Boy Band Battle Royale: LFO

The second entry in our Boy Band Battle Royale is the adorable LFO. I'll admit, I've struggled with this entry, if only because I have a huge soft spot for this group. There's no trace of guilt or shame here, either; their singles were always a lot of fun, and I don't mind admitting that I genuinely like listening to them. Still, for the sake of pop culture science, I will try to analyze them like they're just another group in the list. 

D'aww, look how cute!

Boy Band: Lyte Funky Ones, dba LFO
Members: Rich Cronin, Brad Fischetti, and Devin Lima
Reign of Terror: Allegedly they started in 1995, but it really counted from 1999-2002


Cast your minds back to 1999. Back when Gwyneth Paltrow was America's favourite blonde actress, and Reese Witherspoon was still actually acting. Back when we were just hearing about the Napster. Back before LOL and OMG had entered the vernacular, let alone the OED. It was a more innocent time, is my point, and our pop music was carefree and laid-back. It was the perfect time for LFO to make their debut: our guard was down and our standards were low. Enter: "Summer Girls."

This song peaked at number 3 on the U.S. Billboard, people. Reportedly, not even LFO thought this would be as big a hit as it was. Their nonchalance and lack of self-seriousness is apparent from the get-go, since the song is just a string of one vaguely rhyming non sequitur after another, loosely tied together with the theme of "summer love, I guess." Based on some of the lines, I assume the song was written about the late 80s: 

• The great Larry Bird, jersey 33
• Michael J. Fox was Alex P. Keaton
• Love New Edition and the Candy Girl
• Let you off the hook like my man Mr Limpet [seriously?? - M]
• There was a good man named Paul Revere
• I like Kevin Bacon, but I hate Footloose [which, unforgivable - M]

Clearly, teenage girls in 1999 didn't need coherent lyrics to love a song. We would even put up with someone who now looks like an extra on the Jersey Shore and turn him into a semi-legitimate pop star. 

0% acceptable.

LFO was a 1999 perfect storm - goofy sense of humour, reinforcement of Abercrombie and Fitch as cool apparel, and a non-threateningly catchy melody. 


They followed up their sleeper hit "Summer Girls" with the slightly less successful song "Girl on TV," an ode to Rich Cronin's then-girlfriend Jennifer Love Hewitt*. Even though this was a more coherent song, with a solid plot - boy meets famous girl, boy falls in love with famous girl, friends do not believe boy's fanciful claims - there are still some little nuggets of randomness tucked in. For instance - "Shooby doo-wop and Scooby snacks/met a fly girl and I can't relax;" "She's from the City of Angels/like Bette Davis, James Dean, and Gable." The song also includes that most odious of boy band tropes - the completely unnecessary white boy "rap." I have no idea why so many boy bands tried this. With Backstreet Boys, it was AJ. With NSYNC, it was Justin and his determined beatboxing. Rich Cronin was even whiter than those two, and it definitely shows. Especially since he's not "rapping" so much as "talking kind of to a beat." 

Alas, by 2000 the American teenage girl was demanding more from her music than just "cute" and "fun." She wasn't demanding anything better, mind you, just more - more coherent, more sexual, and with way more bass. LFO continued to coast for two more years before calling it quits. They flirted with the notion of a comeback in 2009, but must have realized that by then, the moment in the sun for all boy bands had passed. 

Final Tally:

• Sex appeal/charisma: Neutral - Brad Fischetti cancels everybody out
• Cheesiness: 8/10
• Dance moves: None!
• Music: 5. Yes, 5!
• Post-band success: Unfortunately, Rich Cronin is the most famous of the three, and that's because he passed away in 2010. The other two have faded completely from our collective memory.

* Remember when Jennifer Love Hewitt was fucking EVERYWHERE? And dating everyone? Not just starring in Lifetime and Hallmark Original Movies? God, the 90s.

New domain!

Quick update: 

As of this morning, you can now find Feed it to My Goldfish at feedittomygoldfish.com! The old URL, feedittomygoldfish.blogspot.com, will still work, as will all the old links. Please let me know if there are any problems with the RSS feed, so I can try to fix. 

Anyway. Woot!

