3 Acts Who Personify the Bubblegum Pop Craze of the Late 1990s

Something happened in the 1990s. It was such a dramatic left turn in the world of popular music, it almost seems comical today. But that’s what happens when a decade sees seismic changes on the marquee. The decade launched with a bang with grunge music and gangsta rap. But the late 1990s ended with a bubblegum pop craze that the world had never seen.

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Here below, we wanted to explore three examples of just that. These three musical acts are so drastically different from, say, their grunge counterparts earlier in the decade that it almost seems like they come from different times in human history. Indeed, these are musical acts that personify the bubblegum pop craze of the late 1990s.

[RELATED: 3 Two-Hit Wonders From the 1990s That Will Remind You of a Different Time]

Britney Spears

In 1997, a 15-year-old Britney Spears signed with Jive Records. That one signature would go on to change the face of pop music for the next decade-plus. It was at the end of the decade when Spears landed in a major way, but it was enough to cement her status as one of the biggest names of the era.

After the mid-90s when pop music had had enough of depressing grunge boys and shoot-em-up rap songs, audiences turned to the sweet sounds of Spears (and others on this list). And Spears didn’t disappoint. It was in 1999 when the McComb, Mississippi-born artist dropped her debut single, “…Baby One More Time”, and she ruled pop for years after.

*NSYNC

Speaking of Britney, her former love affair Justin Timberlake rose to fame and popularity around the same time as she did. That’s all thanks to the boy band *NSYNC. People craved heartfelt pop so much that there were appetites for a seemingly endless string of boy groups in the 1990s and 2000s, but it was *NSYNC who was at the forefront. You can thank songs like “Tearin’ Up My Heart” from their self-titled 1997 LP for that. The quintet of Timberlake, JC Chasez, Chris Kirkpatrick, Joey Fatone, and Lance Bass were on posters in bedrooms all around the world.

Backstreet Boys

Just as you can’t talk about Britney without mentioning Justin, you can’t talk about *NSYNC without mentioning The Backstreet Boys. The boy bands had a healthy competition on the Billboard charts, each going back and forth with chart toppers. Both boasted energizing vocal harmonies and songs that got stuck in your eardrums as soon as you heard them.

However, it was Backstreet that hit the scene first. They paved the way for their brethren with albums like their self-titled 1996 offering and the 1997 follow-up, Backstreet’s Back, which included epic songs like “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”.

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