(7) the eagles, “hotel california”
EVICTED
(9) new kids on the block, “hangin’ tough”
336-245
TO RESERVE ITS SPOT IN THE FINAL FOUR

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 25.

THAT CREEP CAN ROLL, MAN: THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ ON “HOTEL CALIFORNIA”

For me, it’s as iconic a scene as any. The Dude sits in the back of a taxi. He’s had a long day—a porn producer roofied him, the Malibu chief of police has chucked a coffee mug at his forehead—and the taxi driver is playing one of his least favorite bands. The Dude asks the driver to change the channel. “Fuck you,” the driver yells. “If you don’t like my music, get your own fuckin’ cab. I’ll kick your ass out.” This doesn’t stand with the Dude. “I had a rough night,” he says, “and I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man.” The driver pulls over, and kicks his ass out.

I spent most weeknights in high school in the early 2000s listening to Q104.3, New York’s classic rock station. I would lock the door to my room, tune the stereo, and, after about thirty minutes of math, position myself in the center of my room, between bed and bookcase, pump up the volume, and rock out. I could do this for hours, jumping around my room and whisper-screaming lyrics, the radio loud enough to drown out my noise, the rug thick enough or the downstairs neighbors patient enough that they didn’t complain. The whole thing had a very George Michael and his lightsaber vibe. I tried to keep my fantasies modest. In my imagination, I played my school talent show in front of my classmates so they could see how cool I’d become. I was my own little dictator: I just wanted to be loved, and maybe adored.
I idolized pretty much anything Q104.3 played. If you got lucky, on Two for Tuesdays, when the station played ten songs by five bands without commercial breaks, you’d catch something like Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” and “Ramble On,” or Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” If you were unlucky, you got “Layla” or “Light My Fire.” If it was a really rough night, you got the Police or the Eagles, and then you turned the radio off, sat down, and finished your homework.

The irony of the Dude’s cab scene, as the clip’s surprisingly insightful YouTube comments point out, is that we the audience expect the Dude, a white, middle-aged stoner who smokes roaches in his car and listens to CCR tapes, to like The Eagles, and the cab driver, a Black man wearing a taqiyah, to dislike them. The pair’s fiercely opposite reactions—the Dude just cannot keep his mouth shut; the driver almost causes an accident pulling over—are both a subversion of racial stereotypes and a joke about the Eagles. They are the most indifferent, blandest of bands, and yet both these characters are ready to die on this hill.

I disliked the Eagles in high school for a mostly aesthetic reason: their songs were oversaturated with the 70s. They sounded like they wanted to be liked, and that made me dislike them. As a grad school professor would write shorthand in my margins, they were TTH: Trying Too Hard.
I also mistrusted them because “Hotel California,” with its upbeat and wooden timbales and Don Henley’s elongated vowels, sounded like a bunch of white guys on vacation in the Caribbean, trying to sound Spanish. Indeed, the song’s working title was “Mexican Reggae.” And here I was, a white guy with a Spanish last name, who did not speak his father’s native language, and who decided to take Chinese in high school so he wouldn’t have to learn the Spanish the rest of his family spoke. I did not identify with what the Eagles were trying to do in that song, and yet I did identify, and this bothered me most.

At least, I think this is why I disliked the song. Because at some point in high school, along came the Dude and The Big Lebowski and here was another white guy, who smoked pot and wore pajamas outdoors and hated the Eagles.
By now, I’ve watched the movie more times than any other except for Casablanca. (Once I was alone for a long time in a house without cable.) The anxiety of influence kicks in. Did I hate the Eagles because my favorite character in my favorite movie hated them? Or is he my favorite character because he was able to articulate my dislike in the way we say good literature articulates our long held yet unexpressed truths? Did I root for the villains in Bond films because I too am slippery and untrustworthy, and because I appreciated how these figures complicated and undermined a sense of unflappable masculinity? Or did I feel this way because these villains wormed their way into my head before I could come to my own questions about myself?
You might say any assignation of good or bad, like or dislike, is never a judgment about the text itself, but a shaping of ourselves in reaction to a text. We want what reflects us back to ourselves. Or, as the Dude would say, “Well, you know, that’s just like your opinion man.”

