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Former teen heartthrobs regroup for album, concerts and nostalgia
By Malcolm X Abram
Beacon Journal music writer
POSTED: 06:46 a.m. EDT, Oct 02, 2008
Nostalgia is a funny thing.
The passage of time can make things that seemed so crucial, so important or so egregious at the time seem less so.
Bands and artists who were once so uncool (even when ridiculously popular) can gain hip, hipster or kitsch cache when aging fans reminisce about simpler times in their lives.
Case in point.
The New Kids on the Block are back with a new album called The Block and a new tour — their first in 15 years — that will stop Friday at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.
The group — Joey McIntyre, Jordan and Jonathan Knight, Danny Wood and ''bad boy'' Donnie Wahlberg — have grown from fresh-faced teens to near 40-year-old men, husbands and fathers (four of the five have children). They have watched their boy-band mantle — or their ''block'' as they jokingly refer to it — occupied by successors such as N*Sync, the Backstreet Boys and now the Jonas Brothers.
But the New Kids aren't just back to cash in on fans' desire to relive the obsessions of youth. The group wants to establish itself as adults making music for adults. In other words, they are now ''New Men on the Block.''
The New Kids story began with Maurice Starr, a Svengali- like musical entrepreneur who took four black kids from a bad Boston neighborhood and turned them into New Edition. After that group's break with Starr, the manager realized that if he followed the same formula with white faces, his returns would likely grow exponentially.
In 1984, he found 16-year-old Donnie Wahlberg in Dorchester, Mass.,
who corralled most of the other members from his circle of friends. The early version of the group briefly included Wahlberg's younger brother Mark who later introduced himself to the world as Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.
Eventually, bright-eyed 12-year-old Joey McIntyre was located and rounded out the group's ''classic'' lineup.
From that starting point, Starr, who is also a songwriter, followed his New Edition template replacing teen-oriented R&B tunes with mainstream pop songs designed to give tween-aged girls someone on which to unleash their hormonal screeches and an impressive plethora of merchandise that their parents could purchase.
Starr got the group a record deal with Columbia and the group's self-titled 1986 debut didn't fare well at first, but Starr kept the group on the road performing everywhere. The group's second album, Hanging Tough, found the New Kids trying to shed the bubble gum tag and featured the hits Please Don't Go Girl, You Got It (The Right Stuff), the No. 1 single, I'll Be Loving You (Forever), and the still laughably awful title track.
The album went on to sell more than 8 million copies domestically and established the group as a teen phenomenon. The streak continued with the slightly less successful but still quintuple-platinum-selling Step By Step which contained the chart-topping title track and the top 10 hit Tonight.
By the dawn of the '90s, the New Kids had become an object of derision with allegations of lip-synched live shows (which they deny), a fan base that was growing up, and an embarrassing amount of marketing and merchandising which Disney has since made standard operating procedure with kid-aimed artists such as the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus. Additionally, the aging group oozed a laughable corniness that along with the proliferation of hair metal would help open the door to the navel gazing and dour sounds of the grunge '90s.
In 1994, the same year unhappy grunge king Kurt Cobain decided it was better to burn out than fade away, the group broke with Starr, changed its name to NKOTB and released the R&B flavored Face the Music, featuring a cover photo of the now young men on the block looking stone-faced and pensive. But their time had passed and they broke up not long after.
After the breakup
Like his brother, Wahlberg, now 39, left music to begin a successful acting career and is now acting as the group's manager. Jonathan Knight, 39, who endured panic attacks during the band's heyday, became a successful real estate mogul.
McIntyre, 35, went solo and has built a small but loyal base of fans. He released an album, Talk to Me in 2006.
Danny Wood, 39, tried joining other groups — D-Fuse and D-Wood — but eventually went solo releasing Coming Home in 2007. Jordan Knight, 38, has had some success, releasing a self-titled album in 1999 that sold gold on the strength of the single Give It to You.
The Block probably won't pad NKOTB's 70 million-plus record sales total much, but it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. The tour, which opened a few weeks ago in Canada, has brought the man band back in front of its audience, members of whom can now afford to buy their own concert tickets.
If the album's purpose is to establish NKOTB in 2008 as grown men with the accompanying needs and desires, it is successful. The music is a pastiche of current contemporary R&B/pop trends. Throughout the baker's dozen tracks, several of which were co-written by group members, the songs revel in carnality.
Click Click Click finds the men so enamored with their paramour that they feel compelled to take pictures (''bounce for me, bounce for me, my camera loves you,'' they sing). Keeping with the voyeuristic nature of the 21st Century, on Light, Camera, Action they trade their camera for a video recorder (''you turn on the lights, I'll set up the camera, let's get to the action'') over a generic thumping groove.
Guests on album
Current R&B singer/songwriter Ne-Yo lends the group his recent song Single and appears on the track lending it the sound of a really well-recorded karaoke version. The single Summertime is awash in synths and the staccato singing style prevalent in so much of ''blazing hip-hop and R&B,'' while Sexify My Love is as corny as its title suggests.
