‘Menudo: Forever Young’ looks at the exploitative nature of boy bands

by Brent G. Oneal

As the culture considers the ills of the ’80s and ’90s, much attention has been paid to how the public and the media treated white American female stars such as Britney Spears. That’s a necessary conversation, but there’s a parallel discussion that we haven’t had — about how we’ve participated, stamped out the exploitative nature of boy bands, and effectively overlooked those whose members aren’t primarily placed spoke English.

We were watching HBO Max’s “Menudo: Forever Young,” which was a sobering experience. The docuseries forces you to understand how one of the most beloved boy bands ever, made up of preteen and teenage boys from Puerto Rico, was commercialized for our consumption and enjoyment. It does this brazenly and, especially at first, largely in Spanish.

Menudo

“We don’t care,” co-director Kristopher Ríos told HuffPost, although he admitted he had some concerns about how audiences would receive the series, partly because it’s in Spanish and English. “I mean, we made this primarily for Puerto Ricans. But you want a wider audience to see this.”

We must do that. As you work through each segment – four parts in the series, each about an hour or so – you realize the parallels to our relationships with all the boy bands in history and language, from the Jackson 5 and ‘N Sync to BTS.

Ríos believes the obsession with the business of male youth and talent started with Menudo. “It’s the first time the industry has realized that this is a way for us to maximize the profits of five guys,” he said. “Menudo is the first to show the world [that] this is how you make a lot of money with five young men. We analyze the way the industry exploits guys for profit.”

In 1983, Geraldo Rivera traveled to Puerto Rico to interview Menudo, the Puerto Rican group formed in the 1970s, one of the biggest Latin boy bands in history.

ABC News via Getty Images

That means telling the full story of Menudo, as few have ever bothered. Most superfans of the band could probably recite the press release version of their account by heart: Edgardo Díaz created the bar in the 1970s in Puerto Rico. They earned international acclaim with hits like ‘Los Fantasmas’ in the early ’80s, which helped cement their status as teen idols in their native island and the United States throughout the early 2000s.

Even if you didn’t have “Menuditis” — a word Stans coined to describe their love for five of the most recognizable guys in the world — Menudo was impossible to ignore completely.

Ríos was born in New York and moved to Puerto Rico when he was 4. He lived there until he was 14. He knew Menudo’s songs and who they were. “I remember when I was a kid, you would go to birthday parties, and they would give you the little Menudo makeup mirror and fanny pack and the Menudo notebook and things like that,” he recalls. “I think maybe I even had a Menudo T-shirt.”

To the credit of Ríos and co-director Angel Manuel Soto, they tell a nuanced story that explores why the boy band continues to be so loved. In doing so, they knew they had to talk about the price of fame and the respect these guys helped bring back to Puerto Rico. That’s the story that everyone knew, even if they only knew Menudo a little bit – and if you were a boy band fan, you could certainly identify with the fascination with merch.

Featuring clips and interviews with about 12 members of the band and other pundits, “Menudo: Forever Young” also chronicles the parts of their story that haven’t been properly accounted for, even all these years later.

For example, how Díaz replaced each boy once they reached puberty to maintain the youthfulness of the group and pay little or no attention to the departing member. The boys were reportedly not being paid enough for the 24-hour work they did and how. They were robbed of an education by aggressive touring and rehearsal schedules. Their parents had to transfer a significant portion of their parental rights to Díaz so that he could manage them as he saw fit. And how they had little actual oversight, which left the minors vulnerable to the ubiquitous drugs.

Former Menudo member Ralphy Rodríguez appears in the docuseries “Menudo: Forever Young”.

But perhaps the most devastating part of the story is the band members’ accusations that Díaz groomed and sexually abused them.

That caught even Ríos by surprise. The filmmaker came to the project with an extensive journalistic background and did a lot of research on the band. “I didn’t know there were abuse allegations,” he said. “The things you see in the documentary — I didn’t know. The first time I got involved with those parts of the story was when I started working on the project.”

However, as “Menudo: Forever Young” shows, it’s not that these claims weren’t made public, even at the peak of the band’s success. Journalists like Carmen Jovet and Juan González sounded alarmed about this story years ago, largely in vain.

Similarly, band member Ralphy Rodríguez publicly accused Díaz of abuse in 1991. That was on the wildly popular Puerto Rican talk show “El show de Cristina,” whose host, Cristina Saralegui, also invited the much more powerful Díaz on the episode to counter Rodríguez’s reaction. to go. Claims.

