(9) new kids on the block, “hangin’ tough”
deprogrammed & retired
(12) STYX, “MR. ROBOTO”
143-88
and will play in the elite 8
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 20.
“WHAT NOT TO DO TO YOUR ROBOTO”: BERRY GRASS ON “MR. ROBOTO”
“I've got a secret I've been hiding under my skin/ My heart is human, my blood is boiling, my brain I.B.M.” —Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.” —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Is “Mr. Roboto” even a bad song? I mean, are concept rock operas inherently bad? Do synthesizers make a song bad? Is there something bad about a cinematic 40 second mood-setting opener? Are robots bad? Is thinking robots are bad bad? Is showing gratitude to robots bad? Is it bad to be thankful?
If you look at Styx’s 2nd most popular—but also 1st most reviled—single as an assemblage of its constituent parts, “Mr. Roboto” is extremely my shit. It sounds like The Cars and Steven Sondheim and Journey and Genesis all got together to nerd out over episodes of Kamen Rider & wrote a song about it. Almost every one of my favorite albums of all time is a ridiculous concept album, and when I put on “Mr. Roboto” I hear in its layering of synth sounds, down-tuned power chords, operatic lead vocals, & character-dialogue-for-lyrics some groundwork of concept album bands that have my whole heart: Ayreon, Pain of Salvation, Queensryche, Kamelot, The Mars Volta, Opeth, Wolverine, Porcupine Tree. It feels like an extension of Renaissance, ELP, Yes, and Camel, only trading progressive & symphonic chops for emerging electronic flair (a downgrade, admittedly). It’s a song that tries to make something commercial out of the esoteric.
Sure, the punk rockers and new wavers that controlled college radio and the popular music press in the 80s hated it for being too emotional, too grandiose, too pretentious, too cheesy. As a lifelong fan of progressive rock, heavy metal, and musical theater, I know that cheesiness is often the ultimate form of sincerity in art. Cheesiness is vulnerability. Cheesiness is more punk than punk. Rolling Stone in the 80s (& 90s? & 2000s? &…) reads like literary critics who scoff at genre writing in favor of domestic realism. Is a song that’s literally about a man imprisoned for rock & roll crimes who pretends to be a robot in order to escape prison cheesy? Yes. It’s also a song about being thankful for the coping mechanisms that saved us but no longer serve us. Is that sincere? Yes.
*
“I am the modern man (secret, secret; I’ve got a secret)/ who hides behind a mask (secret, secret; I’ve got a secret)/ so no one else can see (secret, secret; I’ve got a secret)/ my true identity.”—Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“I have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody. People will not even turn round in the streets.”— Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
*
Nearly every interaction in my daily life is spent wearing a mask to normalize me & my neurodiversity. The term “masking” describes the way that autistic & otherwise neurodiverse people learn to hide/camouflage/obfuscate their social and sensory difficulties, because to do otherwise results in targeted harassment and discrimination, reduced opportunities, and general ostracization. It takes a lot of active brainpower to remember to perform social cues that do not come naturally for me: eye contact; smiling; small talk; socially-appropriate phrases or sounds while someone else is talking to indicate my continued listening; trying not to talk at length about the things that excite us; trying not to connect with someone sharing their emotions by talking about times when you’ve felt a similar emotion; using prepared, replicatable facial and verbal reactions that center everybody’s feelings but my own; etc. I am a good and attentive listener. I care, deeply, about others. I have many emotions. But none of that is seen unless I play a character version of myself, honed by a lifetime of social trial and error, that’s legible to other people.
One of the harmful stereotypes of autistic people is that we are devoid of or deficient in emotions. Basically robots. It comes from the incorrect notion of autism as an “extreme male brain” (which itself comes from reifying harmful ideas of a gender binary), and the prevalence of this stereotype among clinicians & diagnosticians results in women and other gender minorities being drastically underdiagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, especially in their youth. Because of socialization under patriarchy, gender minorities are socialized to be more attuned to the emotions of others and, not coincidentally, autistic gender minorities are about 300% more likely to employ masking than cisgender, heterosexual autistic men and boys. Gender minorities so often go undiagnosed because they escape notice, because they don’t look like what parents and teachers and doctors expect, because they aren’t seen.
The thing about masking for autistic people is that the more we use it to reduce the external consequences of being autistic in a world reluctant to understand us, there are internal consequences. We meltdown. Shutdown. Bear the brunt of short-term and long-term stress, of anxiety, of depression. We may dissociate. We may hurt ourselves. We may impact our jobs because of the time it takes us to recover. We may lose friendships because people don’t want to understand us.
*
“The time has come at last/ to throw away this mask/ so everyone can see/ my true identity!/ I'm Kilroy! Kilroy! Kilroy! Kilroy!” —Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“A person is guilty when he: being masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration, loiters, remains or congregates in a public place with other persons so masked or disguised, or knowingly permits or aids persons so masked or disguised to congregate in a public place; except that such conduct is not unlawful when it occurs in connection with a masquerade party or like entertainment if permission is first obtained from the police or other appropriate authorities;” —New York Consolidated Laws, Penal Law - PEN § 240.35(4) Loitering
“Because we want no more death and trickery for our people, because we want no more forgetting. The mountain told us to take up arms so we would have a voice. It told us to cover our faces so we would have a face. It told us to forget our names so we could be named. It told us to protect our past so we would have a future.” —Subcomandante Marcos
*
Whether you come to agree with me or not that “Mr. Roboto” is decidedly not a bad song, you should know that the song is part of Styx’s 1982 concept rock opera, Kilroy Was Here, and that the album’s story is totally bonkers, and all in all it may be the most politically confused concept album I’ve ever heard. It’s so simultaneously unintuitive and inane that the band had to play a 10 minute short film prologue dramatizing the album’s conceit before their concerts began.
Set in some vague, 1984-esque dystopian United States, we learn in the prologue that the country is being ruled in part by the authoritarian group Majority for Musical Morality, and its leader, Dr. Everett Righteous. Styx modeled the group quite transparently after televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. & his political organization, Moral Majority. In “Kilroy Was Here,” Righteous has lobbied for? enacted? a total ban on rock music. The short film opens with a bustling mob of people throwing records & guitars into an ever-widening pyre. This majority seems perplexingly youth-driven, only in a choice that predicts the 4chan alt-right incels of the mid-2010s many of them are wearing Dick Tracy-style fedoras. The staging is meant to invoke the infamous pictures of Nazis burning all of the research & history & records at Magnus Hirschfield’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which was the premier site of sexology research in the world at the time, with a specific goal of bettering the lives of gay and trans people.
The album has two protagonists. One is the rebellious youth, Jonathan Chance, who is leading an underground rock insurgency against Dr. Righteous. The other is the legendary rocker, Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (his initials are R.O.C.K.! Whoa!), who brutally attacked a member of the Majority for Musical Morality (or did he? Was he framed??) & is now serving a life sentence in prison and...ok, I can sense the look on your face. You think this is bad. Well, you’re right. But there’s more!
The prison that Kilroy is serving time at is using a fleet of Japanese-manufactured, human-shaped robot prison guards. Robotos. Jonathan Chance breaks into the prison & manages to send a message to Kilroy, including an instruction manual for the Robots, titled “What Not To Do To Your Roboto.” Kilroy takes special notice of the page that identifies the Roboto’s groin as a weak spot, for some reason.
Kilroy manages to take down a Roboto in private, break open the Roboto’s head, and then wear its head like a mask. Kilroy then dons the Roboto’s prison guard attire, which somehow fits him correctly, and proceeds to escape prison by pretending to be a Roboto.
In some unspecified number of days? weeks?, Roboto-Kilroy keeps up the disguise while travelling on foot to some unknown destination. He then encounters Jonathan Chance by chance after hours at a Rock & Roll Museum, which features animatronic recreations of Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix, ala the Rock-afire Explosion robots at Chuck E Cheese restaurants. Jonathan Chance soon realizes that the museum is a propaganda site meant to depict Rock & Roll as morally deviant and dangerous. The main exhibit is a recreation of Robert Orin Charles Kilroy bashing a Moral Majority dweeb with a guitar. Jonathan Chance momentarily begins to question the cause of rock, wondering if Kilroy really is a bad guy, when Roboto-Kilroy confronts him and starts singing about how he’s got a secret & he’s not just a Roboto & it takes the length of the song for Kilroy to unmask & let Jonathan Chance know that he is, in fact, the Kilroy of rock legend.
If you’re still following—yes, you have it correct: ALL of that bonkers storyline is the prologue to the song “Mr. Roboto.” The song doesn’t make sense within the story of the album unless you watch all of that. And while I find that the song makes resonant sense isolated from the album’s concept & visuals, it becomes confusing when taken in the context of the overall story. Kilroy seems very thankful for the Roboto, who he killed and used to find freedom & sort of became intertwined with. But there’s also the brief moment in the song where Kilroy sings about the destructive problem of too much technology in our lives. The song that is literally titled after expressing gratitude to a Roboto also explicitly states that the Robotos are on the side of dehumanization & authoritarian control.
