’
Liquid Dreams has carved a place for itself as a pop classic. It’s daring concept and resistance to the norm of the time makes it memorable. The band, now a four-piece following the departure of Ashley, still typically opens their shows with their debut. ‘I definitely think it aged well,’ Jacob asserts. ‘Even the list of women we named in the song aged well!’
Now, about that list of women…. The chorus offers the roll call: ‘I dream about a girl who’s ‘a mix of Destiny's Child, just a little touch of Madonna's wild style, with Janet Jackson's smile, throw in a body like Jennifer’s, you've got the star of my liquid dream.’ The second verse adds to the mix: Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, Cindy Crawford and Tyra Banks. She has Halle Berry’s personality, too, as an urgent – seemingly last-minute – confirmation that ‘looks aren’t everything.’ Halle Berry is, of course, famously unattractive. Thank God for her personality.
Halle’s inclusion as the token possessor of character aside, it’s actually a deeply encouraging list for its time. The women featured are a range of different ages, body types and ethnicities. There is no stereotypical pin-up – a blonde, white, skinny twentysomething, for example – in the mix. Remarkably, they are all still recognisable today. A song like Liquid Dreams might not be release in 2020, but if it was, you could feasibly retain every single name included.
‘We all had our favourites within the list of names,’ explains Jacob. ‘And it was cool to run into Destiny’s Child from time to time and get some love for the name drop. I think we picked some good names the first time around after seeing how amazing they all look even after twenty years.’
I ask Jacob which Jennifer – Lopez? Aniston? Love Hewitt? – is the Jennifer whose body is so desirable, but he doesn’t answer. It has become something of a pop mystery.
Liquid Dreams is not a perfect pop song. It could stand accused of objectification. It sexualises women who did not give their permission to be celebrated for their looks in such a way. It contains mad lyrics. But it is undeniably something special. In a world of white suits and identikit ballads, O-Town tried something different, and created a song that has -for all its faults – remained a lasting testament to millennial sensibilities. Two decades on, it has more than earned its place on your playlist. Long live Liquid Dreams.
Visit otownofficial.com and find the band on Instagram and Twitter
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