‘Nobody has a better eye for developing teen talent than Lou Pearlman…’
My knowledge of ’90s boy bands is pretty slender as I hated them as a kid. Not just because Noel Gallagher and Eminem told me to hate them but also because most of the music they produced was dogshit. Having said that N’Sync and Backstreet Boys have undeniably endured as a cultural force, so it is no surprise that we now have this Netflix documentary. The surprising bit perhaps is that the focus of Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam is not on the groups themselves but on the man behind their success…
Lou Pearlman was a music mogul and entrepreneur responsible for numerous ’90s boy bands (as well as many other business interests). Despite earning a reputation as a shrewd businessman and father figure for his bands, Pearlman hid a dark secret.
Featuring interviews with numerous members of Backstreet Boys, N’Sync and O-Town, Dirty Pop explores how the whole thing was basically a pyramid scheme that was always going to collapse at some point. The famous faces speak eloquently about their experiences riding the Pearlman gravy train until the bottom fell out and it is also fun to see archive footage of the bands in their pomp (even though it was undoubtedly a terrible time for music generally).
Despite poor reviews elsewhere, I found Dirty Pop a compelling and breezy run-through of an extraordinary tale of fraud and mismanagement. There is one unfortunate moment where the documentary hints that Pearlman may have been a sexual predator before dropping that theory entirely having provided no evidence, but aside from that misstep, Dirty Pop is solid television.