Other guests include the Pussycat Dolls (which means singer Nicole Scherzinger) and R&B hitmaker Akon. On Full Service, the group teams up with New Edition (minus Bobby Brown) to bring the '80s boy-band revolution full circle.
Overall, The Block with its de rigeur autotuned vocals, spare grooves, club jams and ballads is as generic and workmanlike a contemporary R&B album as any on the market. But it serves its purpose by placing NKOTB in the here and now and giving them new material to perform every night for the thousands of screaming fans awaiting their chance to hold up their ''I'm legal now'' and ''Donny, I had a crush on you back then, and I've got a crush on you now. Let me backstage!!!,'' (two signs observed during their Canadian run) during The Right Stuff.
The group members admit they've missed each other and the spotlight and the love from the audience. But they have also come to appreciate being able to engage their adult fans in real conversations and not worrying about being torn to pieces.
Whether New Kids on the Block can turn this tour down memory lane into a revitalized and continuing career remains to be seen, and the group has yet to state any definite plans. If the New Kids do decide to keep it going, it will take a more definitive musical statement than the trend-hopping The Block. Nostalgia can put a nice rosy glow on one's memories, but that warm fuzzy feeling eventually wears off. Many fans will put their Hanging Tough cassette tapes back in their closets (though perhaps not buried as deep as they previously were) and fill their MP3 players with new songs and get on with their lives.
Malcolm X Abram can be reached at mabram@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3758.
Nostalgia is a funny thing.
The passage of time can make things that seemed so crucial, so important or so egregious at the time seem less so.
Bands and artists who were once so uncool (even when ridiculously popular) can gain hip, hipster or kitsch cache when aging fans reminisce about simpler times in their lives.
Case in point.
The New Kids on the Block are back with a new album called The Block and a new tour — their first in 15 years — that will stop Friday at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.
The group — Joey McIntyre, Jordan and Jonathan Knight, Danny Wood and ''bad boy'' Donnie Wahlberg — have grown from fresh-faced teens to near 40-year-old men, husbands and fathers (four of the five have children). They have watched their boy-band mantle — or their ''block'' as they jokingly refer to it — occupied by successors such as N*Sync, the Backstreet Boys and now the Jonas Brothers.
But the New Kids aren't just back to cash in on fans' desire to relive the obsessions of youth. The group wants to establish itself as adults making music for adults. In other words, they are now ''New Men on the Block.''
The New Kids story began with Maurice Starr, a Svengali- like musical entrepreneur who took four black kids from a bad Boston neighborhood and turned them into New Edition. After that group's break with Starr, the manager realized that if he followed the same formula with white faces, his returns would likely grow exponentially.
In 1984, he found 16-year-old Donnie Wahlberg in Dorchester, Mass.,
who corralled most of the other members from his circle of friends. The early version of the group briefly included Wahlberg's younger brother Mark who later introduced himself to the world as Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.
Eventually, bright-eyed 12-year-old Joey McIntyre was located and rounded out the group's ''classic'' lineup.
From that starting point, Starr, who is also a songwriter, followed his New Edition template replacing teen-oriented R&B tunes with mainstream pop songs designed to give tween-aged girls someone on which to unleash their hormonal screeches and an impressive plethora of merchandise that their parents could purchase.
Starr got the group a record deal with Columbia and the group's self-titled 1986 debut didn't fare well at first, but Starr kept the group on the road performing everywhere. The group's second album, Hanging Tough, found the New Kids trying to shed the bubble gum tag and featured the hits Please Don't Go Girl, You Got It (The Right Stuff), the No. 1 single, I'll Be Loving You (Forever), and the still laughably awful title track.
The album went on to sell more than 8 million copies domestically and established the group as a teen phenomenon. The streak continued with the slightly less successful but still quintuple-platinum-selling Step By Step which contained the chart-topping title track and the top 10 hit Tonight.
By the dawn of the '90s, the New Kids had become an object of derision with allegations of lip-synched live shows (which they deny), a fan base that was growing up, and an embarrassing amount of marketing and merchandising which Disney has since made standard operating procedure with kid-aimed artists such as the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus. Additionally, the aging group oozed a laughable corniness that along with the proliferation of hair metal would help open the door to the navel gazing and dour sounds of the grunge '90s.
In 1994, the same year unhappy grunge king Kurt Cobain decided it was better to burn out than fade away, the group broke with Starr, changed its name to NKOTB and released the R&B flavored Face the Music, featuring a cover photo of the now young men on the block looking stone-faced and pensive. But their time had passed and they broke up not long after.
After the breakup
Like his brother, Wahlberg, now 39, left music to begin a successful acting career and is now acting as the group's manager. Jonathan Knight, 39, who endured panic attacks during the band's heyday, became a successful real estate mogul.
McIntyre, 35, went solo and has built a small but loyal base of fans. He released an album, Talk to Me in 2006.
