the first round

(9) new kids on the block, “hangin’ tough”
crushed
(8) minnie riperton, “lovin’ you”
177-72
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, watch the videos (if available), listen to the songs, feel free to argue, tweet at us, and consider. Then vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 3.

ron hogan on “lovin’ you”

Months after volunteering for this gig, I still haven’t fully figured out if I’m participating in a quest to find the best bad song or the worst bad song, but I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that “Lovin’ You” isn’t a bad song at all.
Before we can talk about “Loving You,” however, we need to talk about Minnie Riperton’s first solo album, Come to My Garden. And what you need to know about Come to My Garden is that it’s one of the first truly great albums of the 1970s. Not the first—it didn’t come until November 1970, months after Bridge Over Troubled Water or Paranoid or Abraxas—still, it deserves to be viewed in the same light as Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, which had been released two years earlier, or David Bowie’s self-titled second album and Scott Walker’s Scott 4, both of which came out at the tail end of 1969.
Unfortunately, very few people recognized that in 1970—and that’s a big part of why, three years later, Riperton was living in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband, Richard Rudolph, who co-wrote several of the album’s songs, including the title track. Wikipedia describes their life in Florida as “semi-retirement,” but the truth is they hadn’t really abandoned the music business; instead, they were biding their time, writing new songs together while raising two small children somewhere more affordable than Los Angeles or New York—not off the grid, exactly, more like its furthest edges.
Then a guy at Epic Records had a “Whatever happened to Minnie Riperton?” moment and tracked her down, at which point she and Rudolph happened to have a four-song demo for him to listen to. (The fact that they had the tape ready to go underlines the “semi” in semi-retirement.) Soon enough, they had a contract with Epic and flew out to Los Angeles, where they wound up at The Record Plant with Stevie Wonder sitting next to Rudolph in the producer’s booth.
And yet Perfect Lover almost followed Come to My Garden into semi-obscurity when it was released in the summer of 1974, because early singles like “Reasons” and “Every Time He Comes Around” straddled the arbitrary boundaries between rock and soul to a point where radio programmers held them back from heavy rotation in either format, unsure if the songs really fit in with whatever else they were playing. (The other single, “Seeing You This Way,” was unambiguous pop, but it was also one of the weaker songs on the album—though it works much better in an acoustic version that eventually surfaced on the deluxe CD.)
Then there was “Lovin’ You.”

*

In some ways, “Lovin’ You” is a minimalist version of the poetic vision of Come to My Garden, with the epic orchestrations on that album distilled to two instruments: Wonder’s electric piano and Rudolph’s acoustic guitar. The lyrics are simpler, more straightforward than anything on the previous album; the song, famously characterized as having been inspired by Riperton and Rudolph’s daughter, Maya, develops a more universal embrace.
Although it took some time for Rudolph to convince the label, that simplicity made “Lovin’ You” a much clearer fit for radio, as well all the other media platforms by which pop music was delivered to the masses in the mid-1970s. It was such a clear fit, in fact, that DJs came back to it over and over, until someone might very easily become very sick of “Lovin’ You,” and four decades of critical backlash could ensue. In an unreceptive mood, you can zero in on the chirping birds and the “la la lalalas” and just get turned off by the whole thing. The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, for example, dismisses it as an “annoying... novelty hit,” and that’s not even a review of Perfect Lover, just a throwaway line while discussing a ‘70s soul compilation.
(And let’s not ignore the possibility that, if we hate “Lovin’ You,” we might not hate Riperton’s original recording so much as we hate all the bad karaoke versions by people who believe, because it’s a very simple sounding song, that they can sing it just as well as she could and, lacking the range to truly deal with those high notes, create a trainwreck.)
Hell, I hated “Lovin’ You” when I was a kid in the late 1970s, and on into my teen years, because I would rather be listening to real rock’n’roll or new wave radio stations than the “Lite/Magic” easy listening stuff my mom always had on in the car. I might hear “Lovin’ You” about once a year in the 1980s, and even that would be too much. I didn’t get anywhere near Minnie Riperton's albums until 2014, when Paul Thomas Anderson used the opening cut, “Les Fleur,” in Inherent Vice. (The song also appears, to brilliant effect, at the end of Jordan Peele’s Us.) There’s also undoubtedly some culturally ingrained racism to unpack there, in a late ‘80s suburban Boston environment where a teenage boy could believe that Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” was a poignantly stark song about motherhood, but “Lovin’ You” was simplistic and cheesy.
That’s on me, though, and late 20th-century pop music is just one of the many realms where, the more I learn, I’m continually reminded how much I need to unlearn.

