‘NSync circa 2000. Original photo: Tim Roney/Getty Images.

So ‘NSync is allegedly getting back together.

Yay?

As a once fully bonded and licensed music critic for a major daily newspaper, I’m still legally required to react to the big news by properly rolling my eyes in disgust and continue listening to Sigur Ros and reading a book detailing the genius of the Flying Burrito Bros.

But ‘NSync is an important group to me, because it taught me an important lesson early in my music writing career: Whether you enjoy or loathe a musical act in general has very little to do with their ability to put on a good show.

And if you’re reviewing a concert, you’re not reviewing the band’s personal tastes, its history or even its song catalog – though the latter is somewhat inescapable.

You’re judging how much of a show the artist put on. More specifically, did the artist give fans a show worthy of that lofty ticket price?

If true, you have to say so. Period.

It was terribly fun making jokes about boy bands in the late ’90s and early aughts. Those fans don’t fool around, though. The emails I got after I saw a Backstreet Boys concert and wrote it was obvious these poor flesh puppets were on their last legs still keep me awake at night.

The 11-year-old fangirls actually had me frightened. One was going to cut me if she ever saw me in public. Another threatened to beat me to death with a Furby.

I was right, by the way. That was Backstreet Boys’ last big tour until they became adults and ran out of money. I, too, am getting older and don’t need any more trouble from those women.

But in the summer of 2001, I reviewed ‘NSync playing the Oakland Coliseum, to which I took my 12-year-old daughter. We had really good seats, which gave me a bird’s eye view of everything happening on stage. And, as much as I hated saying so—really, honesty can be so painful sometimes—the truth of the matter was that for 90 minutes or whatever it was, these guys absolutely went balls-out to put on a kick-ass show.

It was awful.

Of course, the music was manufactured. Of course, every move, syllable and thought emanating from the stage that warm summer evening was choreographed down to when these five guys were allowed to draw breath. I wasn’t expecting five musicians with instruments to start improv jazz-funk-prog fusion.

But, that said … they really put on a good show. And I said so.

At the time, I was still taking scattered classes at San Francisco State for the journalism degree I started years earlier and basically gave up on once I started reporting full-time. I was taking a class with SFSU’s journalism department chair, John Burks, who was the first managing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, at one time, and a pretty famous music journalist who did the last interview with Jimi Hendrix before he died.

Burks was a good guy despite some weird stories circulating toward the end of his career. But Burks was an extremist when it came to music snobbery.

A couple days after my review ran, I happened to drop by the journalism office at SFSU before class. Burks was in there, and asked me to step into his office, so he could inquire as to how exactly I’d gotten a lobotomy and still made it to class that week.

“What the hell was that review I read in the Mercury News?” he asked me.

I kind of laughed. Then I realized he was pointing a gun at my face.

(No, he wasn’t. But I was surprised at how serious he was).

“How could you possibly give that shit, that non-music, even a decent review?” he asked. “Why did you go? What are you thinking?”

I was thinking this renowned music journalist somehow got his knickers twisted up by ‘NSync.

Well, I explained. No, the music isn’t music. The performers are trained monkeys, backing up the Brinks truck to Louis Pearlman’s (their manager) mansion every night. It’s not creative; it’s formulaic and gross.

“But they worked extremely hard to put on a show and, in the end, entertained a ton of people. Including, me … sort of,” I told him, very bravely.

That wasn’t good enough. But it didn’t matter. It was an experience that taught me to have an open mind when it comes to even bands whose very existence you despise. Otherwise, why bother going? Just save time and write the review at home.

So the word is Justin Timberlake and the boys and going to be working together again. They’re possibly recording and — seeing all the money their now-grown-up fans are spending on concert tickets for everyone else — have probably decided to get in on the action.

I’m not going. But good for them. I hope they work hard as they did 22 years ago. At these prices, the fans deserve it.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.