Danny Wood, 39, tried joining other groups — D-Fuse and D-Wood — but eventually went solo releasing Coming Home in 2007. Jordan Knight, 38, has had some success, releasing a self-titled album in 1999 that sold gold on the strength of the single Give It to You.
The Block probably won't pad NKOTB's 70 million-plus record sales total much, but it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. The tour, which opened a few weeks ago in Canada, has brought the man band back in front of its audience, members of whom can now afford to buy their own concert tickets.
If the album's purpose is to establish NKOTB in 2008 as grown men with the accompanying needs and desires, it is successful. The music is a pastiche of current contemporary R&B/pop trends. Throughout the baker's dozen tracks, several of which were co-written by group members, the songs revel in carnality.
Click Click Click finds the men so enamored with their paramour that they feel compelled to take pictures (''bounce for me, bounce for me, my camera loves you,'' they sing). Keeping with the voyeuristic nature of the 21st Century, on Light, Camera, Action they trade their camera for a video recorder (''you turn on the lights, I'll set up the camera, let's get to the action'') over a generic thumping groove.
Guests on album
Current R&B singer/songwriter Ne-Yo lends the group his recent song Single and appears on the track lending it the sound of a really well-recorded karaoke version. The single Summertime is awash in synths and the staccato singing style prevalent in so much of ''blazing hip-hop and R&B,'' while Sexify My Love is as corny as its title suggests.
Other guests include the Pussycat Dolls (which means singer Nicole Scherzinger) and R&B hitmaker Akon. On Full Service, the group teams up with New Edition (minus Bobby Brown) to bring the '80s boy-band revolution full circle.
Overall, The Block with its de rigeur autotuned vocals, spare grooves, club jams and ballads is as generic and workmanlike a contemporary R&B album as any on the market. But it serves its purpose by placing NKOTB in the here and now and giving them new material to perform every night for the thousands of screaming fans awaiting their chance to hold up their ''I'm legal now'' and ''Donny, I had a crush on you back then, and I've got a crush on you now. Let me backstage!!!,'' (two signs observed during their Canadian run) during The Right Stuff.
The group members admit they've missed each other and the spotlight and the love from the audience. But they have also come to appreciate being able to engage their adult fans in real conversations and not worrying about being torn to pieces.
Whether New Kids on the Block can turn this tour down memory lane into a revitalized and continuing career remains to be seen, and the group has yet to state any definite plans. If the New Kids do decide to keep it going, it will take a more definitive musical statement than the trend-hopping The Block. Nostalgia can put a nice rosy glow on one's memories, but that warm fuzzy feeling eventually wears off. Many fans will put their Hanging Tough cassette tapes back in their closets (though perhaps not buried as deep as they previously were) and fill their MP3 players with new songs and get on with their lives.
Malcolm X Abram can be reached at mabram@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3758.
Comments
Click here to post your comments
Posted 04:03 PM, 10/01/2008
There are a few corrections needed in your story. You write, "Danny Wood, 39, tried joining other groups — D-Fuse and D-Wood". These in fact weren't groups, but names that Danny went by when he started his solo career. Second, you write, "Click Click Click finds the men so enamored with their paramour that they feel compelled to take pictures (''bounce for me, bounce for me, my camera loves you,'' they sing)." The lyrics are in fact, "pose for me, pose for me, my camera loves you". The "lip-synched live shows" allegation was not only denied by the guys but it was also retracted by the disgruntled New Kids employee who made the allegation. While I do disagree with your review, I appreciate your honest objectivity, something that is lacking in most negative reviews I have read thus far.
Posted 04:32 PM, 10/01/2008
I do hope that they do eventually make another album maybe not next year, but at some other time. I would be dissapointed if they just do what the spice girls did. the girls just made a reunion and then they just dissapeared as if nothing ever happened. I mean I understand they they each have lives aside of being a group, but hey this is my opinion.
Posted 05:41 AM, 10/02/2008
This album is amazing!! I can not wait to see them on tour.
Posted 12:04 PM, 10/02/2008
I loved them when I was younger. It is nice to see them back and for us to be able to relive our youth at least for a minute. When I role my eyes at the Jonas Brothers, I understand what my mother felt for the New Kids but understand what the 9 year old girl is going through. A lovely part of going up.
Bizarrebertucky, OH
Posted 06:38 PM, 10/02/2008
Eeeewwww
Posted 10:29 AM, 10/04/2008
Oh boy. A bunch of 40-year-old broads gettin' their seats all moist in a fit of nostalgia.
Posted 01:06 PM, 10/06/2008
I went to the September 30th Show in Connecticut and it was everything I ever dreamed it could be!!!! I had floor seats and the guys actually ran down the aisle and took the time to shake hands and say hi. I never thought that would happen and then in the middle of the concert they took a few minutes to talk about breast cancer awareness and to let us know that Dannys mom died from that and all the proceeds from the tshirt sales was going to the cancer fund. They have grown from cute young men to mature responsible men who do not need to prove anything to anyone. If you like them, than good for you and if you dont then that is entirely up to you. I liked them so much that I am going to the November show too!!!!!!