*

It would make my argument simpler if I thought Perfect Lover was as brilliant an album as Come to My Garden, so I could hold it up to Astral Weeks and David Bowie and Scott 4 and declare that this is how the pantheon should look. As much as Perfect Lover has been growing on me these last few months, though, I’m still not quite there yet. It’s a good album, to be sure—and the way Riperton’s chanting “Maya, Maya, Maya, Maya” at the end of “Lovin’ You,” followed by a metronomic sequence of single electric piano notes, segues perfectly into Stevie Wonder’s harmonica at the start of “Our Lives,” well, that is pretty close to perfect. But it doesn’t have the sheer epicness of its predecessor. It’s an collection of songs that’s meant to seduce listeners, rather than overwhelm them, an album that’s not quite as overtly, self-consciously a production.
(This, of course, is as much a lie as Riperton’s “semi-retirement.” It doesn’t matter how stripped down an arrangement might be, once you start layering birdsong into the mix, you’re producing the hell out of it.)
Give me another year or so, maybe I’ll learn to love Perfect Lover more.

*

In the meantime, maybe I could try pitching “Lovin’ You” to you from another angle. While acknowledging the reality that both albums were (co-)written and produced by male impresarios, what if we look at Come to My Garden and Perfect Lover as among the earliest epic creative visions by black women recording artists that, following the trajectory over the next four decades, leads us to Beyoncé’s Lemonade? Or, if we need to narrow our focus to the songs, let’s say that “Lovin’ You” leads us to “Hold Up.”
This is a slightly more precarious argument for me to make, because my instinctive response is to ask myself “what about Nina Simone?”, but then I look at the discography and while I see a lot of great songs, I don’t see an album that makes the sort of cohesive, definitive statement that Riperton’s records make. Is that really how it is, though, or is that just how I’m looking at it, with a far-from-comprehensive experience base?
For that matter, what if that imaginary timeline is unnecessarily restrictive rather than carefully curated? What if we juxtaposed Riperton with other contemporaries like Sandy Denny (who, like her, had her career cut short by death when she was just 31) or, following the hint I gave myself above, looked to Kate Bush or, even further ahead, Alanis Morissette?
Or, you know, I’ve been listening to Haley Heynderickx’s I Need to Start a Garden a lot lately, and she’s the same age Riperton was when she released Perfect Lover, and I swear I could make a pretty good case for “The Bug Collector,” with its minimalist arrangement of acoustic guitar and trombone, as the latest spiritual heir to “Lovin’ You.”
I hope one of these lines of reasoning is proving persuasive for you, or that at least you’re open to the proposition that these are the sorts of contexts in which “Lovin’ You” should be discussed, rather than dismissing Minnie Riperton as another one-hit wonder in the “Super Sounds of the Seventies” trash heap. She—and the song—deserve better.

Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. Over the years, he's written hundreds of book reviews, covered the publishing industry as a commentator/analyst, served as an editor at a startup publishing company, and shared his expertise at book festivals and writers workshops around the world. He currently works with both fiction and nonfiction writers as a developmental editor, and runs a newsletter about developing your writing practice, "Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives," at ronhogan.substack.com. He’s @ronhogan on Twitter and @theronhogan on Instagram.

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.