round 2
(9) new kids on the block, “hangin’ tough”
drummed out
(1) BEACH BOYS, “KOKOMO”
155-146
and will play in the sweet 16
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 14.
SOMEONE TOOK THE WORDS TO MY SONG: LAWRENCE LENHART ON THE DOUDISMÉ OF ‘KOKOMO’
If I ask politely, stuff some American dollars in the glass vase, the house band in the resort’s cocktail lounge will play an impeccable cover of “Kokomo.” And that’s the problem.
The Bahamian singer, Jermaine, looks at me like, Are you sure? Do you really want to go there? As if to say, isn’t there enough guilt in your tourist pleasure? I stand back to see what will happen.
During the verses, the loungers chomp ice from their cocktails, cut cigars with guillotines, and suck the blood out of their pretty mamas’ clavicles. They sway their sunburnt bodies with arrhythmic confidence, like this yacht rock earworm has stolen their breath, amputated their sea legs. Scanning the faces of those who sit in this lap of luxury, it’s easy to tell how supposedly fun this is all meant to be. They have all taken up residence in the Beach Boys’ Kokomo, which is more clef than it is caye. Watch as they all surrender to the tropical contact high. No surprise here: “Kokomo” is not an attempt to engage with the Caribbean states so much as it wants to co-opt the Caribbean state of mind.
But it’s Jermaine’s take on the song’s signature amphibrachs that’s most infectious. Without much effort, he gets the whole lounge to take up the cause. Dozens of couples erupt in spontaneous incantation: “Aruba, Jamaica... Bermuda, Bahama... Key Largo, Montego…” Some lay it on thick, dropping their voices into bassy spellcasting, raising their arms like drunken witch doctors. Just when I was getting the hang of not policing the super-elite, I glare at the most ill-behaved woman in the room. There’s a world of difference between having fun and making fun. From the adjacent casino, it probably sounds like the lounge is the site of an incoherent geography quiz.
It’s a song written by a generation of lyricists whose doorsteps were clearly skipped over by door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. What else could explain the presence of Aruba and Bermuda whose irreconcilable distance does no favors to a song whose hook is meant to geolocate the fictional Kokomo? Oughtn’t rhyme connote geographical proximity? The island nations are 1,500 miles apart—in the South Caribbean and Atlantic respectively. I can’t help but jot down a shortlist of more appropriate locales that still adhere to the ˘ˊ˘ amphibrach: Barbados, Antigua… Grenada, Tortola... Tobago, Havana.
I make the same request four nights consecutively, doubling, tripling, and eventually quadrupling my initial inducement. I look at the cash in the vase, wondering if I could even be obnoxious enough to request a receipt for the song. I know I can make the case in my grant paperwork that it’s all part of the small island/climate narrative research, but decide I just don’t have that kind of gall.
“Kokomo?” Jermaine asks. “Again?”
“Please,” I nod. And: “Sorry. Last one.” I don’t look him in the eyes this time. It’s as if he is dealing me something illicit.
Just as I’m preparing for the Caribbean litany, ready to white-knuckle again through the redundancy of “Montego” (it’s a bay, not an island; and wasn’t Jamaica invoked just a few measures back?), Jermaine decides to cleverly swap the locales in the song for U.S. states whose names have the selfsame syllabics. He winks at me, his jerk requestor. It’s a thrilling projection onto an audience that whoops when the lyrical guesswork is correct: “Ohio, Wisconsin… Wyoming, Virginia… Montana, Alaska… Kentucky, Rhode Island… New Hampshire, Missouri… Nebraska, Nevada… ” For a moment, everyone seems to forget the purpose of the song—“to get away from it all”—and the pride each takes in being flung back to the prairie, desert, or pine barren from whence they came makes it all the more ironic when Jermaine’s bandmate plays the steel pans on his digital keyboard. In this rendition, Kokomo is less of a Caribbean escape than it is the real town of, say, Kokomo, Indiana—allegedly named after an “ornery” Miami Indian chief. Jermaine respectfully leaves Hawai’i out of the modified cover, and I lead the lounge in ovation.
*
Overturn the jukebox in the nearest-by tiki lounge, and out will spill the proto-surf sound: twist beat with loose-tuned tom rack, minor pentatonics and rick-a-tick triplets, tremolo picking drenched in “wet spring” reverb, amateur field recordings of waves breaking. Watch the acetone vinyls slip from the needle, The: Belairs, Challengers, Champs, Chantays, Del-Tones, Lively Ones, Rumblers, Sandals, Showmen, Surfaris, Trashmen.
