Boy/Girl Bands and the Billion Songs Once Again, Music Beyond Borders The Jackson 5 arrived in 1969, just a year after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. one of the darkest hours in American history. Yet, ve Black kids from a working class town in Indiana became the absolute idols of a country and a world that loved them with an almost irrational intensity. Just like The Temptations ve years prior, music accomplished what politics and society failed to do: it united people. It didn t ask which side you were on, and it didn't care about the color of your skin. It only asked you to move, to sing, and to smile. This is one of the grandest lessons the Billions Club teaches us if we read the data carefully: popular music has crossed every cultural, racial, and geographical divide. It carried Black voices from Detroit and Indiana into the living rooms of a segregated America. Decades later, it would carry Korean voices from Seoul into the bedrooms of Western teenagers who couldn't understand a single word of Korean, yet listened anyway. Over and over again. 16