Menudo: Forever Young
Menudo: Forever Young ===> https://cinurl.com/2tkZRm
CASTILLO: Sure. So starting in the late 1970s, Menudo was this boy band that burst onto the scene in Puerto Rico and quickly gained a huge audience in Latin America, crossed over to the U.S. And then, as we see in the documentary, it earns international fame, a feat that had not been done before by basically many other bands from Latin America, let alone Puerto Rico specifically. They had a formula where after certain members would age, you know, past the teen years, their voices would change or so, they were quietly shuffled out, and they would introduce new members who were younger. And they kind of kept that forever young feeling and, you know, focused very directly on getting the attention of a teen fan base.
CASTILLO: I think it's important to note that there was no oversight. Whatever Edgardo said kind of went. And we see what that power, unchecked, could do and did do to some of these young boys. And it's heartbreaking - it really is. You know, even small stories of, you know, one of the guys mentioning that his mom was saying, oh, you know, you're joining the band in January and I won't see you until December. That's it. Santa Claus is over. Or other moments where, like, some of the kids get in really mortal physical danger, and he's just there for business. He's not there to comfort them. He's not there to take care of them as children. That's really heartbreaking, and it clearly has an effect on them. Now, as grown men telling these stories, they're clearly still hurt. I don't think a lot of fans knew the extent of which, you know, bad things happened behind the scenes.
That same year, the group hosted a television show on Telemundo entitled Gente Joven de Menudo. They hosted a yearly beauty pageant, \"La chica joven de Menudo\", (\"Menudo's young girl\") and the winner of the pageant would sometimes appear in the band's videos or join them onstage at their concerts in the United States.
During their first visit to New York in early 1983, Ray Reyes, 13, replaced Xavier Serbiá, 15. Their American fanbase grew, especially among the young, as evidenced by Menudo on ABC, aseries of four minute music spots that aired during the Fall 1983 season of ABC's youth-oriented Saturday-morning programming block.[18] They also sang the theme song for ABC's Rubik, the Amazing Cube. Miguel Cancel became the first member to voluntarily quit the group. According to a 1998 interview, he was unhappy that a sudden voice change rendered him unable to sing his songs, so he opted to leave before his scheduled departure. He was replaced by Roy Rosselló, 13. Menudo signed a six-year multimillion-dollar contract with RCA International and released their Spanish album A Todo Rock (Full of Rock). According to Time magazine, at the end of July, the group had already sold 3 million copies worldwide,[18] 750,000 in USA only.[18]
In 2007, it was announced that Menudo would return after signing a multi-album contract with Sony Music. That would be directed by Johnny Wright, he was the manager of Justin Timberlake and the new band music will be a fusion of urban, pop and rock in both English and Spanish. They began promoting the project in cities of the United States and Mexico to attract young singers who wanted to belong to a new band that would sing in Spanish and English. Auditions in different cities such as Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami, New York, among others. In the Dallas audition, radio announcer Daniel Luna and singer Luis Fonsi[29] were part of the selection jury. where they were selected JC Gonzalez[30] and Monti Montañez (Che Antonio). In New York, they took 25 boys and during this one-week mini-competency they chose 15: Monti Montañez (Che Antonio), JC Gonzalez,[31] Carlos Pena, Jr., Anthony, Carlos Olivero, Chris Moy, Dennis, Eric, Hansel, Henry, Jorge Gabriel, Jorge Negron, José Bordonada, Monti Montañez (Che Antonio), Thomas and Trevor. The 15 semifinalists met in South Beach, Florida to continue preparing with producer Johnny Wright, choreograph Anibal Marrero and voice coach David Coury, participating through a reality show showing the entire process of competition. The re-founding of the band was profiled in a MTV reality series entitled Making Menudo that had launched as a primetime series on October 25, 2007, but was later pushed to afternoons due to low ratings.[32] The series aired ten episodes, ending on November 20, 2007.
For one thing, Menudo was explicitly conceived as a pop music brand that was bigger than its members. From the beginning, singers were phased out if they got too old (or difficult) and replaced with younger kids, and the series does a good job articulating the economic benefits and emotional costs of this approach. For another, Menudo conquered many parts of the world by singing in Spanish, which was rare for pop stars at the time, and the series vibrantly demonstrates how meaningful this was to Spanish-speaking fans across the world.
To be sure, the formula worked big-time for a while. Fifteen years back, with Melendez, Lozada and Masso in the lineup, Menudo broke the Guinness Book of World Records for attracting huge audiences, including 200,000 in Sao Paulo and 130,000 in Rio de Janeiro. The young group sold out four dates at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1982 (and played the Hartford Civic Center in November 1983, when Mayor Thirman L. Milner made Menudo honorary citizens of Hartford).
Alana Casanova-Burgess: Their manager, Edgardo Díaz, had a strategy to keep the band going for decades. Once a member reached his later teens, he was replaced by a new younger kid so that the group could continue indefinitely. The new HBO Max docu-series, Menudo: Forever Young traces the rise of the group as they amassed fan bases across the world including in the contiguous United States where Spanish-speaking bands had previously struggled to achieve mainstream success.
