On the heels of the 20th anniversary of *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached album, Entertainment Tonight (ET) Canada published an article that attempted to clarify some details about the group’s breakup. But for me personally it created more questions than it answered. In this post I’ll discuss the article, the questions it raises, and how it led to research that eventually became the Riddle On Her Mind visual archive.
Author(s): Leena Taylor
Title: Did Lance Bass’ Astronaut And Acting Aspirations Break Up *NSYNC?
Original Source: ETCanada.com (unavailable)
In a nutshell, this article implies that *NSYNC’s breakup came from converging factors and that the band’s six‐month rest period unintentionally paved the way for solo work and eventual disbanding. Taylor points to Lance Bass’s pursuit of projects outside the group, first with acting and later with space aspirations, implying that the time needed to pursue the latter lead the 2 lead singers to consider solo ventures. Quotes from former Jive Records executives Barry Weiss and Joe Riccitelli and former collaborator Alex Gregg are used to support the points offered by Taylor, with some quotes from Lance Bass too as a partial counter to their descriptions of the timing for how things played out. Towards the end of the article all quoted parties offer some opinions about the plausibility of and *NSYNC reunion, conveying a mix of pros and cons but ending with the comment that fans would be happy just to see them again.
I think most people who know more than just the surface information about *NSYNC would agree that there were probably multiple factors that led to their breakup, including, but not limited to, extreme tiredness from keeping demanding schedules for years on end. But what made the article take a turn for me was the implication that Lance’s outside interests could have led to the fractures that eventually led to *NSYNC collapsing. Barry, Joe and Alex certainly have more insight into the situation 98% of the people who would end up reading this article. At the same time, I would caution against thinking of them as unbiased or not having their own reasons to highlight some factors and minimize others, particularly Joe Riccitelli since he is currently an RCA employee and still works with Justin Timberlake. How the article tries to frame Lance’s outside projects as a catalyst for NSYNC’s breakup seems more speculative than substantiated. I can admit that I have some bias towards Lance, since he’s my favorite member of the group. But removing any biases of my own, it just didn’t seem like much of a factual basis for what was being said. Perspectives and opinions? Yes. But because *NSYNC as a group had been circumspect about their breakup for so long, and because it wasn’t well documented by the media, there really wasn’t a solid basis for comparison even though it seemed like some things were off to me.
What piqued my curiosity the most was timelines and accuracy related to the group: who said what, when it was said, and whether the order of the supposed unfolding that was conveyed by Alex, Barry, and Joe had any corroboration aside from how they remember things.
If someone were to look back at historical information about NSYNC before and during heir “hiatus” what might they find?
Or to phrase in a way that would support research: if someone gathered and reviewed chronological, historical information about *NSYNC before and during their “hiatus”, would it reveal anything about how their break turned into a breakup?
This is the primary question that led to me creating Riddle On Her Mind. I didn’t have any assumptions what could/couldn’t be found because there was so much that I, and really most of the public, didn’t know about how *NSYNC broke up. I had a lot of smaller, more specific questions that stem from the ET Canada article, but they were all things that could probably be answered by addressing the bigger question. Over the course of my research more questions have started to pop up along the way but they, too, could probably be answered just by gathering whatever I could find and looking at it in order.
Riddle On Her Mind was started as a counter to Leena Taylor’s article but isn’t just about countering her narrative or just about answering one big question. It’s about digging through history and seeing what pieces come together. Since NSYNC’s breakup wasn’t widely documented, there’s still a lot of room for speculation, but going straight to historical sources helps put things in perspective. I didn’t start out expecting any particular outcome, and honestly, the process of piecing things together has been just as interesting as whatever answers I’ve found so far. At the very least, it’s given me a new appreciation for how stories about the past take shape—and how much we don’t know until we start looking.
Riddle On Her Mind 