I try to imagine the surf rock supergroup, along with their would-be single that follows the surf formula to a t. Let’s call them The Grommets. The track would begin with five seconds of breakers doing what breakers do best: lapping, splashing, crashing. Sound recordist Irv Teibel, founder of the “nature sounds” genre (and responsible for the un-ironic Psychologically Ultimate Seashore), would make the listener feel as if this song is being recorded not from a studio, but from a SoCal sandbar. Cue Dick Dale’s frenetic fretting along a single heavy-gauged string, a Turkish scale that crests and troughs like a wave. The story goes “Misirlou” (made famous again by Pulp Fiction) was written on a dare: “Can you write a song using just one string, Dale?” Now for Sandy Nelson’s swell—tom-a-tom-a-tom rumble and a backbeat whose rimshot sounds like the crack of a surfboard. Fuck it. How about a second match-grip drummer? Let there be drums and let there be more drums. Rhythm guitarist Duane Eddy strikes at chords, but chokes them off in reverberating caesura. And just like that, The Groms have laid down another surf classic. The crowd goes gnarly, surfer-stomping their way through the whole composition.
A summary: Waves breaking. A pick scrape into exotic tremolo. Every note goes WOM or WEE. Chop / tom-a-tom-a-tom / chop / tom-a-tom-a-tom. Tremolo again, presto this time, WOM-WOM-WOM-WEE-WOM-WEE with whammy and more pick scrape. Chop / tom-a-tom-a-tom-a tom-a-tom-a-tom-a / chop / tom-a-tom-a-tom tom-a-tom-a-tom-a. Key change lets loose a catchphrase—better yet, a single word. Uttered once, something good enough to be the title.
Because “surf” is instrumental, a song in this genre can only spare a single word. Think tequila, think wipeout, think 6-pak. The Trashmen should have known better. If everybody already knows that “bird [was] the word,” then every lyric not “bird” was needless.
Let it be a word from the surfer’s dictionary. Something like ripping or carving or bailing or pearling or bogging. But no gerunds please. Something about the motion of the ocean. Barrel or wave train, whitewater or backwash. It should be a word whose vibe overpowers its meaning. Or maybe an image of what comes after the surf. And what does come after the wetsuits have been stripped off, the boards slid through the barn door of the microbus? “Bonfire!” they’ll scream when the sun has slipped the horizon. “Bonfire” it is. And let’s be sure to let the waves come back at the end, Irv, because “surf” is art imitating life and lifestyle.
Sure, some tiki-lounge jukeboxes will acknowledge the seeds of surf in punk, art rock, and new wave. But the closest you’ll get to The Beach Boys in my all-time favorite jukebox in Sacramento’s Hideaway is the opening riff from Duane Eddy’s “Moovin’ and Groovin’,” which Carl Wilson poached for “Surfin’ USA.” (The plagiarism doesn’t end there: the rest of the song is a total rip of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.”)
Surfers saw through The Beach Boys from the start. Except for the one true beach boy, Dennis Wilson, they were too clean-cut, too virginal. Their manager-father bought them striped shirts from Macy’s, a starter pack for a barbershop quarter. When Capitol Records execs hatched a plan to distribute their early records for free to local surf shops, storeowners faked enthusiasm before chucking the vinyl into the trash bin. At early shows, surfers pelted The Beach Boys with rotten vegetables and threatened to kill them. Dennis kicked one of them and “split his scrotum,” whatever that means. There’s no avoiding it: The Beach Boys were the O.G. boy band, bona fide posers who faked membership in a surf scene from which they cowered.
In fact, Brian Wilson couldn’t even swim. Having only ever experienced radio waves, he relied on the DJ to tell him “the surfin’ is fine.” His aversion to the beach was so strong that he famously had a sandbox constructed around the piano in his living room as he composed Pet Sounds. This way he wouldn’t have to go outside to have his toes in the sand.
