Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on August 9, 2024.

(M) ★★★★

Director: David Terry Fine.

Dirty Pop is now screening on Netflix.

Spot the manager.

I was a grunge kid who grew up worshipping at the altar of alternative rock. In the early '90s, I bought Nirvana albums, and stashed my New Kids On The Block tape in a shoebox, never to be played again. The rules of the era were simple. Alternative music was cool. It was real and it meant something. It was made in garages and bars by real musicians, like me and my friends.

Pop, on the other hand, was fake, plastic, soulless and meaningless. It was the real devil's music, admired by vacuous idiots and purveyed by talentless hacks. It was the sound of capitalism and boardrooms. It was manufactured and therefore entirely meaningless and not real.

Of course, these ideas are naïve and overly simplistic - the reality of the music industry, especially in the '90s and '00s is far more nuanced than this black-and-white mentality that I held so dearly in my teens and early 20s.

But watching Dirty Pop makes me think I wasn't so far off the mark.

This three-part doco series (why isn't just a movie?) digs into the diabolical world of Lou Pearlman, who ripped off "mom-and-dad investors" to the tune of around half a billion dollars to fund his lavish lifestyle and voracious appetite. Oh, and to bankroll NSYNC and Backstreet Boys.

This is a story that's been told a few times before, including in the doco The Boy Band Con, which was produced by NSYNC member Lance Bass. But it's a story that bears repeating because it's so crazy, and Dirty Pop repeats it well.

With two Backstreet Boys and a member of NSYNC holding court, as well as a number of Pearlman's former friends and employees, Dirty Pop dives deep into Pearlman's ridiculous ambitions. Their interviews are interspersed with huge amounts of archival footage that keep the story ticking back and forth between the then and the now, but also makes it feel complete and full of emotion.

The ace up its sleeve is Pearlman himself, brought back to life by the power of AI (Pearlman died in 2016). Some will argue that AI has no place in documentaries, but the usage here is intelligent and honest. It takes Pearlman's own words from his autobiography and real footage of the man himself, and uses AI to insert his words into his mouth. It's not misrepresenting Pearlman at all - they're his own words after all - and the doco points out it's doing this every time it does it. 

This aspect of Dirty Pop has been controversial, but it needn't be. They could have used the same words and had someone else read them, or had them appear on screen as text, but instead they put them in the mouth of the man who wrote them. That seems legit to me. It works, it's a cool way to introduce Pearlman's own ideas and voice into the story, and no one is being misrepresented. Get over it.

All that aside, the only real criticism is the sense of repetition that comes from making this three 40-minute episodes instead of a less-than-two-hour-long doco. It's an easy task watching this in one sitting, but the decision to split it up messes with the pacing. There are some questions and details that go begging, and some obvious absentees on the call sheet, but what it's got is good. 

Dirty Pop is great, in fact. It plants its seeds early, letting them grow and bear fruit like a good murder-mystery, and its use of AI is to be applauded. The editing makes the most of its interviewees and tells its story in a compelling way. It will probably leave Backstreet Boys and NSYNC songs humming in your head for days to come, but don't let that dissuade you from checking out this excellent doco miniseries.