Jive
Pop, 2001

Look, the boys have grown up! Continuing the extrapolating of their coming into puberty that was No Strings Attached, Celebrity has all the signs of maturity, boyband-style. There’s the obligatory bad hair, the tattoos, the ear and other body piercings, and the leather duds. Don’t forget the gloomy faces, because adults don’t smile anymore, you know.

Now all that’s missing is one or two of them going into rehab and the others making a martyr out of themselves for it.

Well, there’s the obligatory whine about how hard it is to live the life of a celebrity, because oh, are her hands down his pants because she wants his binkie or because she wants his money? Duh. Oh, the pain of being a celebrity, painstakingly chronicled in the title track. “Would you be so into me if I wasn’t a celebrity?” they screech, and all the preteen girls (and some older ones who should know better) in the world swoon.

Then they are trying to do a faux gangsta-rap/hard chorus routine on everybody. Yo homies, da NSTINK, sorry, NSYNC boys are here, tired of dirty pop and they will hit you with the real thing. “This must be… ppppppppop!” they go in Pop (really). True, the rhythms are harder, more techno, but the lyrics remain on the insipid, asexual level typical of boybands. Thus, the whole ensemble doesn’t seem very credible.

Still, it’s better than anything they’ve ever done. Even if they still do sound like bad Michael Jackson impersonator rejects.