So which is the mask: the gratitude for the Roboto, or the condemnation? Does Kilroy even know? Does the band?
*
“So if you see me acting strangely, don't be surprised./ I'm just a man who needed someone, and somewhere to hide/ to keep me alive. Just keep me alive.” —Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“Sometimes, to become somebody else, you have to become nobody first.” —Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
*
I’m a trans woman. That I can relate to the concept of hiding within somebody or something else—at worst confined within the other self, at best an uncomfortable compromise because of circumstances beyond one’s control—in order to survive should be obvious. That I can relate to being thankful for no longer needing to hide should be obvious.
*
“The problem's plain to see:/ too much technology./ Machines to save our lives./ Machines dehumanize.” —Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“Fuck it, mask off.” —Future, “Mask Off”
*
There’s a phrase that’s seen plenty of use on social media the past few years, as politicians and celebrities and commentators and general discourse in the United States pushes ever rightward: “mask off.” As in, some people are saying the quiet part out loud. Conservatives are fully embracing fascism. Neoliberal pundits are increasingly not trying to hide their disdain for the poor. Arts institutions and publishing companies flagrantly pursue a politics of marginalization—celebrating their funding from subprime mortgage lenders and pharmaceutical giants; throwing release parties with barbed wire table settings for books about migrants; tokenizing the select few marginalized writers allowed through the gates. So much un-pretending.
As much as I dig the sound of the song, it’s undeniably true that in the context of the album’s concept & music video, “Mr. Roboto” is racist. It feels at first as if “Kilroy Was Here” has a liberal politic: it has a clear message of artistic freedom in the face of religious authoritarianism that strongly critiques the Satanic Panic of the 80s. But the album & short film quickly veer into xenophobia, needing audiences to know that the ban on rock music is enforced by made-in-Japan Robotos. Growing up in the Midwest, I heard all sorts of disdain for “foreign” motor vehicles. The Japanese car industry was made into a boogeyman that was hurting American workers, redirecting the blame away from the real evildoers—wealthy executives for GM, Ford, etc. During the prologue short film, the imprisoned Kilroy does a mocking bow to a Roboto guard while another prisoner insults the Roboto by saying “your mother was a Toyota.” Later, when Kilroy dispatches the Roboto he would disguise himself with, the Roboto crumples to the ground saying “Ow, Kawasaki!”
The villainization of the Japanese motor industry is not subtext here, it’s text text, a total Mask Off moment, and it leads directly to the villainization of Japanese people. The heads of the Robotos, featured prominently in the video & on the album cover & in Styx’s live show, are obscenely racist. With an exaggerated overbite & slanted eyes, they look just like the World War II propaganda caricature illustrations of Japan’s General Hideki Tojo. Even the album’s title is a reference to World War II; U.S. soldiers often left graffiti behind them after conflict in towns or villages, the most infamous tag from that time being “Kilroy Was Here.” So, Kilroy,“machines dehumanize,”? Or are you blaming the wrong thing.
The Redress Movement to win reparations for the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII had been going on for close to two decades before Styx released “Kilroy Was Here” on February 22, 1983. Literally two days later, February 24, the federal Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians made its official determination after years of study that the internment was a failure of justice, and that a [meager, paltry] reparations of $20,000 should be paid to every survivor of internment.
I lack the positionality or interest in making an apologia or defense for Styx’s conceptual and visual racism. I think the song itself has its own merits. But, arguably, choosing to look at “Mr. Roboto” in isolation from those things is its own obfuscation, its own act of hiding.
*
“Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto/ for doing the jobs that nobody wants to./ And thank you very much, Mr. Roboto/ for helping me escape just when I needed to./ Thank you. Thank you, thank you./ I want to thank you. Please, thank you.” —Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
“Gratitude in women is a quality like electricity: it has to be produced, projected, and consumed all in the same instant to exist at all.” —William Faulkner, The Town
*
The way to make this essay legible as a literary essay would be to bring all of its various threads together here, at the end, to make the thinking feel neater, more tidy, than perhaps it actually is. To give readers the satisfaction of all the pieces falling into place. I don’t feel like making that move happen with this essay.
I’ve been thinking this whole time about wearing a mask and nothing about it is tidy. Drama and Comedy. Existing as not your true self and as more than yourself. Masking is both good and bad for me. But its only good because of the circumstances that necessitate it in the first place. Similarly the painful gendered compromises that trans people make before transitioning can literally enable survival, but at a cost. It’d be better though if survival wasn’t contingent upon compromises. There can be beauty in removing a mask, in standing bright in one’s truth. There can be ugliness in removing a mask, if that mask was hiding bigotry or covering up abuses of power. There can be ugliness in wearing a mask if it enables your success at the exploitation of others. There can be beauty in wearing a mask if you and your comrades wear the same mask, centering collective struggle over personal identity.
I can be thankful for the small things I do every day to survive. I can be thankful that I’ve survived this long. And despite what Faulkner’s misogynist narrator thinks, I’d like to think that my gratitude looks towards past and future. Does Kilroy’s gratitude towards the Roboto he killed do the same, or is it fleeting, momentary? Is anyone’s gratitude its own mask? A veil of virtue hiding ugliness beneath it? I’m not going to answer those questions, because I’ve got a secret: I don’t have the answers. Maybe you do. Maybe you can make things legible.
Berry Grass has lived in rural Missouri, Tuscaloosa, and now Philadelphia. They are the author of Hall of Waters (The Operating System, 2019). Their essays and poems appear in DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, and Sonora Review, among other publications. They are a 2019 nominee for the Krause Essay Prize. When they aren't reading submissions as Nonfiction Editor of Sundog Lit, they're embodying what happens when a Virgo watches too much professional wrestling.
Gonna Put You in a Trance With A Funky Song: kristine langley mahler on “hangin’ tough”
Every time I type the apostrophic colloquial version of “hanging,” the correspondent word “tough” materializes in my mind like a phantom, ohhh-ohhh-ohhh-OHHH-ohh following suit and re-imprinting the lines of its old tattoo on a part of my brain I thought I had reassigned to new information. It’s no use: “Hangin’ Tough,” by the New Kids on the Block, is a chant, a crowd-wave, end-of-third-quarter pump-you-up-for-the-comeback at a high school football game. “Hangin’ Tough” has permanently taken an old directive for beleaguered souls (just try to hang tough, kid) and turned it into a collective promise from a wall of boys: we’re hangin’ tough.
*
It is 2019 and I am tracking down VCRs to re-watch a 30-year-old videocassette, the one I watched on my best friend’s plaid sofa twenty years ago. VCRs, in 2019, are more difficult to find than you might imagine. I went to three different thrift stores but couldn’t find a VCR. I went on Craigslist and emailed a dude selling one but, like all Craigslist dudes, he never hit me back. Why is it so hard to obtain the method of retrogressing into a younger version of myself? I can find 8-track players and DVD systems from the early 2000s, but it’s like the VCR era has been deemed unworthy of remembering, digital cheese allowed to molder. Bad.
My best friend’s videocassette of Hangin’ Tough Live sits on my dresser top, where it’s sat since she mailed it to me in July when I told her I was writing to defend/accuse “Hangin’ Tough” as the best/worst song for March Badness. For months, the image of Donnie and the boys has confronted me when I open my eyes in the morning, when I open drawers to pull out clothes, when I reach for my perfume. Donnie and the boys are there, subliminally affixing themselves into a place they do not need to subliminally affix—they were already there.
I first saw the New Kids on the Block on the 1989 Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards. By “saw,” I mean that I was a seven-year-old girl who’d only ever dreamt of a boy asking to hold my hand and when my eyes saw Donnie Wahlberg in his ripped jeans, sauntering across the Kids Choice Awards stage while singing “Hangin’ Tough,” it was a literal sexual awakening.
It had never dawned on me that a boy might be so “bad” he’d shred his jeans to show his thighs—and then defy convention by pairing his “ruined” jeans with a semi-formal blazer! Bad Boy + Good Boy! Donnie’s (stylist’s) sartorial decision was utterly thrilling and titillating!
I am nearly certain I was so overwhelmed by my conflicted emotions that I asked my mom, who was sitting on the sofa beside me, “Why are his jeans RIPPED?” in a half-mocking tone. I am also nearly certain there is no answer she could have given that would have prevented me catapulting from a little girl into a little girl in the throes of her first celebrity crush on the safest “bad boy” out there: New Kids on the Block’s Donnie Wahlberg.
I developed such vaguely shameful feelings for Donnie that when my fourteen-year-old cousin sent me two NKOTB pins, I kept them hidden in the back of my desk drawer lest my attraction be intuited. I was afraid of my parents finding out because I had asked if they would buy me the full-length album of Hangin’ Tough on cassette and my mom told me I was too young to be listening to that music.
*
Ages of the New Kids when Hangin’ Tough was released:
Donnie Wahlberg: 22
Joey (Joe) McIntyre: 19
Jordan Knight: 21
Danny Wood: 22
Jonathan (Jon) Knight: 23
*
It’s extremely hard to find footage of the ’89 Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards online. I’m watching some terribly video-ed copy on YouTube which the uploader apologizes was dubbed from “my own personal collection,” and it’s blurry and the view cuts into black half the time, but I put up with it.
*
“Hangin’ Tough” was written, like most of the New Kids’ songs, by Maurice Starr, the man who put the group together and then handed the boys their choral sheets, along with choreography.
The song begins with what is likely supposed to be a police whistle—Tough Southie Boy alert—but it sounds, to me, more like a dog training whistle, especially considering the post-chorus growl of “We’re rufffffff,” appealing to the little girls clutching fistfuls of their doggies’ fur, Pound Puppies on the playroom carpet, pillows between their knees at night.
The lyrics to “Hangin’ Tough” are nearly non-existent—there are only two and a half verses:
Listen up everybody, if you want to take a chance, just get on the floor and do The New Kids’ Dance / Don’t worry ‘bout nothing ‘cause it won’t take long, we’re gonna put you in a trance with a funky song.
Everybody’s always talking ‘bout who’s on top—don’t cross our path or you’re gonna get stomped. / We ain’t gonna give anybody any slack and if you try to keep us down, we’re gonna come right back.
Get loose everybody ‘cause we’re gonna do our thing / And you know it ain’t over til the fat lady sings.
In the music video for “Hangin’ Tough,” Joe shreds on the “guitar” (a baseball bat) during the solo, but he doesn’t even bother with fingering the “strings.” Jordan, Danny, and Jon rock their microphone stands in rhythm. Donnie makes eye contact with a “hot girl” in the audience and starts to remove his leather jacket, revealing a t-shirt emblazoned with the very threatening moniker “HOME BOY,” a sneer on his face, but at the crucial moment right before the jacket is all the way off, Donnie breaks into a grin and pulls it back on, just kidding.
*
I’ve got notes reminding me “Compare length of song with length of ‘guitar’ solo” but I don’t want to spend more time on the mechanics of “Hangin’ Tough”—I’d rather discuss The New Kids’ Dance.
The thing is that it is impossible to dance to the dirge-like chorus of “Hangin’ Tough” in any way other than crowd-waving your arms back and forth. Maurice Starr knew what he was doing by inserting a call to perform a signature dance—a recent method of success, in the 1980s, for “Vogue” and “Walk the Dinosaur”—but The New Kids Dance from “Hangin’ Tough” didn’t quite catch on.
An important note: the famous leg-swinging dance, for which the New Kids are most known, is NOT. THE NEW KIDS. DANCE. If you watch the New Kids during the “Hangin’ Tough” video, immediately after asking the audience to get on the floor and do The New Kids’ Dance, they execute a distinctive move I remember from my middle-school cheerleading days—clasping fists, elbowing competition out of the way.
*
Hangin’ Tough Live, the videocassette I keep referencing, won a Grammy for Best Long Form Music Video in 1989.
But I didn’t watch it when I was young; I watched it when I was old, a teenager during NKOTB’s fallow years (1994-2008) when the height of hilarity was calling the radio station and requesting New Kids on the Block because it was so obvious the DJ would never play them. I watched that videocassette while sitting on the sofa in my best friend’s parents’ house during some lazy 1998 or 1999 summer, bemused by the New Kids’ moves—these boys didn’t remotely resemble the khakis-and-t-shirts of our town. These boys had style! They were unashamed to perform in synchronization!
It was safe to gush, in 1999, about my childhood love for Donnie because a crush on one of the New Kids seemed like a phenomenon nearly every girl my age had experienced—you had been a Donnie Girl (bad boy lovers, unite!), or a Joe Girl (if you were realistic, because he was the youngest), or a Jordan Girl (if you always fell for the front man), or a Danny Girl (meat-head aesthetic), or a Jon Girl (like a unicorn—I’ve never in my life met a real Jon Girl, but there must have been some of us who liked him simply because he was never in the spotlight—less competition). The New Kids had taken themselves out of the game with the shitshow of 1994’s Face the Music album and their subsequent disbanding; the pillowcases were dropped off at Goodwill, the cassettes weren’t repurchased as CDs. It was an embarrassing phase we’d all grown through, like stirrup pants and knit turtlenecks, that we could laugh at now that we were safely on the other side.
