Saturday, June 23, 2012

How things change

A nostalgic-like thread developed during a FaceBook discussion the other day:

"blablabla Boyz II Men bla."
"Oh, NKOTB were the bomb I heard they're on the cruise ship tour circuit now (or maybe that was the Backstreet Boys)."
"OH boybands... I really loved those BSB fellas..."
"Mmm, JC Chasez."

In the evening, I had to wait in the car for a bit while Enfant Terrible got ready for dinner. The new Justine Bieber song (Boyfriend*) was playing.

It was redolent of, dare I type it, sexy feel. My external auditory meatus was swamped by the sexy feel. I was simultaneously intrigued and creeped out. Intrigued because here was Canada's #1 one-man boyband sounding sexy, creeped out because he is (only) 18 years old.

This young man is confusingly pretty. Image from The Justin Bieber Shrine

Things have not changed at all. Young, good-looking men are still making sexy faces and sounds that throw old(er) girls like me for a loop and think they're way too young to be behaving like that (though they're clearly not).

Suddenly, I have a rudimentary understanding of the desire to be forever young. The candy-colored everything, the predilection for impossibly tiny and delicate delicacies like rainbow-hued macarons, the entire concept of precious behavior. All aim at preserving the feeling of youthfulness.

I might be being melodramatic, but think about it: those who really go for that stuff, i.e., if they're all "OMGWTFBBQ<3<3<3" in real life, they might tell you they're 28 years old 5 years in a row.

* Entirely different and infinitely better than the one by Big Time Rush**
** Don't know what else they've done, but I had a hell of a difficult time looking them up.

2 comments:

Snuze said...

Thanks to this post, I discovered that when you type boyf into google, the first thing that hits up is this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GuqB1BQVr4

Even as a teen, I was a music hipster that I never fancied any of the boybands, hahahaha.

Unless you consider Queen, Depeche Mode, Babylon Zoo or Blur as boybands.

Angela Gripesalot said...

Such is the power of the Beliebers (?). I like boybands, they're easy on the eye. However, I draw the line at the Boyfriend video: I didn't even make it past the first 10 seconds cos I still think of him as a child (though I read somewhere that the age of consent in Canada is 16 years...) D: