His artists called him Big Poppa, but the late boyband mogul Lou Pearlman was also a big old conman, convicted of running a substantial Ponzi scheme which earned him a 25-year prison sentence. He died in custody, after eight years in jail. Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam tells the story of how he unleashed Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync on the world, while also engaging in large-scale financial fraud.
Both are compelling stories, and the combination of the two makes for a surreal and undeniably intriguing spectacle. Pearlman ran a blimp-hire company in the 1980s, with the help of friends who had “Wall Street” connections, and who, according to one of the interviewees here, had some involvement with the mob. He also hired out aircrafts to pop stars and celebrities. After Pearlman saw New Kids on the Block on television, he was astonished to learn that the boyband, who he says he’d never heard of before, were raking in tens of millions of dollars a year. He began to plot his move from the air to the airwaves.
Pearlman’s wealth allowed him to launch first the Backstreet Boys, and then ‘NSync, treating both groups as if they were already megastars, flying them around the world in private jets and visiting US high schools in luxury tour-buses. This “fake it till you make it” approach paid off. While the US was slower to catch on, Germany adored the Backstreet Boys and made them into stars. Other nations soon followed.
Two of the Backstreet Boys, Howie Dorough and AJ McLean, speak here, as does ‘NSync founder Chris Kirkpatrick; the others appear through archive interviews that highlight just how young some of the members were when they rose to fame. (Justin Timberlake was, presumably, too busy with the tour. What tour? The world tour.) In a detail that gives real insight into Pearlman’s thinking, we learn that he saw the Backstreet Boys as a “dominant brand like Coke”, which suggested to him that someone would soon launch a Pepsi. In ‘NSync, he was making his own Pepsi, and getting ahead of the competition.
But the wealth that kickstarted the music management was built on shaky foundations which eventually came crumbling down. The financial misconduct is the stuff of Wolf of Wall Street, a clip of which is used for illustrative purposes. The scale is staggering. This documentary gives a voice to at least one of the victims of Pearlman’s schemes: the mother of Frankie Vasquez Jr, who worked with Pearlman and encouraged his own mother to invest in his businesses. The consequences of this were catastrophic. Was Pearlman a monster? Was he a villain? Was he a marketing genius who deserved his share of the boyband pie, or did he exploit young creatives who didn’t know anything about this world? There are ample interviews here with people who worked with Pearlman, childhood friends, colleagues, those who severed their ties and those who took him to court. More of them than you might expect remain somewhat ambivalent.
Clearly the story is fascinating on a number of levels. However, there is an editorial choice that is so bizarre and unnecessary that it undermines everything else in the series. Early in the first episode, we see a clip of Pearlman sitting at his desk. A caption flashes up on-screen: “This is real footage of Lou Pearlman.” OK. It didn’t look like a cartoon, but fine, be clear. Then another caption: “This footage has been digitally altered to generate his voice and synchronise his lips.” What? Why? They have taken words from Pearlman’s book Bands, Brands and Billions, and changed the footage to make it look as if he is speaking them to camera.
It is such a strange decision. It does nothing to enhance the story that getting an actor to read the words wouldn’t do, but it does undermine the audience’s trust in what they are seeing, even though they’re being open about it. It is still a faked interlude, a man being made to look as if he is speaking words where he never spoke them. In 2020, the documentary Welcome to Chechnya, about the persecution of gay people in the region, digitally altered the faces of participants in order to protect them. It was carefully done and it was made a feature of the film. In this case, it seems to be purely an aesthetic choice. They repeat the trick in other episodes, though not often enough to suggest that it is essential to the storytelling, which makes it even more odd. In the age of post-truth and deepfakes, sticking AI into a pop documentary feels like a slippery slope. And in a show about scams, too.
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