I am about to give away one of my best anecdotes, one which I’ve never written in an essay before. I am that committed to emphasizing this point.
In the Year of Our NKOTB Backlash 1993, shortly before Face the Music was released, I was a sixth grader. Our middle school fundraiser’s lowest-ranking incentive (selling literally two items) was tickets to a special show, in our rival middle school’s gym, during 5th and 6th period. After being bussed over and arranged in rows on the gym bleachers, a FIVE PIECE BOY GROUP came through the gym doors, struttin’ and calling out “Hey everybody!” and trying to high-five kids sitting in the front. I looked to my left and looked to my right and everyone was mortified on behalf of these performers. Didn’t they know we were listening to Blind Melon and Red Hot Chili Peppers now? These guys danced and sang like NEW KIDS KNOCKOFFS, as we whispered to each other derisively, and when the crooners approached girls in the audience, tugging them onto the gym floor to be SERENADED, we started hiding behind each other.
When we arrived back at our middle school, we were presented with signed promo posters and signed cassette tapes and we loaded up the trash can with our giveaways from that cheesy group called “the Backstreet Boys.”
And yet, within two years, the Backstreet Boys were everywhere. *NSYNC, the Backstreet Boys’ immediate rivals, were also everywhere. Three years after that, LFO (yes I just brought up LFO) smothered the airwaves with their 1999 hit song, “Summer Girls,”—a song which reminded everyone in the very first line of the chorus that New Kids on the Block had a bunch of hits. We weren’t on the other side of anything.
The senior boys at my high school tried to battle their girls’ defection back to boy bands by performing a skit in the talent show mocking *NSYNC; they called themselves “*NSTYNK.” But let’s be honest—it was an excuse to dance in perfect synchronization while mouthing lyrics like baby when you finally get to love somebody, guess what? It’s gonna be me because the girls went wild for that package in the 80s, and we still did in 1999.
*
There was a time when Jon Knight could sell you a house. Donnie showed up emaciated in The Sixth Sense as (SPOILER!) Bruce Willis’s murderer. What did Jordan do during the off-season? He went solo and performed the raunchy “Give it to You,” a song co-written by Robin “Blurred Lines” Thicke, in a music video nominated for Best Dance Video in the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards (Jordan lost to “Livin’ La Vida Loca”).
Sweet Joe, on the other hand, also had a solo hit with a slow-jam ballad primed for high school dances, “Stay the Same,” a gospel choir backing him up in a music video where Joe walks around like a goddamn angel, wishing self-love on everyone he encounters—not just pretty girls—singing, “I hope you always stay the same because there’s nothing about you I would change.”
=add embed]
Danny? Worked with LFO!!!
The New Kids resurfaced in conversation every once in a while between 1994 and 2008. Sometimes as we remembered the rumor (that apparently blanketed the USA, I’ve come to find out as an adult) about Jordan (or Donnie, region-dependent) getting his stomach pumped before a New Kids show because he’d swallowed too much semen. Sometimes we mocked their commercial-of-a-cartoon, “New Kids on the Block” and the meme of Cartoon Jon and Cartoon Joe went viral. Sometimes MTV or VH1 tried to convince the Kids to do a one-night-only Special Performance, but the networks’ overtures fizzled and we forgot.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, the New Kids quietly reunited and recorded an album in 2007, working with Akon and the Pussycat Dolls on the New Kids’ first album in thirteen years, The Block. The New Kids went on a morning-show-tour to promote their new album and—lo and behold—the news that they were going back out on tour. To women in their mid-twenties who’d been just a breath too young to make it to a New Kids show back in the day, this was the equivalent of telling a Boomer in the 1970s that the Beatles had reunited. THE WHO HAD WHAT? The New Kids were BACK TOGETHER? The New Kids HAD A NEW ALBUM? The New Kids WERE GOING TO PERFORM ON STAGE AGAIN IN A HOST OF ARENAS ACROSS THE COUNTRY?
I shrieked to my best friend on the phone as she leapt onto Ticketmaster and bought tickets, both of us screaming that we could not believe we were going to get to see the New Kids in concert at this late stage of our waning adolescence and she gushed over the memory of Joe’s gorgeous curly hair and my pelvis involuntarily rocked at the memory of Donnie’s ripped jeans.
