The Friday Flash Review:

Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”

I asked for a 90s Boy Band track to review.

And y’all decide to deliver me a 1999 late-stage 90s boy band track that not only seems to defy logical genre descriptions (“pop ballad” appears to be the consensus, however this seems like a cop-out to me), but sports a title that Andrew Unterberger of PopDust claims is “devoid of inherent meaning.” 

Cool, guys. Cool. 

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In-a-Flash Review:

What happens when something is too perfectly honed for its own good and thusly collapses into a musical singularity?

“I Want It That Way” is apparently what happens. I honestly can’t even wrap my brain around this track, as it transcends songdom and enters into the realm of “lots of sounds in sequence that people are inherently designed to like.”

It’s an odd sensation. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a good s-s-s-something! I’m just not prepared as of yet to call it a normal song. Whatever it is, though, it’s effective. 

LET’S GET METAPHYSICAL SCORE: 7/10!

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The Full Friday Flash Review

Given that this otherwise throw-away song has spun me into a mini existential crisis, this review would be so much easier if I could use irrational numbers. Unfortunately, I don’t think this website supports irrational numbers, so regular numbers will have to suffice.

Right off the bat, there’s some sublime weirdness going on: the intro guitar riff was actually inspired by Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” (welcome; you will never be able to unhear that now).

…no matter how many brain cells collapse upon themselves in the process. 

I’m just glad we’re all in this together. 

Don’t even get me started on the “wah-wah-wah” guitar-yet-not-a-guitar type thing bouncing around in the intro acappella chorus, which somehow is crucial to the zeitgeist of this s-s-s…track despite its very limited use. 

OK, exiting the intro, we immediately get a cool bass slide (as if it’s a real bass player – ha!) into the groove, which locks in like a metronome’s metronome. This production is as tight as the night is dark. The rhythm section sounds purely unnatural but in a completely inoffensive Swedish way.

But also, what are those percussion sounds? They’re not really drum sounds. They’re not block sounds. This is what I mean about this track – it’s pure inscrutable loveliness. 

Oh, did I just say its lovely? Yeah, I did. Despite my reservations and consternations and all the other -ations, everything just gels into this congealing form of sounds that effortlessly flows over me like a waterfall without water. 

Leave it to Max Martin to programmatically optimize production to the point where vocal riffing is as programmatic as the drum machine. Point deducted! 

Honestly, I feel like something bad might happen to me if The Great Swedish Algorithm found out that I didn’t give the songwriting here perfect marks. This song is so expertly written to idyllic perfection that, at the risk of repeating myself (oh, there’s no risk – it’s absolutely going to happen), it almost transcends traditional songdom. 

Yet – yet! – it’s all a bit too idyllic, isn’t it? Yes, it is.

At this point, I feel like I’m just giving up and defaulting to 7’s, because 7 is the most programmatic/inoffensive “better than average but not great” score, which is really BSB’s wheelhouse, right? These vocals are, in a word, buttery. They go down smooth and easy, and while notionally tasty, they don’t have a ton of substance.

Even toward the end where they “let loose,” they’re really not letting loose at all.

And, it’s honestly not surprising given the (spoiler alert!) situation with the lyrics.

So, let’s just kick this section off with a funny coincidence:

Not only was the song inspired by Metallica, of all groups, singing about how nothing matters, but it appears the lyrics were inspired by the same Metallica song as well: because nothing here makes any sense, and it doesn’t matter.

But the best part of this fact is that making no sense was 100% on-strategy.

In an interview with HitQuarters, Andreas Carlsson confessed that the song was a play with words. According to him:

“When Max came up with the original idea for the song, it already had the line ‘you are my fire, the one desire’. We tried a million different variations on the second verse, and finally we had to go back to what was sounding so great, ‘you are my fire, the one desire’.
And then we changed it to ‘am I your fire, your one desire’, which made absolutely no sense in combination with the chorus – but everybody loved it!”

Many critics over the years have questioned the song’s lyrical meaning, mainly the line, “I want it that way.” Ben Westhoff of LA Weekly dissected the song, writing that its lyrical content “makes zero sense”. For Westhoff, “Mainly, the meaning of ‘that’ is at issue.”

While analyzing the lyrics, Westhoff perceived that, “None of the sentiments in the chorus seem to go with any of the other ones. Even worse, no further explanation is given for what ‘that’ is.” The critic assumed that in the song “someone simply doesn’t like it when his lover expresses preferences, never wanting to hear when his girlfriend says she wants things in particular ways”.

This is truly great stuff:

The song drove people nuts.

Who knew? I certainly didn’t. I was just gliding along in an idyllic sonic dreamscape created by Max Martin. With Max, it’s all about the syllables and the vowels, not the actual words, silly!

Yeah, two plus decades later, “I Want It That Way” is still creating content juice for websites. 

BONUS TRIVIA ALERT: One of the “well known producers at the time [hired] to redo the song” referenced in this article was none other than…Mutt Lange. 

So, yeah, points for massive amounts of drama about essentially nothing. Points for creating an entirely different version of the lyrics because what is meaning anyway? But points deducted for creating a two-decade fugue state for one too many people. 

This rating surprises no one, including me. Frankly, “I Want It That Way” has a bunch of earworms, including the inspired-by-Metallica guitar riff and the bouncy guitar-not-a-guitar thing not to mention the super-melodic verses and the programmed-to-worm chorus melody. So, points for all that.

But, there’s no top-tier stuff anywhere. It’s all better-than-serviceable but not cream of the crop. Really good but certainly not epic. 

TL;DR: 

So, look:

There’s two ways to approach “I Want It That Way” as a reviewer in my mind: You can find the most efficient path from A to B and just talk about what tofu would sound like if it were music.

But I chose to take the long way home and explored it through the musically mechanistic machinations utilized to compose and craft this simple and almost hypnotic piece of work. 

I still feel odd about all the ratings to be honest. 

There’s a part of me that views “I Want It That Way” in a pretty poor light –

it’s weaponized mundanity put to music.

But technically, I cannot help but to be impressed by the spectacle of what was accomplished.

This is why I would have preferred to use irrational numbers in my ratings! 

mathematical theorist and tofu aficionado Jon Deutsch

I definitely blame the song for this.

But I’ve galaxy brained myself into a 7/10. I’m curious what everyone else thinks.

Cheers!

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