Backstreet Boys — "I Want It That Way"
The boy-band anthem that became iconic despite its infamously nonsensical lyrics, which even Kevin Richardson admitted "really doesn't make much sense." Peaked at number six on the Hot 100 due to chart technicalities, but hit number one in over twenty-five countries and spent ten weeks atop the US Adult Contemporary chart—Rolling Stone later ranked it among the 500 greatest songs of all time.
Released on April 12, 1999, "I Want It That Way" arrived as the lead single from the Millennium album, bearing all the hallmarks of the Cheiron machine at maximum velocity. Written by Max Martin and Andreas Carlsson and produced by Martin and Kristian Lundin at Cheiron Studios in Stockholm, the song was engineered to be inescapable—a perfect encapsulation of what made late-90s pop radio so potent. The fact that the song's lyrics were deliberately nonsensical—a source of genuine bemusement among fans and even the group itself—only seemed to enhance its cultural magnetism.
The all-white music video was filmed in early April 1999 at Los Angeles International Airport—the Tom Bradley International Terminal and a hangar with a Boeing 727. Five guys in white, an airport, synchronized choreography in front of a parked jet: it became the mental image the words "boy band" summon to this day, endlessly imitated and parodied.
The chart journey was peculiar: unable to break the Hot 100's top spot due to a technicality (no commercial single was released during its peak popularity, so it accumulated points through airplay alone), the song instead stormed the globe. It topped the charts in more than twenty-five countries, including the UK and Germany, and spent an astounding ten weeks atop the US Adult Contemporary chart. The song earned three Grammy nominations, Rolling Stone's 2021 revision of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" placed it at number 240, and the video passed one billion YouTube views in 2021—the definitive boy-band moment of the era, still singable from the first "you are… my fire."
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