*
I had to reactivate my deactivated Facebook account to retrieve this picture of my best friend and I in our homemade NKOTB Fan Girl shirts (mine reads It’s been a long time since someone blew my mind like you did, her shirt quotes Joe’s plea of I’m not too young to let you know how I feel) before we left for the New Kids’ 2008 Omaha concert. That reversion is, obviously, the whole point of this essay.
*
I cannot convey the sheer happiness I feel re-watching, in 2019, all the Hangin’ Tough Live performances. I am present in three Kristines: the one who loved the New Kids as a child, the one thrilled by her childhood crush when viewing the video in her teens, and the screaming Kristine in her 20s who could not believe the New Kids were actually doing that leg-swinging dance right before her very eyes.
I have never gone so crazy; I have never lost control of myself the way I did when the smoke had cleared after some pre-opener named “Lady Gaga” (inexplicably reminding her Omaha audience at every juncture, “I’m from New York City!”) and the actual opener, the singer from the Pantene commercial (“Feel the rain on your skin!”) had departed the stage. The opening music to the New Kids’ 2008 single (titled: “Single”) came booming out of the arena speakers, and the New Kids began entering.
I screamed like a motherfucking maniac; the New Kids singing “I’ll be your boyfriend” was like the only thing I had ever wanted to hear in my life. I used to roll my eyes at the girls in Beatles’ footage, but something took over me at that New Kids concert; I screamed and screamed and my best friend and I were beating each other’s arms in amazement and jumping up and down, complete mob mentality, I would have rushed the stage if I’d had floor tickets, I would have done anything. I forgot I had a six-month-old baby daughter at home (not to mention, um, a husband). I was in the same space as the New Kids on the Block.
*
I acknowledge that this essay is teetering toward devolving into a fluff-piece for all the New Kids Girls (and boys) who grew up and can’t believe our luck: the Kids grew into Men, slyly promising they’ll give us some “Grown Man” while still swinging their legs in tandem during “The Right Stuff” for a crowd old enough to welcome Donnie’s pelvic gestures with a new appreciation.
*
I make my daughters do a “Kids React” to the music video for “Hangin’ Tough” because my daughters are the right ages: Daughter #1 is nearly twelve (the age I was when Face the Music was released); Daughter #2 is nine (prime for Step by Step); Daughter #3 is seven—my age when I first saw Donnie’s ripped jeans on the Kids Choice Awards.
My middle daughter provides nonstop commentary, saying things like:
“Why do these people have 90s haircuts?”
“Yeah…ripped pants.” (A CRUSHING BLOW!!!)
“What’s their band name? Tough? Tough Guys? Tough Rough Guys? HOMEBOYS?”
“Those guys thought they were so rough and tough, but all they were doing was singing and wearing leather jackets.”
My youngest daughter’s comments center on the videography:
“What is the point of putting those letters there if you can’t read them because they’re so fast?”
“Why does it look like they’re standing on a piece of paper?”
“What does it mean by ‘hanging tough’?”
When I ask her, “Would you want to dance like them?” she says, “Nah, I want to free-dance.” When told they are still performing that song today, she says, “Wow. Why?”
My oldest daughter, naturally reticent, stays silent during nearly the entire viewing. When I ask her, “Do you know what hanging tough means?” she replies, “No. They’re, like, doing what they have to do?” When asked, “Did you think any of them were handsome?” she says, “I didn’t like their hair.”
*
But the New Kids are not for my daughters’ generation. The New Kids are for MINE. Marketing dudes look at the New Kids and say DANG: The New Kids know their fans. And they know ’em well. It’s women in their 30s to 50s. That’s it. If you go to a concert, that’s 95% of the audience. They aren’t even trying to attract millennials. Everything they go is 100% focused on their fans. Their music. Their concerts. Their merchandise. They embrace serving their niche.
The New Kids’ victory is in the title of their March Badness tourney song, my friends: thirty years after its release, the New Kids on the Block are still HANGIN’ TOUGH. They own nkotb.com—a feat considering the band pre-dated the internet. The New Kids are wholly unashamed of their cheesy past—all of the merch in the e-store (and believe me, there’s plenty) has the old NKOTB logo with the sideways “O”. The difference is that, now, you can buy a ladies’-sized Blockhead t-shirt. God love them, they’re still selling a travel bag with their cheesy-ass Christmas photo from 1989.
The cartoon show, the dolls, the lunchboxes, the sheets. The novelizations, the buttons and the pins and the loud fanfare—look at me, I’ve internalized them so hard I’m quoting their own damn lyrics about their popularity in my essay.