The other day, my friend Alyssa brought up a personality metric her younger sister invented to measure the world. There are four categories to express a person’s outward and (inward) dichotomies: You can be 1) chill (un-chill), 2) unchill (chill), 3) chill (chill), or 4) unchill (unchill). Chill (unchill) presents a chill exterior while maintaining an un-chill interior. Unchill (chill) does the inverse. The rest explain themselves.
As is the case with any personality metric, the test becomes more complicated the more you think about it, although you could say that that is pretty unchill of me to point out.
But still it’s a fun exercise. For example, Walter, the Dude’s best friend, with all his screaming about Vietnam, is decidedly unchill (unchill), as are the movie’s Nazis, despite their nihilism. Jesus, the Dude’s bowling antagonist, is actually chill (chill). A Bond villain is unchill (chill): at their core, they know what has to be done and how to do it. Their firmness of purpose bespeaks a certain calm.
On first blush, the Dude appears to be chill (chill) since, after all, he’s the Dude and the Dude abides. But you could also argue the Dude is chill (unchill). Beneath his façade lies an interior full of agitation and anger at the injustices in the world, as well as the failing of the Dude’s life work to correct those injustices, that anger often funneled into wherever he happens to be at the moment, such as in the back of a cab with a bruise on his forehead from a fascist police chief’s coffee mug, listening to Don Henley want to sleep with you in the desert tonight, with a million stars all around.

Like the Dude, the Eagles are chill (unchill). While their songs present a surface of easy listening and relaxed SoCal vibes, underneath that surface lies a corporate mentality, a lack of conviction, and a cynical, exploitative view of the world. Unlike, say, CCR, the Dude’s favorite band, the chillness of their music does not ground itself in the knowledge that the world is decidedly an unchill place. Their music instead argues that the world is an easy place, or at least a place where shallow, derivative, uncomplicated songs can succeed in the way that my imaginary concerts strove to: by presenting a fantasy and wanting adoration.
If the length of its guitar solo is any indication, there is no song more a fantasy, more wanting of adoration than “Hotel California.” Its six minutes and thirty-one seconds are full of vague metaphors and knock-off Springsteen lines that portend to mean anything and everything. The narrative possesses a muddiness that makes “Stairway to Heaven” sing like a clear mountain stream. Musically, its guitars cascade through the song, awash and bright not like sunlight, but like Dawn, like your computer monitor turned all the way up. I suspect it’s a song simply about getting your nut, but at least when Led Zeppelin sang those, they didn’t have to do it with so much pomp and mystery.

That said, this is less an essay about whether Hotel California is a bad song as it is an essay about why I feel the need to say Hotel California is a bad song. About how aesthetics often equal an idea of how the way we are good is determined by what we say is good, or at least how we might appear good in public by what we say we like.
Whatever its limitations, could a metric like chill (unchill) be applied to the notion of good and bad? What are the qualities of a song that is 1) good (bad) versus one that is 2) bad (good)? What makes something 3) good (good) or 4) bad (bad)?
I would like to think that this is a world where the core of a text makes itself known eventually. Take Guy Fieri, for example, who people such as myself only admit to liking ironically at first. Guy Fieri appeals because of his ridiculous exterior; liking someone so unsophisticated is one way of gaining social capital in a generation suspicious of sincerity. Irony is a mask, says Anne Carson (good (good)). That is, we say Guy Fieri is good but we wink when we do so because we are witty and patrician enough to know he is good (bad). But spend any amount of time with him, and those designations tend to flip or disappear. What actually appeals about him is not the way in which he might make a viewer feel intellectually superior, but the way in which his relentless positivity, good cheer, and support of others make me, at least, wish for more of those qualities in myself. I start to admire what big bites he takes and the convenience of his backwards sunglasses. Irony is a mask, but then, Carson adds, the mask becomes the face.
To put it more succinctly: Once I grew a mustache as a joke. Now I have a mustache.

