Dream Street

By V. Arrow Discovering Dream Street is one of the flashbulb memories of my life. In under a week, I had begun my own fansite, an amateur non-for-profit website that functioned as a massive shrine to the band, and within a month, I had become deeply immersed in the teenipop subculture. I knew immediately of the actions of Dream Street, those beautifully stylized youths who could lift themselves, and me, in my infatuation-addled mind, from humdrum normalcy.Throughout these changing times, Dream Street represented something different than the mainstream. The crowd to whom Dream Street sung, winked, and pointed was holding onto more outwardly clean-cut ideals. They still wanted that special someone to sing to them, they wanted -- to quote Dream Street's album -- "someone to hold [them] tonight". Dream Street was a boy band, They danced synchronized suggestive movements onstage as they sang of true love. They arrived together in coordinated outfits to awards shows and charity benefits. But they were not of the same creed as the *NSync, Backstreet Boys, or even O-Town of the '90s for one major reason: they were genuinely boys. The members of Dream Street were only a year or two older than their average fan. As such, their fans were rabid, rivaling Beatlemaniacs in their intensity if not their number. They were almost ubiquitously female, high-school aged, and a member of the incomparably peppy teenipop subculture.