What's 'Cute' in Spanish? Try RBD.

It's just before 9 Friday night, as the curtain comes up and the Mexican flag comes plummeting down. Confetti is turbo-pumped into the crowd, smoke blasts onto the stage and five of the six members of RBD (one missed the flight from Madrid) commence doing their thing.

It's the thing that packed 63,000 fans into the Los Angeles Coliseum for RBD's U.S. debut in March, the thing that has sold 7.8 million albums in the United States alone, the thing that is now filling the aisles of the Patriot Center with flipped-out fans shrieking lyrics, eyes glazing over, hands outstretched. Reaching.

Onstage Maite, Alfonso, Christopher, Anahi and Dulce are singing the RBD anthem "Rebelde," which very conveniently happens to be the name of their hugely popular telenovela. (Never miss an opportunity to cross-promote!) They're singing about teen angst: young love, broken love and parents who just don't understand. Cue the grinding guitars. Funky-booted feet stomp. Hair is flung with calculated abandon, index and pinky fingers held aloft in the international rockers' salute. "Y soy rebelde." ("And I'm a rebel.")

But that's not quite right. More like rebel lite.

Which is exactly the point. To understand the phenomenon that is RBD -- if you're not a fan, that is -- you'll need to go back in time a little. Think the Monkees, think Menudo, think the Backstreet Boys. Think cute.

Think of Britney Spears and the power of prefab pop married to fresh-scrubbed sex appeal and really good hair products. Then multiply that by six -- three girls and three guys -- and you'll begin to get why RBD, with four CDs, is one of the hottest-selling acts in Latin music.

They're a Spanish-language act with an eye on the multilingual market. Already, RBD has one Portuguese album on its résumé and plans for an English-language CD, a planned collaboration with Hilary Duff and another one with reggaeton mega-producers Luny Tunes, a movie, and a CD in English and Spanish for the Japanese market. Then there's the current 43-city U.S. tour.

It doesn't matter that the members of RBD neither write their own songs nor play instruments. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of them. If their manager-creator-mastermind, Pedro Damian, and their record label, EMI Televisa, have anything to do with it, you will.

So yes, Damian says in a telephone interview, it's all about the commerce. "But I always try to get the most quality for the product."

Which is why, nearly two years ago, RBD began with a telenovela, one set in a school and aimed at Mexico's teen market. (RBD is an abbreviation of the show's title.) Damian figured that he'd include a band in the plotline. If the group was good, maybe they'd be a hit in Mexico. So as he was casting actors for "Rebelde," he made sure they could sing and dance as well as act.

Fitting into some neatly defined categories helped, too. "One [Anahi, a blonde] represents the cute Barbie that everyone wants to look like," Damian says, "the other one [redheaded Dulce] is the rebel, and the other one, the brunette [Maite], has the most Mexican look, she's the most kind, beautiful. . . . We named her character Lupita, like the Virgin of Guadalupe."

The religious reference, that was on purpose? "Nothing's an accident when you're planning a soap," Damian says.