After decades of trying to convince Midwesterners they were the beating heart of the SoCal surf scene—see the way they literally pose with surfing props in their earliest music videos, tandem-surfing like it’s a freestyle photoshoot by Jostens photography—The Beach Boys finally traded in their bogus calling card for a boarding pass to the sexed-up retirement home that is Kokomo. The transformation didn’t happen overnight. From the start, their message was one of energetic peer pressure: “Let’s Go Surfing.” A decade later, they’re phoning in their one contribution to the counterculture movement. “Don’t Go Near the Water” is a sad-sack song more notable for its irony than its vague political message. Another decade on and desperate for another hit, they release “Keeping the Summer Alive,” an echo of disco’s twee existentialism. A year later, Dennis Wilson drowned. As the one surfer in the Beach Boys, Dennis shouldered the band’s ethos. Without him, 1988 seemed as good a time as ever to finally come clean.
This is the one strength of “Kokomo.” It is the most honest song The Beach Boys ever released. It is the sound of late-career musicians confessing, We’ve always been more poolside hacks than beach bums.
*
This is probably why I balked at the idea of The Beach Boys mini-concert experience at my Las Vegas hotel. For an extra $50 per person at check-in, available to the first 250 customers only, you could watch some of the original Beach Boys play staples from their early catalogue.
“You’re going to want to go directly to the pool,” the concierge said, tracing the maze with a fountain pen.
Having just arrived in the desert, we rolled our suitcases toward a newly renovated deck with four large pools, “three of them infinity.” As a thirteen-year-old on vacation with his parents, I was more interested in the promise of tomorrow’s Warped Tour than I was in seeing these living legends of beach pop.
The pool deck was a bourgeois oasis crowded with boomers on pool chairs, recumbent like the plaster Roman sculptures in the periphery. I reluctantly lifted away my headphones, which had been playing Combat Rock nonstop since takeoff from Pittsburgh.
It was unclear to me how people on a luxe vacation in Las Vegas could identify so insistently with the “let’s get away from it all” sentiment. How much farther could one get from “it all” than Las Vegas? It wasn’t until I heard “Kokomo” live that I realized that in performing a song about a fictional place off the Florida Keys, they were culturally identical to Jimmy Buffet with his lame utopia of Margaritaville.
*
As far as bad songs go, Kokomo is a gift that keeps on giving. If I were merely trying to make the case that the song is bad, I would probably focus on its place in the pop cultural landscape of 1988. It first appears on the soundtrack for Cocktail, a movie about a seasonal barman, Flanagan (Tom Cruise), whose hustle includes show-offy mixology during late-night shifts in elite Manhattan bars; an entrepreneurial spirit that fails to impress his grouchy business professor; and who’s consumed by the chronic notion to “date up.” He winters in Jamaica, where he’s certain the tips from upper-class expats will pad his checking account. All of his ambition forms under the bad influence of a father figure who attributes his work ethic to Irish ancestry and whose pseudo-philosophy stales midway through the first scene. I know what you’re wondering, and the answer is: yes, Cruise does deliver at least one of his lines in Jamaican patois.
In fact, that line is basically the cue for “Kokomo,” which plays as nocturnal visions of Manhattan’s skyline dissolve, replaced by the mineral blue waters of the Caribbean. The movie begs the question: Can one really get away from it all? (Spoiler: Not even close.) In one terrible scene, Flanagan is on a date with his romantic interest, Jordan (Elisabeth Shue), when he indicates the cocktail umbrella poking out of their drinks.
Flanagan: You know there’s a guy who makes these?
Jordan: One guy? He must be exhausted.
Flanagan: Yes, he is. But still, he gets up in the morning and he kisses his wife and he goes to his drink umbrella factory where he rips off ten billion of these a year. This guy’s a millionaire.
Jordan: [Picking up an ashtray] How about the guy who makes these?
Flanagan: How about that guy? Not to mention the guy who makes these.
They take turns fondling unlikely items, in awe of their potential value.
Jordan: And those little wrappers are made by another guy.
Flanagan: What about these plastic things at the end of these laces.
Jordan: Hmmm. It’s probably got one of those weird names too like – ummm, ‘flugelbinder’.
Flanagan: Flugelbinder, right. We’re sittin’ here, and we’re surrounded by millionaires. You rack your brains day and night to try to come up with a money-making scheme, and some guy corners the flugelbinder market
Jordan: Poor baby. He’s frustrated.
Flanagan: You get a bar job to keep your days free for your real gig. After work you’re so charged up, you have a few drinks. You know, hey, it’s party time. Days get shorter and shorter. Nights, longer and longer. Before you know it, your life is just one long night with a few comatose daylight hours.
Jordan: Oh God. Stop feeling so sorry for yourself, Flanagan. Hey, your flugelbinder is out there waiting to be discovered.
Flanagan: Waiting. Do you think so?
