There's baggage there, of course; O-Town was put together by Lou Pearlman, the former *NSYNC manager who parted ways acrimoniously with the group amid a flurry of legal actions during 1999. So it's not surprising that *NSYNC's Lance Bass would term O-Town "stupid" and "not real." But Bass says it's not just because of the group's association with Pearlman. "A lot of older people watch that show and say, 'Oh, that's how you got together,'" notes Bass, who's in the process of making a new album with his *NSYNC mates. "We weren't put together by anybody. We didn't go through a boot camp audition. There was no training like that whatsoever. That's why I think it's really just a bunch of stupidity. I don't think it will ever last." The five members of O-Town feel differently, of course. But they take a politic course in answering such criticisms. "Honestly, I would completely understand any criticisms," says 19-year-old Ashley Parker Angel. "We don't expect that everybody in the music industry right now will welcome us with open arms. We're a group that is being put together on television; of course it's going to be different than how *NSYNC came together, or how Backstreet came together. Maybe those groups are misconstruing what Making the Band is. It's not the story of how they came together; it's a story of how we came together. It's an opportunity for people to view a group from its very beginning. No one is trying to say this is how *NSYNC or Backstreet came together." Adds Dan Miller, 20, "We know how hard other people have worked to get where they're at. We're just lucky. We've met a lot of the other groups, and everybody's been cool. I don't think there's been any reason for them to show us any attitude, at least not to our face. I hope they don't go back and badmouth us behind closed doors."
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