Watch the Tunes: Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of

I’m about to firmly advocate that you watch a documentary about The Backstreet Boys, so brace yourselves, people. Yeah, I didn’t see this coming either, but here we are. Now that we’re here though, there’s something really wonderful about getting to prosthelytize to the Vinyl Me Please faithful about Stephen Kijak’s Backstreet Boys: Show ’Em What You’re Made Of despite the fact that nothing of theirs was ever released on the slick twelve inch by twelve inch medium we all know and love. It’s music, and that’s enough for nerds like us to put it under the umbrella of “stuff we give a shit about” even if, like me, it was just something to tolerate while you waited for whether or not Nine Inch Nails might inexplicably make the cut on Total Request Live.

The “Boys” are collectively painted as victims and, given how hard their manager fucked them over, it’s a characterization that sticks a lot better than you’d think. Sure they were a boy-band, cobbled together with the pure intention of separating teen girls from their allowance money but, even though it’s a far cry from Get In The Van, they sure as shit put in the hours and days rehearsing and bouncing from mall to mall in the early years. "Pinocchio was manufactured but in the end he turned into a real boy" is the way they validate the means by which they were chasing the dream of being Artists with a capital A. There’s a ton of colorfully dated archival footage crammed into Show ’Em What You’re Made Of and, coupled with the mid-aughts trips to catch up with various middle school chorus teachers, it all goes a long way to humanize these guys. For real, if A.J. dusting off some ballet moves in front of a class full of girls who were infants when he was topping the chart doesn’t warm you to them, nothing will.

The film ends up landing a good ways off from the squeaky clean image that the group was forced to conform to at their peak. From the opening shot of two members of the group pissing in the woods, you know to watch out cuz “this ain’t your mother’s Backstreet Boys doc!” Wanna learn how to say "Will you give me a blow job?" in German? Kevin’s got ya! For rubberneckers looking for trainwrecks, there’s a shocking amount of candid and sometimes unflattering footage that makes it into the final cut. In a huge Some Kind Of Monster style emo-explosion, the cameras capture a tour-planning meeting where Nick yells a seemingly nonstop barrage of profanities at Brian over the fact that the group is having to dance around his cracking voice. It’s a crazy testament to the group’s professionalism that the beef eventually gets squashed and everyone’s able to ultimately get past their old grudges, but it’s readily evident that everyone’s got some scar tissue just under the surface.

Show ’Em What You’re Made Of, like previous Watch the Tunes entry We Are Twisted F*cking Sister, does a great job controlling the narrative scope of its respective subject. Even though you might end up with a whole new respect for the group, actual footage of them on the tour in 2013 is thankfully saved until the credits start rolling (the less said about the tunes from the new album, the better). The upside of this credit reel though is getting to see the OG fans interact with members before and after the shows. These guys clearly still mean a lot to more people around the world than you might think, and my only complaint is that it’s a fact which we aren’t directly confronted with until the very last possible moment. There are so many ways this could’ve ended up being a really boring movie, but it ends up transcending the soulless genre of music that the Backstreet Boys were best known for.