So I graduated college. NBD. As a recent college graduate, I went with my friend (also a recent college graduate) to perhaps the most epic concert of our lives: the NKOTBSB concert (code for New Kids On The Block and Backstreet Boys) at the Staples Center in L.A..
Oh yes. It wasn’t as cool as imagined. It was even better.
After the openers finally finished, New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys stormed the stage and captured the hearts of all women (and the few (whipped) men) in the audience. The setup was perfect. There was a main stage, a catwalk, and then a smaller, secondary stage. NKOTB and BSB took turns on each of the stages and were choreographed into the perfect battle of the bands.
The concert was epic in every possible way. I mean, what’s not to love about boys (more appropriately now, men) singing in harmony, dancing in unison, and hamming it up to the ladies? I dare any woman with a soul, and a warm, beating heart, to go watch a boy band and not melt a little bit inside, or go just a little weak in the knees. I just don’t think it’s humanly, or in this case, womanly, possible.
Which leads me to possibly my favorite moment of the night: Shortly after both boy bands got on stage and started singing, the perfect girlish squeal escaped my friend’s lips. Yes. It was glorious and it vocalized all the torrent of teenage hormones raging inside my not-13-year old body.
Towards the end of the show, Kevin (the oldest member of the original group, who left the band in 2006 to "pursue other interests") magically appeared on one of the stages and happily all of the Backstreet Boys did a few songs as an entire group before the concert officially ended. So now, the Backstreet Boys can fade into my memory as a complete, never tainted boy band.
After experiencing all of it, it's really hard for me to pick a favorite song from the concert. Naturally, being a child of the ‘90s, I already knew and loved BSB, so my favorite song from the concert has to be one of theirs, not the before-my-time New Kids. This narrows the choices, but still leaves me a plethora of worthy options. The Boys would start singing a song and I would realize what I felt I had been missing my entire life and they were now reminding me of, leaving me feeling momentarily satisfied. Until the next song that I had forgotten about and was again blissfully reminded of… With that cycle in mind, I think the happiest, most memorable reminder for me was Drowning.
In the end, here are the things the concert accomplished for me:
- Previously my ‘New Kids On The Block’ exposure consisted of the LFO song “Every Other Time’, with the oh-so-famous line, “New Kids On The Block had a bunch of hits, Chinese food makes me sick…”. Now I’ve heard them sing some of those hits.
- It made the 13-year old inside of me so insanely happy.
- Most importantly, the middle-schooler inside of me can now die a happy woman (Okay. Okay. A happy girl).
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