Menudo gave those fans an opportunity to imagine a different self. A different future for who they were and who they could be. I think for me, that is one of the most important things about Menudo's legacy. For the diaspora, it was especially powerful because it's one of the first times that young Puerto Ricans, young we say Latinx, but really at the time, there wasn't that identity.
Kristofer Rios 07:48Yeah, so, I like to say that they're the sort of first modern global boy band in the way that we understand boy bands right now, right. I mean, of course, you had the Beatles. Of course, you had the Jackson Five. Even had groups like The Busters, but when you think about boy bands, the way that we engage with them and consume them now, Backstreet Boys, you know, In Sync, 98 degrees, BTS, right, Menudo is the first band to really commercialize young men in this way, right, and, you know, Puerto Ricans don't need a lot to be proud - don't need a lot to sort of start talking about how amazing we are and how proud we are of our island, but this is one of those situations where, and most of the situations are true, but this is one of those situations where, you know, Menudo as you know, as Puerto Ricans representing a small island in the Caribbean that has a very complex relationship with the United States. They really did this first. And Menudo, through, you know, through extension, really brought, you know, like, a lot of attention and brought a lot of pride and joy to the island because we're talking about a time period, you know, this is the late 70s, through the mid 90s. Puerto Rico's coming out of a recession, really had suffered a lot in terms of just sort of restructuring and its economy through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, right. Really needs a win and Menudo just sort of comes out. It goes into the world. It really kind of strikes a chord in the youth in Latin America. And it really just kind of takes the world by storm in the 80s, right. And so, it's a really big deal for the island. It's a really big deal for the diaspora, you know, like Puerto Ricans in the United States and other parts of the world. And it's, yeah, I mean, it's just amazing for us to be able to say that they did it first. You know, I think the other thing, you know, so that's what we always sort of lead with, right, they were the first boy band, but I think that when we think about global youth culture, it's also the first model, you know, that is, you know, from a small island like Puerto Rico, connecting to Venezuelans to Peruvians to Mexicans, to people in the United States to Italians. I mean, they had Italian albums, they were massive in Brazil, they were, you know, they went to Japan several times. Really big in the Philippines. You know, this is the late 70s, early 80s, that we're talking about, it seems very common now. I mean, anyone can become globally famous using social media. But back then there wasn't social media, right. And so, it's a big feat for a very small, what starts as a small kind of family run operation out of a place like Puerto Rico, to explode in this way. It's a really big thing. And it's an interesting enough model, you know, for the music industry, that a big label like RCA signs them for a multi-million dollar, multi-year deal, right. That's not a small thing, right. The other thing that, I think, is really, you know, and so kind of going back to being proud Puerto Ricans, I also think they do a lot for, you know, this is the late 70s, early 80s. There's a lot of people that are immigrating to the United States from places like Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, Puerto Rico, I mean, we're citizens, but, you know, there are a lot of Puerto Ricans now, not on the island living in the United States, and at this time in the early 80s, you know, you're a Puerto Rican living in New York, you're a Mexican living in New York, this idea of Latinx as an identity, as, you know, your experience coming from a place like Puerto Rico or coming from a place like Mexico, but living in the United States as a distinct experience, that's not quite articulated yet in the 80s, right; we're living in our little communities. Menudo was the first time where Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and El Salvadorans and Hondurans, in the United States, have a touchdown, right We have a band that we can celebrate that speaking in our language, right. Yes, they're from Puerto Rico, but you can be from another part of Latin America, be a Spanish speaker, right, and love them, idolize them. And that's an important thing, not just for the adults because in a lot of the archival footage, we find that, like, you know, the adults are super happy that their daughters are into Menudo, because they're worried that their children are going to start losing the language. So, they're like, great, if my daughter wants to celebrate this band that speaks Spanish, amazing, but it's really important for that generation, that young generation, that first, second generation of people living in diaspora to find that commonality, and to finally be seen, right. I think that's the thing that we hear a lot from the fans, that we hear, you know, that we heard in the archival but also heard in our interviews with the fans that before Menudo, if you are Puerto Rican living in the South Bronx, a lot of what you're confronting in the media, a lot of the representations of yourself in the media, are that you are, you know, you live in communities that are crime ridden, right, you live in communities that are dangerous, right. When Menudo shows up, that's not the narrative because they're polished, right. They are projecting goodwill, they're projecting good values, and they're being celebrated. You know, Ed Koch, the mayor of New York at the time, brings them to City Hall and gives them keys to the city, right. They're at the UN. They're at Madison Square Garden. They're at Radio City Music Hall. They're at these premier venues. And it's the first time for a lot of young people that they see themselves in someone that - that, to me, is one of the most important things that Menudo does. They really allow for young people in the Spanish speaking diaspora in the United States to have a bigger sense of themselves. And to have a sense of, You know, what I can go places, too. Because up until that point, that's not the messages that they're getting in the media - in the US media, right. That's not the representations in themselves that they're getting in the media. 59ce067264
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