In October 2023, the starry-eyed boys of As1One boarded a plane in Tel Aviv bound for Los Angeles, buzzing and ready to record their first full album as the world’s only Palestinian-Israeli boy band. The next day, their phones lit up with the news: Hamas and other militants had attacked southern Israel, killing over 1,000 people and taking more than 250 hostages.
In the year since, it’s not just As1One who has watched the retaliation unfold on their phones, over social media and WhatsApp. It’s the whole world. And throughout the US – the biggest supplier of arms to the Israeli military – the movement to divest has gained unprecedented support, as the Israeli military continues to carry out what some human rights advocates are calling a genocide in Gaza.
With two singles out this year and a long-awaited Paramount+ docuseries dropping Dec. 3 that captures the band’s formation and journey thus far, As1One has remained intact, even as multiple members have lost loved ones and the future of their homeland grows more uncertain by the day. But despite the band’s proximity to the conflict – four members are Israeli Jewish, one is Palestinian Christian, and another is Palestinian Muslim – their official stance is that they are apolitical. Instead, perhaps backed into a corner by global geopolitics that they were hoping to avoid, trailers for their docuseries have pushed a message we’ve all heard before: it’s the music that will “bring people together.” As Palestinian rapper and As1One member Aseel Farah told Billboard last year: “We don’t want to be political, we just want to be humanitarian.”
But many online are wondering how a group made up of people from opposing sides of the world’s most-observed war zone could simply replicate the same blueprint we’ve seen time and again from boy bands – how this group could be anything but political, even if they claim to be otherwise.
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Maria Sherman is a journalist, music writer, culture critic, and author of “Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS.”
Jim Cullen is a cultural historian, writer, teacher, and author of several books on pop culture, including “Bridge and Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century.”
As1One’s first single is a good example. It’s titled “All Eyes on Us,” which some observers, like YouTube host Benedict Townsend, have pointed out is uncomfortably close to “All Eyes on Rafah,” a controversial rallying cry from this past year bringing awareness to human rights abuses committed in Palestine. The upbeat song – studded with standard boy-band lyrics like “dance like the whole world’s watching” and riffs from celebrated guitarist Nile Rodgers – has nothing to do with the war, at least not overtly. And it has people all over the internet raising their proverbial eyebrows.
“It all comes across a bit naïve” and very “‘Eurovision’-coded,” Townsend said in a September episode of his show “Scroll Deep.” He wondered if As1One is “the musical equivalent of greenwashing” – if they are, in other words, “taking something very dark and complicated and trying to just smooth it over into something simplistic.”
While the YouTube comments on As1One’s music videos seem mostly positive, reactions on X and Reddit expose a more widespread mistrust of the band and its aims. On Reddit, someone wrote, “As a MENA person, I don’t know what to make of the idea of an Israeli/Palestinian boyband debuting right now.” Meanwhile, X users mocked the band. “‘Hey world, ignore the genocide and expanding war, come look at us Israeli and Palestinians standing united #as1one’ barf,” one wrote.
“Societally, there has been a value placed on being apolitical, because if you’re not appealing to a specific identity, then the thinking is you appeal to everybody.”
Historically, though, the biggest boy bands have always flaunted similar messaging.
Journalist and culture critic Maria Sherman says that since the ’90s, when the modern pop-group formula first began to see immense success, boy bands have embraced a sort of “all-American, boy-next-door” vibe. They’re meant to be exciting to an audience of mostly young girls and their moms, and tend to be marketed with an air of innocence, with just the faintest whiff of rebellion and sex appeal. As1One, made up of six conventionally attractive 20-somethings with puppy dog eyes and white smiles, hits all those marks.
“Boy bands have always been wholly apolitical, and societally, there has been a value placed on being apolitical, because if you’re not appealing to a specific identity, then the thinking is you appeal to everybody,” Sherman says. “Politics are considered bad business in the pop music space because it could isolate, it could divide. There’s this idea that by speaking out politically on a cause or taking a stance you’re limiting who will enjoy, buy into, and consume your music.”
Still, Sherman says, what we understood to be “apolitical” or “neutral” in the past would today register as pretty transparently political, even conservative. In their heyday, she remembers NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys talking openly about God and patriotism; the Jonas Brothers wore promise rings and made religious conservatism a part of their image early on.
“The purity and innocence was appealing to a lot of people, but now that would have registered as a conservative political idea,” Sherman says. “Historically boy bands have always tried to veer away from political posturing or beliefs, but looking back, there were perhaps opinions or ideologies that they were participating in.”
James Diener and Ken Levitan, the American music executives who formed As1One in 2021, couldn’t have known about the forthcoming war. But even if the Oct. 7 attack hadn’t happened, assembling a band of Israelis and Palestinians has inherent political undertones. To pretend otherwise, critics say, is disingenuous. (Paramount+ and the band’s record label, Thirty Tigers, did not respond to PS’s requests for comment.)
Cultural historian Jim Cullen agrees with Sherman that boy bands generally claim to be separate from politics. And he admits the members of As1One are, “in a certain sense, prisoners of history,” having come to the US where “suddenly world politics rains on their parade.”
“But when they do proceed, [they do] what boy bands have always done,” he adds, which is to double down on their proclaimed neutrality. The public, though, seems to have caught on, he says, and is less pleased with the dynamic than they may have been in years past.
Cullen says the mega-hit boy bands of the late ’90s and early 2000s flourished under the glossy “NAFTA mentality” of the time, referring to President Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement that transformed the US economy.
At the turn of the 21st century, there was a great deal of confidence in capitalism, he says. “That manifests itself in an embrace of the market, and that has important cultural consequences” – one being a higher tolerance for the commodification of pop music and its ties to the “establishment.”
Just as the ’80s swung to what Cullen calls a “capitalistic, self-commodifying” era after the countercultural ’70s, pop music of the early 2000s reflected a renewed belief in the capitalism that repelled the grunge artists of the ’90s. The era we’re in now is still wrestling with its identity, but between cynicism and optimism, few would argue the latter is the pervading sentiment.
It’s harder, Cullen says, for pop artists of any kind, but especially boy bands – “where the commodification is foregrounded and packaged from the outset” – to pull off the innocent, naïve, cheery shtick in our hyper-online, “postliberal world,” because there are fewer places to hide. Social media, for all its flaws, has exposed the inner workings of the pop music marketing machine and made it much harder to ignore the role that boy bands play in upholding the status quo.
That may help explain why, for some, As1One feels so “cringely out of touch with the moment,” Cullen says.
Surely, some people resonate with the band’s message that unity is possible through pop music. As1One’s critics, meanwhile, feel the band is untrustworthy because it’s non-committal, Sherman says.
But committing to anything goes against the boy band business model.
In recent years, fans have pushed BTS to donate to Black Lives Matter, and more generally in the world of pop, Taylor Swift fans have pressured her to make direct political statements and endorsements. But bold gestures from pop artists will likely always feel somewhat inauthentic. “When you see political action happening in music, it’s typically music on the margins, alternative in musical style, or coming from marginalized performers, less so status quo mainstream pop music,” Sherman says.
As1One’s message itself is not bad. Music is healing, and uplifting musical artists from war-torn regions may very well have positive consequences – if indirect – for people who are suffering. But as a boy band, As1One is hamstrung by its duty to be commercially viable. And the likelihood that it will produce anything truly revolutionary is low because of it.
“The boy band’s job is to create joyful music and make people happy,” Sherman says, “but politics don’t always make people happy.”
Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she’s covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.
