Britney Thong Sing Yi MUSI 110 Concert Review 1 12/14/2022 After a two-year hiatus, Backstreet Boys (BSB) were back on world tour, having their eleventh concert tour at Denny Sanford PREMIER Center in Sioux Falls on Sunday, September 11, 2022. Being one of the top boy band groups in the late 90s and the early 2000s, they are known for their massive hit songs like "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)," "The Call," "We've Got It Goin On," and probably their biggest song "I Want It That Way." They brought all these songs and the high energy DNA Tour to the Sioux Falls stage. Backstreet Boys’ main genre of music is pop. Some elements of pop music include rock, hip hop, reggae, dance, R&B, jazz, electronic, etc. Since pop is a big umbrella term, the concert integrated many musical styles such as electronic dance music (EDM), pop, R&B, etc, fusing different genres to create various dynamics in terms of musicality and dance to the original tunes. As a result, even hard-core Backstreet Boys fans got to experience a new remix of the band’s top hits. One of their songs, “Show Me The Meaning of Being Lonely,” is a pop and R&B ballad, with Latin pop influences. Besides the language itself, Latin pop utilizes African rhythm that is unique and incorporates a “call and response” characteristic where two or more musical parts go back and forth in response to each other. This was evident in not just the original song but also when they performed it live. Another popular song the Backstreet Boys performed was “I Want It That Way.” This pop song illustrates vague interpretations about the expression of romantic emotions throughout the livelihood of an individual. Although it is not obvious, this song was inspired by Metallica, an American heavy metal band whose main influences are acts by Black Sabbath, Queen, and Led Zeppelin. Apparently, Andreas Carlsson, who co-wrote the song with producer Britney Thong Sing Yi MUSI 110 Concert Review 1 12/14/2022 Max Martin, claimed that the acoustic guitar riff that opens the song at the very beginning was inspired by the Metallica hit "Nothing Else Matters." Dance is also one of the band’s known features and it is known to have originated, if not, deeply rooted in African American communities tracing back to Ragtime, which later evolved into Swing, an early jazz style that was beloved for both its danceability and adaptability. The clarity of the instruments and snappy quality of the beat mimics closely to that of the songs performed by the boy band. Although Western pop music, or at least our current perspective of modern pop music, has been gaining popularity since the 1950s, it is evident that these music genres are derivatives of earlier music styles such as early jazz (swing) and early Rock ‘n’ Roll (rhythm and blues). Songs produced by Backstreet Boys tend to fall under the category of a form of urban pop – new jack swing, a combination of the R&B style with hip-hop rhythms. Especially when they performed songs in the band’s Red Album during the concert, the subgenre is more noticeable from the use of grittier East Coast hip hop inspired backing tracks rather than synthesizer-heavy rhythm tracks; This resulted in a genre labeled "hip hop soul." Overall, I think that the concert was not only successful but also very entertaining. Through learning the history of jazz, blues, and rock, I become more aware of the evolution of the different music genres as well as the present influences by early music.
