98 Degrees didn’t sign up to be a boy band, but fate has other plans.
Both Nick Lachey and Jeff Timmons appear in the new Paramount+ documentary Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands, discussing how the R&B-centric group ended up mixed into the boy band craze.
“The term boy band was one that we were very hesitant to embrace early on. We never thought of ourselves as a boy band, at least in the conventional sense,” Lachey, 51, explains.
“And so we resisted big time, the label of boy band. But then we got very aware that his was a movement that was happening and we were probably lucky to get kind of swept up in it.”
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Timmons, 51, agrees, adding, “The plan originally for 98 Degrees was to sell us to the public as a true R&B group.”
“We were heavily influenced by the group Boyz II Men,” he adds. “But when our label saw the frenzy that was associated with boy bands, they thought, ‘Hey we have our version of a pop group like this.’ ”
Though they were initially resistant, after talking it over, Timmons says, “We thought, ‘Maybe it’s not a bad idea.’ ”
Source: Nick Lachey/Instagram
Laughing, Timmons notes, “At the time, boy bands were all about dancing and Lord knows, we were not all about dancing.”
Lachey agrees that the choreography piece was tough for them.
“We always joked that we were the non-dancing boy band. We never auditioned, we never went through dance class. We put ourselves together, we moved to California, we sang for people and we got discovered. And from there, we kind of got swept up into a whole other thing.”
Hear more about 98 Degrees’ rise to boy band fame, alongside the stories of other boy bands, in Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands, now streaming on Paramount+.
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