As early noughties boyband O-Town have reformed and are, as we type, on a flight to London to perform hits like All Or Nothing and Liquid Dreams, we’re taking a nostalgic look at the more memorable of their hits to see what we learned from them.
If you need a little refresher, O-Town were a boyband put together on Making The Band, an MTV show just when MTV was starting to push focus from music videos onto reality shows.
Lou Pearlman, the genius behind Backstreet Boys and N’Sync, had the audition process televised and put the band together with the assistance of a choreographer called Ramon Del Barrio. Cute name, right? If you still need a little refresher, listen to this and the first three seconds will remind you:
**1. Dreadlocks on white men are always disgusting **
Bodypopping Michael Jackson wannabe Jacob Underwood might have been really cute, but the locks totally let him down.
**2. Boybands are good at holding straight faces **
Though they were clearly in a green-screened room throughout the entire video’s shoot, doing silly dances and singing about wet dreams, they somehow managed to not fall about laughing throughout.
**3. Babes are eternal **
All of the female celebrities listed in the song: Jennifer (definitely Lopez, or perhaps Love Hewitt), Madonna, Halle Berry, Tyra Banks, Angelina Jolie, Cindy Crawford, Destiny’s Child are all pretty banging, over a decade on.
**4. There are many ways to say ‘Angelina Jolie’ **
Listen out at 01.00 and you’ll hear quite a novel way of saying her name that we still, 14 years on, can’t get our heads round.
**5. Boybanders smattered in tattoos are a slightly new thing **
Sure, there were the AJ’s and the Chris Kirkpatricks and the Justin Timberlakes and, OK, OK, quite a lot of boybanders used to have one or two tattoos somewhere. Compare, though, to the likes of today’s boybanders, Lawson and One Direction, who sport full sleeves of body etchings.
**6. Alex Mak’s gloopy metal form was quite popular in the 1990s and beyond **
Not only did the transformative puddle appear in this video, but you’ll recognise it from Busta Rhymes and Janet Jackson’s (by the way, she gets a mention in this song) Hype Williams-directed video for What’s It Gonna Be?!, TLC’s Waterfallsand um, the cigarette in Nicki Minaj’s new Pills N Potions video. Oh, we miss you, metal blob.
7. Nothing lasts forever
As we reach the end of the video, we realise not everything is set to last. O-Town’s creator Lou Pearlman learned this one the hard way: in 2006, he was found guilty of perpetrating the largest and longest-running finanical scam ever, defrauding investors out of $300 million. He was convicted and sent to prison for 25 years.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.