Boy Band Battle Royale: O-Town

For the first installment of Boy Band Battle Royale, I'd like to get O-Town out of the way. I know that I've set this list up so that I talk about knock-offs and imitators before I get to the real deal - e.g. BSB and *NSYNC - but I think this is the order that makes the most sense. Discussing the boy bands that didn't really stick will hopefully make it easier to understand and explain other bands' successes. Hopefully.

But so much is already inexplicable.

Boy Band: O-Town
Members: (clock-wise from top) Erik-Michael Estrada, Jacob Underwood, Dan Miller, Ashley Parker Angel, Trevor Penick
Reign of Terror: 2000-2003


I hardly know where to start with O-Town. They were one of the first pop culture personalities brewed in MTV's reality show lab, which has gone on to produce monsters like Heidi Montag and those horrible Jersey Shore creatures. Despite lacking anything resembling talent or personalities, in 2001 they garnered two Top Ten Billboard hits - a hopelessly generic ballad called "All or Nothing," and a remarkable piece of work called "Liquid Dreams."


Oh my god, "Liquid Dreams." By itself, the song defies belief; combined with the music video, it is an aural apocalypse.

Just...holy shit. Where do I begin? I mean, the music was clearly performed on two Casio keyboards. The video's budget was $4.27 tops. TOPS. Their dancing is also problematic; one second they're doing an explicit interpretation of male ejaculation, the next they're dropping it like it's hot. And I can't pretend I didn't see the liquid penis at 0:06, or that the existence of said penis was an accident.

I'm not making this up. Liquid. Penis.

Though honestly, I have to give O-Town props for being so explicit. Most other boy bands went for a harmless and neutered approach, making their desires seem sweet, romantic, and completely non-threatening. O-Town was having none of that. They wanted to have sex with hot ladies, and if they couldn't have that, they'd just masturbate to posters of hot ladies and sing about it. Try as I might, I can't even be mad at their honesty. 

I can still be mad about their total lack of singing talent, however. Feast your ears on this live performance at Miss America 2000: 

The redhead's singing voice is the aural equivalent of getting your ear drums scrubbed with Brillo pads, but he's hardly the only guilty party here. As I understand it, their ear pieces were broken, which is apparently supposed to explain and excuse this musical monstrosity. Still, that doesn't account for every single one of them hitting the wrong notes whenever possible. I'll give them points for their very enthusiastic choreography, especially the redhead - shawty got a duuuunk! But this performance is a declaration of war on good music. Unforgivable. 

By 2002, O-Town's profound lack of anything good caught up with them. They released a sweet little ditty called "We Fit Together," a song whose bubbly melody nearly disguised lines like "how many triple-X dreams I've had starring you" but only brought them to #104 on the Billboard charts. The group disbanded in 2003*. Their success, short-lived thought it was, is adequate proof of two things:

1) Teenage girls didn't need to be sweetly romanced in order to buy records.

2) They also didn't need working ears.

Final Tally:

• Sex appeal/charisma: 1 - That Ashley Angel character is as pretty as his name
• Cheesiness: Solid 10
• Dance moves: 5, for sheer enjoyment value
• Music: 0.5
• Post-band success: Ashley Angel is the only one of the five members with a Wikipedia page, which is pretty damning stuff as far as the other four are concerned. He's put together a solid enough Broadway career, starring in the musical Hairspray; but he also named his son Lyric. 

*O-Town did regroup earlier this year, sans their most famous and successful member, Ashley Angel. So far no music has been released, but be on your guard...

Boy Band Battle Royale: Introduction

I was unfortunate enough not to grow up during the eras of Motown, rock & roll, or disco; instead, I was a pre-teen and teenager during the boy band explosion of the late 90s and early 00s. This is when all of pop culture finally became aware of teenage girls and their buying power, and started marketing almost exclusively to us. Boy bands suddenly became ubiquitous, and while their reign of terror made perfect sense to me as a guileless preteen, the whole thing is baffling to me now. The Boy Band Battle Royale will be my attempt to categorize, organize, and somehow explain how groups of neutered young crooners doing synchronized dance moves briefly conquered the music world.