The 2008 tour had looked tentative, a one-last-time-for-the-fans performance. But eleven years later (I can’t believe I am typing “eleven years later” when we’re talking about a group who, in 2008, had already pushed their relevance fourteen years past their disbanding), I have to report that the New Kids have completed five more nationwide tours: 2011’s NKOTBSB Tour (with the Backstreet Boys [!!!]), 2013’s The Package Tour (with 98 Degrees and Boyz II Men), 2015’s The Main Event Tour (with Nelly), 2017’s Total Package Tour (back with Boyz II Men, and also Paula Abdul), and they recently completed 2019’s Mixtape Tour, featuring Salt-N-Pepa, Naughty by Nature, Tiffany, and Debbie Gibson. The NKOTB Cruises have sold out every year since 2009—and they’ve done one every year.
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I am sitting at my laptop holding a mug obtained by my best friend from the Total Package Tour which reads “She wants the D,” with a photo of Donnie’s face inside the “D.” Sorry. It’s still true.
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Jordan in a 2013 Parade Magazine interview:
A lot of people say we’re the forefathers of the modern-day boy band. But also I think you’ve never really seen a boy band come back like we have; [that’s] part of our legacy [too]. Hopefully we’re showing younger boy bands that there’s life after your first surge as long as you keep at your craft, establish a relationship with your fans, and keep your head on straight.
*
The 30th anniversary of “Hangin’ Tough” occurred in 2019, which seems impossible since I should not be able to remember anything from thirty years ago with the clarity with which I see Donnie’s ripped jeans, but the facts are what they are. In a 2019 article by Variety, it is revealed that “the track (“Hangin’ Tough”) was intended as an anthem for their basketball heroes, the Boston Celtics, yet it also reflected NKOTB’s own tough journey, involving limited finances, rundown recording conditions and criticism from those who dismissed the group as a boy band fad.”
I had written a whole paragraph complaining about the New Kids’ unnecessary braggadocio in “Hangin’ Tough” because I was pretty sure that, when “Hangin’ Tough” hit the airwaves, the Kids were already on top of the charts. But that’s because I was relying on my memory—faulty after thirty years. Hangin’ Tough, the New Kids’ second album, was released in 1988. Their debut record, New Kids on the Block, came out in 1986 with fairly lackluster notice. As Donnie explains during the New Kids’ 30th anniversary show at the Apollo Theater, their 1988 performance at the Apollo literally turned their career around.
Donnie gets very emotional when thanking the fans. He wipes his eyes multiple times.
*
I guess I’m still thinking of how my best friend has attended two more New Kids concerts since 2008, and how she splurged for aisle seats at both, and what it must have felt like when Donnie and Jordan and Joe and Danny and Jon ran by and she reached her arm over the security guard holding the crowd back and touched each one of their biceps as the Kids strode past. She sent me the video; she screams like a little girl, “I got one! I got one!”
After watching endless tour clips from the past eleven years, the feeling I have is beyond begrudging respect for how the New Kids were able to find an audience long after their Teen King days were dead and buried. It’s flat-out admiration. These men, in 2019, are completely unashamed to wear coordinating outfits while performing dance routines from their audience’s youth. It takes something to be pushing 50 years old and still willing to dance in sync with four other dudes night after night.
Or maybe it just goes to show that the New Kids knew what they were doing all along.
“Hangin’ Tough” has no lyrics to hang your hat on, nothing you can dance to; it’s a super-obnoxious chorus characterized by a single sound (ohhh-ohhh-ohhh-OHHH-oh), but the song didn’t flop. “Hangin’ Tough” remains the encore closer on the New Kids’ tours; the opening dog whistle remains instantly recognizable. “Hangin’ Tough” remains beloved. The New Kids took a thirteen year break, breathing shallowly while buried in the grave of their own boy band era, waiting through the cyclical boy band resurgence-and-flop of *NSYNC/BSB. The New Kids on the Block knew that the kids of the 80s are the children of nostalgia, writing about our past even as we continue to relive it. They called this way back in 1989 with a premonition from the best worst song, “Hangin’ Tough”: if you try to keep us down, we’re gonna come right back.
Step by step, ooh baby, Kristine Langley Mahler is gonna get to you. Her work has won the Rafael Torch Award from Crab Orchard Review and the 2019 Sundog Lit Collaboration Contest, been named Notable in BAE 2019, and has been published in DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, The Normal School, and Waxwing, among others. She is the Publisher of Split/Lip Press and sincerely hopes that Donnie will finally follow her back on Twitter.