So while I’d like to live in a world where the core parenthetical reveals itself, the core also shifts, moves, heats up and cools down. And I myself am moving in relation to it. I might hardly even know where I am in the first place.
Is “Hotel California” a bad song or am I saying it’s a bad song so I can sound like a certain (good) person? Is it possible to call it a bad song and still say I like it? Or to say that I like it but that I don’t believe in it?

Anyone that’s watched The Big Lebowski knows about Jesus. As played by John Turturro, the character wears a lavender jumpsuit, a hairnet, and a perfectly manicured violet pinky fingernail. He dries his fingers over the air vent and tongues the bowling ball. In a fitting touch for the Dude’s nemesis, “Hotel California” plays in the background when we meet Jesus. Not the Eagles’ version, but a cover by the Gipsy Kings. Jesus prepares to bowl during the song’s instrumental opening; if you’ve never heard this version, you’d have no idea what song it was. Once Jesus bowls a strike, he turns around, hops from foot to foot, and points at the camera as the first verse begins. At this point we the audience recognize what we have, and how it differs. Here is a Bond villain cooked up by the Coen Brothers.
I find the Gipsy Kings’ version formidable in its arpeggiated fury, and I also do not know how seriously to take it. Is it over the top, or does it just accompany one of the movie’s most over the top scenes? Either way, it does something I hardly did in high school, something the Eagles are all too eager to convince you they do: as the kids say, it fucks, and does so in the Spanish I refused to learn as a child. Given all the vague references to mission bells and colonialism and the exoticism of California in the Eagles’ original, here is a twist. The song feels like it’s taking something back and pushing something else forward.

Some time ago, my partner described an article that considers how song covers “queer” their original versions, such as when a woman covers a song in which a man pined for a woman. That is, a cover does not just imitate, but destabilizes its original. I think, most famously, of Jose Feliciano playing a folk version of the Star Spangled Banner during the 1968 World Series. To many viewers, Feliciano presents an image of defenselessness: a person who is blind, sitting and playing an acoustic guitar on his own, with no martial band to back him. This, in turn, gives the cover its power; Feliciano manages to demilitarize the anthem brilliantly. And like all good (good) covers, he renders it so that you both can and can’t sing along to it. When the melody rises, Feliciano descends. When a note should be held, he shortens it. Certainty becomes, instead, conditional.
I hesitate to use the word queering myself. I’m not sure it is my word to use, and I do not want to dampen or quell the word’s effect, much as I was hesitant to use the word partner. I wonder as well if my using that term is similar in some respect to the pop corporate mentality with which Don Henley and the Eagles appropriate the sounds of a just-passed era where others laid more on the line than they did, or the way in which a multinational corporation will drop a Kardashian into the vaguest of Black Lives Matter protests to sell soda.
But I admire the subversion a gesture can create. What a cover does to the original song resembles what the Dude is to Jeffrey Lebowski, or how Jesus, whose last name is Quintana, does not pronounce his name “hey-zeus” but as the Anglicized “gee-zus” himself. A cover questions the original’s values and repurposes content for new aims. It does something more complicated than call the original good or bad. It alters a text from whatever is considered acceptable, keeping in mind that when we call something such, we want that to say more about ourselves and our good standing than about whatever that thing is.

The house where I watched Casablanca over and over again belonged to my grandmother, a house she and my grandfather, whom I never met, had built outside Rio de Janeiro. Casablanca is, of course, a movie about people of mostly comfortable means attempting to escape the threat of fascism by traveling to the Americas. (Good luck, many would say.) It resembles, to that skeletal degree, my grandfather who fled the Spanish Civil War for South America just a few years before, the way the families of the future Gipsy Kings also fled Catalonia during that same civil war for the south of France. It’s a cheap move, an easy move, to tell you the insignia of both Generalissimo Francisco Franco and the Third Reich was an eagle.

Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint Press, 2017). His work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review Online among other places and he has received fellowships from Colgate University and the MacDowell Colony. He's an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps, and a lecturer at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

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.

—

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.

—

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.