Boy Band Battle Royale (BBBR) will use the following judging criteria: 

• Sex appeal/charisma
• Cheesiness
• Dance moves
• Music
• Post-band success

With something as objective as this, I think it's important to establish a floor. Every barrel has a bottom, and I'm choosing the bottom of the boy band barrel: Youngstown.


If you're lucky, you have never heard of Youngstown...until now.

Just so we're clear - they're singing the theme song for the live action movie Inspector Gadget, starring Matthew Broderick and Rupert Everett somehow. And that song was their biggest hit. Having grown up on the Disney channel, I was very familiar with Youngstown - they also sang the theme song for The Famous Jett Jackson, and contributed to a Disney Channel Original Movie (TM) soundtrack. So, yes.


Sex Appeal/charisma: Negotiable, but really 0
Cheesiness: 11
Dance moves: Barely register
Music: -3 (for ruining the Inspector Gadget song)
Post-band success: That's not even a thing


Bonus: here is a link to the non-Disney version of "I'll Be Your Everything," which is a lot less playful and a lot more date rape-y.


For the next several weeks, I'll throw up a post about different boy bands and how they relate to each other, until I get to the two titans: Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. So, stay tuned!
Part 1: O-Town

Part 2: LFO
Part 3: 98 Degrees
Part 4: B2K and You Got Served
Part 5: Boyz II Men

Religion in the movies

It's the day after Mardi Gras, which must mean it's Lent! In (dis)honour of this event, I thought I'd share my somewhat random ruminations about how religion - specifically Christianity - is portrayed in the movies. While the conventional wisdom seems to be that Hollywood is run by godless, sex-crazed heathens and/or Jews, the truth is that Hollywood movies are and have always been very dedicated to a positive portrayal of religion. Even when dealing with religious fanaticism run amok, the problem is never the religion itself but the fanatics who have misunderstood the religion. 


In general, there tend to be two major themes in movies dealing with religion. Well, that's not precisely true - there's one theme, with two variations.


Theme: Non-believer, through a series of phenomenal events, becomes a believer. 
Variation 1: A genial god seeks to convert the non-believer through friendly/passive-aggressive baiting. 
Variation 2: Evil takes some kind of form, and only through believing can the protagonist stop/come to terms with it. 


As you would expect, the first variation is usually found in comedies, while the second is usually in full-on dramas - shrieking choirs, ominous intonations, fire probably, at least one person slowly crossing him- or herself...that kind of thing. 


In comedies, the god is usually played by someone about as controversial and divisive as a fluffy pillow. After all, how could you associate negative thoughts or emotions with Morgan Freeman, or George Burns? They're so sweet and approachable, but they're also old, which makes them wise and knowledgeable. So, in this case, the god = the perfect grandfather. He also seems to have an opt-out plan regarding his own alleged omnipotence - if he wants to, he can give Bruce 7 fingers or make him walk on water; but he can also choose to let Bruce get the shit kicked out of him by a gang of bullies, a few moments after he gets fired. I assume these movies don't intend to make the god out to be a casual sadist, but it's the sense I usually get. 

Awww, but how can I stay mad at that face?

The dramas, on the other hand, very rarely show any god, but are happy to show numerous versions of evil/the devil. There will be heavy Biblical references. There will be grotesque physicality. More often than not, there will be some creepy kid, who is either a) a small demon; b) hosting a demon; c) the Antichrist. The creepy kid drama will also likely have a female protagonist, who is always - ALWAYS - punished for her lack of religious beliefs by pregnancy. (In the case of The Exorcist, Ellen Burstyn is punished by watching her child become host to several demons.) Men in these religious dramas often die, because they got mixed up with the female protagonist, and because the female protagonist does not deserve a happy and healthy romantic relationship.

Should've found Jesus sooner, crone!

Both variations trouble me, for different reasons. The comedy promotes the most palatable version of Christianity, while completely avoiding anything that's identifiably Christian. The audience doesn't have to think about religion at all, but just accept the vague warm fuzzies lobbed at it. Meanwhile, the drama promotes the most misogynist and regressive parts of Christianity with a creepily reverent tone, trying to scare the audience into believing. Either way, they are insulting, thoughtless, and unchallenging.