Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam’ on Netflix, A Docuseries Delving Into The Financial Scheming of The Backstreet Boys and NSYNC’s “Big Poppa”

In the three-part docuseries Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam, now streaming on Netflix, members of the groups built or promoted by businessman, talent manager, and convicted financial schemer Lou Pearlman take us through how they got taken. “There’s something incredibly wrong,” NSYNC’s Chris Kirkpatrick remembers thinking in Dirty Pop. “Why are we still working our butts off for nickels and dimes, and Lou’s making millions?” New interviews with Kirkpatrick and Backstreet Boys AJ McLean and Howie Dorough feature in Dirty Pop, alongside a ton of archival footage, interviews with members of Pearlman-affiliated boy bands like O-Town and Natural, and Pearlman’s former employees and business partners. Pearlman himself even speaks to the camera. But not in any way you’d expect…      

DIRTY POP: THE BOY BAND SCAM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: In an old piece of VHS footage, the Backstreet Boys – who are so young they’re more like the Backstreet Babies – are harmonizing as curious young people look on. Then a news report takes over. “Nobody has a better talent for finding and developing teen pop in the music world than Lou Pearlman. An impresario who is in sync with the times…” 

The Gist: Lou Pearlman was in sync with the times in that he was a business guy who’d made a lot of money in the building and renting blimps – yes, blimps – but realized he’d missed his calling to make even more once he saw the kind of cash generated by New Kids on the Block. This was the late 1980s, and Pearlman decided to build his own boy band in his homebase of Orlando, Florida. An audition process led to the formation of Backstreet Boys, and in interviews, AJ McLean describes how Pearlman quickly became both benefactor and father figure to the young, inexperienced quintet. They called him “Big Poppa,” and he paid for everything. But they were also performing on a grueling schedule, practicing non stop on a cheap wooden stage built in “Lou’s gondola hangar for blimps,” and besides low-level per diems, they weren’t getting paid at all. 

Lou Pearlman was convicted of conspiracy and money laundering in 2008, and died in federal prison in 2016. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a main character in Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam. The docuseries makes the curious decision to feature an artificial intelligence-addled version of Pearlman, who vocalizes quotes taken from his 2002 book, Bands Brands And Billions: My Top Ten Rules for Success in Any Business. And as AI Lou continues to pop up periodically, his rules for business start to become clear. A no-questions-asked investment program with lots of contributions from his employees, their families, and corporate cronies. And together with its entertainment wing, which soon included NSYNC in addition to Backstreet, Pearlman raised the financial profile of Trans Continental, his central business interest. “Lou definitely used his bands to catapult investment in all of his companies,” a former Pearlman employee says in Dirty Pop.

If Backstreet was his Coke, he needed a Pepsi, which is how NSYNC followed the Backstreet formula. And once they were both signed to a major and appearing on MTV in videos and on Total Request Live, their careers escalated. But so did the questions. You make a gold record and only get ten grand? “JC [Chasez] went and got the lawyer,” Kirkpatrick says, “and we’re just, like, standing there thinking, ‘Oh, there’s an answer to this.’” And the answer was that Pearlman was fleecing NSYNC, Backstreet, the other boy bands and girl groups in his orbit, and many other people who gave him their money to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The rise and fall of Lou Pearlman is a story that’s been told before, probably most significantly in The Boy Band Con, a documentary produced by NSYNC member Lance Bass and featuring interviews with Bass, Kirkpatrick, and Chasez. (It’s available to stream through YouTube.) Nick Carter is among the Backstreet Boys not interviewed in Dirty Pop, but he also wasn’t interviewed for the recent Max docuseries Fallen Idols: Nick and Aaron Carter, which dives deep into the toxic fallout from the crest of the boy band era, including numerous allegations of sexual assault involving Carter. And while Dirty Pop zeroes in on Pearlman and his schemes, the same boy band era also surfaces in the Netflix music doc series This is Pop, as well as Bell Biv Devoe’s appearance on the reconstituted Behind the Music earlier this year. 

Our Take: “I came from a trailer,” Chris Kirkpatrick says in Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam. “And he’s living in this mansion with all of this stuff, and he’s got all these accolades. He must be somebody.” It’s a quote that illustrates how simple it could be for a guy like Lou Pearlman to take his financial advantage. The young men he auditioned and signed had shared showbiz-adjacent connections, like appearing on Mickey Mouse Club or entertaining the public at Disney. They might have had the fire, but they needed fuel for their one desire, and Pearlman had the cashflow to do it his way. Nobody was asking questions in the moment, because they were suddenly topping the charts in Germany and fighting off throngs of screaming fans. 

Dirty Pop smartly ties its year-by-year timestamps to songs, like Backstreet’s “I Want It That Way” and “We’ve Got It Goin’ On,” or NSYNC with “It’s Gonna be Me,” which allows us to follow how huge the 90s boy band phenomenon really got, and wonder how those groups allowed themselves to be swindled for so long. But from the perspective of Kirkpatrick, McLean, and others interviewed, they were riding a wave of success that felt real, even if there were questions in the margins. Because why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t a fresh-faced young Justin Timberlake eagerly show cameras around his bedroom in the house Pearlman rented for NSYNC to live in? This was their moment. Until it wasn’t. 

Which admittedly is more interesting than the inevitable dissolution of Pearlman’s ponzi scheme. The impresario frequently surfacing as an AI version of himself is further disconcerting, because it only makes his control over the members of his bands feel more icky and robotic, like he’s somehow still winning from all of his financial hijinks, even from beyond the grave.

Sex and Skin: Nothing really. Instead there are the requisite cuts of screaming female fans reacting to Backstreet and NSYNC, creepy quotes from Lou Pearlman – “When God stops making little girls, until then, boy bands are never over” – and some commentary on the sexuality of Pearlman himself. Was he straight? Gay? Did he ever behave inappropriately with the young members of the groups on his roster? “Wasn’t a part of my experience,” former O-Town member Erik-Michael Estrada says in Dirty Pop. “However, there was some suspect behavior.”

Parting Shot: If only he could’ve known ahead of time, is Chris Kirkpatrick’s main point. “With Lou, it always seemed genuine. But if you make a deal with the devil, he’s not going to show up as the devil. Because you wouldn’t make that deal.” 

Sleeper Star: It’s really difficult to get past the queasiness of an AI-generated Lou Pearlman. He keeps resurfacing throughout Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam, always accompanied by different versions of an onscreen disclaimer. “This is real footage of Lou Pearlman; this footage has been digitally altered to generate his voice and synchronize his lips.” (An actor is even credited as being part of the computerized concoction.) While it’s definitely more distinctive than simply presenting pull-quotes from Pearlman’s book, the AI thing is a weird outlier in contrast to how any of the other footage in Dirty Pop is used. The docuseries readily admits the footage was manipulated. But it gives off a reek of also manipulating the viewing audience.   

Most Pilot-y Line: AJ McLean acknowledges that Backstreet Boys never would’ve happened without Lou Pearlman. But lots of people got hurt along the way. “Lou had big pockets and a dream. And [Backstreet Boys] were the guinea pigs for that dream.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Alongside a ton of archival boy band ephemera, Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam presents an interesting thread: young entertainment biz hopefuls, taken in by what they perceived as a hot route to notoriety and success, and how a guy like Lou Pearlman got away with his swindle for so long. Maybe the footnote is the same as it always is whenever the contracts are proffered: hire a lawyer before you sign anything.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.