So the allegations were there. (Díaz has not commented on the docuseries but has denied previous allegations against him.) but as we’ve seen so often when it comes to pop stars and other celebrities, there have been overwhelming incentives for the media and entertainment industry to twist or obscure these details and keep the boyband machine going.

Former Menudo member Johnny Lozado shows doll replicas of the band in the docuseries.

Fans often ignore this kind of information because they want to maintain the purity of their love for the band, or because they’re too uncomfortable to face it, or they don’t care – or a combination of all these things. That’s not even disturbed by the obvious fact that their favorite members were regularly flipped out of the group like baseball cards.

Ríos admits he was a little nervous approaching this minefield of complex stories, but he knew it was necessary. “There’s that layer of us that challenges the culture of pop star boy bands,” he said. “But we are” [also] challenging the culture in our community and among Puerto Ricans that allowed these guys to go through this machine and be abused for many decades.”

It’s tricky, and it means considering multiple truths at once. On the one hand, the number of barriers the band broke for Puerto Ricans, as detailed in “Menudo: Forever Young,” cannot be overstated. This could have greatly overshadowed everything else.

Ríos also notes how disregarding the members’ humanity when considering whether their success directly results from the boy band’s business model, echoing how Motown — home of the Jackson 5, the Temptations, and Boyz II Men – itself was a by-product of the Detroit assembly line. That’s compounded by Puerto Rico’s complicated relationship with the US.

“There’s a layer of Puerto Rico’s colonial status,” Ríos said. “It’s like the assembly line at Ford takes away the employee’s humanity, so what does a model like Menudo – who takes examples from the United States of how to do business – do?”

Ricky Martin in the Menudo group in Los Angeles.

Barry King via Getty Images

He thought about it momentarily before adding, “You’re not just taking away their humanity. There are also the layers of exploitation and injustice that I think when you live in an economy you replicate in your business models.”

This goes hand in hand with the fact that in 1991, for example, we did not have the language or the support to discuss issues such as sexual abuse and exploitation, especially when systems like capitalism dominated how we looked at the world, especially how we looked at fame.

Ríos references past documentaries such as “Leaving Neverland” and “Framing Britney Spears” — which came out while he and Soto were working on their series — that show a shift in how the public talks about allegations of celebrity abuse. “I think we had a broader understanding now in 2022,” he said.

“Run away from [‘Framing Britney Spears’], I felt I was guilty of not taking the story seriously because she’s Britney Spears and a pop star,” Ríos said. “, The same kind of misconceptions and prejudices that people apply to the Menudo story.”

But as compelling as “Menudo: Forever Young” is, there will still be people who question its truth, despite all the research and efforts of the filmmakers and all the interviews they conducted while doing the project. That is perhaps compounded by the absence of Ricky Martin, one of the band’s most popular members.

It seems that in the past, or even since the release of this series, Martin hasn’t said anything about the claims of his peers. Ríos didn’t go into many details when asked but did say Martin’s team had certainly been contacted regarding his participation in the project.

“I will say that we tried very hard to get him to participate in the project, and there was some serious consideration,” Ríos said.

“There are a few different factors – I mean, on the production side, we didn’t have enough time to accommodate,” he continued. “He’s a megastar; he’s on tour, he’s doing stuff. So we didn’t have unlimited time to make everything go according to his schedule.”

Reasonable. But when celebrities come forward with abuse allegations, intense public skepticism is always possible — as we saw this month with the Amber Heard trial and its brutal, insidious response. “We see these things happen repeatedly,” Ríos said. “And we’re moving forward a little bit. Then we take a few steps back.”

Menudo during the special recording of “Salute to Lady Liberty,” July 2, 1984, in New York Harbor in New York City.

Ron Galella via Getty Images

Many fans today struggle with complicated feelings, trying to fathom their love for certain pop culture entities as their stories become more complex than ever marketed. So where do we go from “Menudo: Forever Young”? That seems to be where we stay as a culture.

In response, Ríos looks back fondly on all that Menudo had given to Puerto Ricans, who felt devalued before the band reached its highest heights. Menudo reminded them of who they were.

“We finally felt like, ‘Hey, we belong here,'” said Ríos. “We can claim our space. We can be who we are. We can sing in Spanish. We can celebrate these guys and be ourselves, and that’s priceless. To feel like you belong – it’s a huge gift these guys have given us.”

And he wants viewers, especially Menudo fans, to remember that when they watch this series.

“I can’t thank these band members enough for getting through that stuff,” Ríos said. “But still do it for us, for the culture. I don’t want fans to leave this and say, ‘Oh, this was hard, and maybe I shouldn’t have been a fan.’ No, you definitely should have been a fan.”

Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center website.

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