Jordan: I do.
Until then, they’ll polish off this cocktail and another, stare into each other’s eyes like they’re the only couple at this resort. Like they’re the only couple in the world.
*
It’s always a forbidding sight: clusters of honeymooners, clutching at Bahama Mama cocktails, their teeth stained from too much grenadine, coming and going from the all-inclusive beach bar—their knock-off flip-flops stretching, straining, eventually unplugging as they are dragged through the white-soft sands, pulled along by the swollen, lymphedemic machinery of the American ankle.
Happy and Tre, shirtless and smiling, hoist the limbo stick shoulder-length, waiting for the honeymooners to queue before them. Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock” plays on the bluetooth speaker as Happy repeats the banal rules to the guests again and again, encouraging them to form a line. Just form a line. They are illuminated by the curve of tiki torches thrust into the sand, which is still wet from high tide.
One guest—Brian, if his penchant for self-reference in the third-person is a valid indication—approaches his new wife from behind, patting the backside of her smocked tankini. “Come on, pretty mama,” he actually says. “Just foam a lion.” He is obviously mocking Dion’s Bahamian Creole, though it sounds more like Jamaican patois.
Brian reaches into his trunk pockets to find a handful of fritters. He palms them like the fried testicles they are before popping them into his gob. “Mmm. Come on now. How low can you go, mama?” Brian has called his wife ‘mama’—in the fashion of The Beach Boys’ “Kokomo”—so many times in the past hour that the other honeymooners have started snickering at the Freudian term of endearment. Like walking into a room that play previews for next week’s episode of [any TLC show], it is impossible to look away from the spectacle of Brian and Jessica.
Jessica—not nimble, nor quick—shimmies toward Happy and Tre. “I guess we’re the only ones who want to play, boys,” she says to the party corps, wrapping her fingers around the limbo stick. She overdoes it, the flirtation, and looks to Brian to see if she’s provoked his world-famous jealousy. When Happy ripples his pectoral muscles, Jessica stares down the center of him, fixating on the pendulant keloid scar puffing like bubble gum on his chest.
Most couples, worn out from the day’s pampering—the resort’s unholy regimen of breakfast buffeting, Swedish massaging, bikini waxing, mani/pedicuring, oatmeal exfoliating, triple-digit Jacuzzi-ing, elkhorn-coral snorkeling, lunch buffeting, sunglass shopping, lotion lathering, recumbent sunbathing (clothing mercilessly optional), water scootering, 36-hole golfing, beer koozying, dinner buffeting, blackjack strategizing, ATM thumping, and rum-flight sampling with the occasional sojourn back to the bungalow for clumsy honeymoon fucking—are keen to just stand on the sidelines, bellicose and varicose, obnoxiously comparing photos from the day, and waxing braggadocious about their humdrum lives on pause back home.
But not Brian and Jessica. They are getting their ever-loving-cent’s worth. And aren’t we all Brian and Jessica—summoned to the reef, strangers to paradise, whispering to ourselves “we deserve this” “we earned this” “we deserve this” “we earned this” at each and every dose of leisure.
Watch as they “limbo lowa now, limbo lowa now, limbo lowa now.” Long after they collapse onto their asses, their cocktail wrists unhinging drinks into the sand—“Ew, it looks like your period,” Brian actually says—the corps keeps the party going: bugling the horn, striking the cowbell, chirping the whistle, buzzing the conch. There are stick holders and stilt dancers and acrobatic limbo ringers vying for Guinness World Book’s attention. Scanning the resort, it’s plain to see that all this excitement is just so unexciting. Dozens of people squat on their balconies, diving into their phones’ blue light, nose first. Some stare absently at the ultra-bright LED fountain. One man gives himself a foot massage and says “now, that’s the stuff” to no one in particular. If you’ve ever heard the lyrics to the original “Limbo Rock,” you can never unhear it: “What a monotonous melody!” they sing. “What a monotonous melody!”
*
The Beach Boys could have gotten away with it, lending their bad song to the soundtrack of a bad movie with just a few fans holding their noses. Instead, sensing this would be their last go at a No. 1 hit (and their first in decades), they let it all ride on “Kokomo.” For that year, they became “Kokomo.” In the music video, which features silent clips from Cocktail, one can see just how bad of an actor Cruise really is. It’s like the director gave him a note to “just relax, act casual, be cool,” and Cruise, in turn, played it like he had a balance disorder, like gravity just has a stronger pull on him than everyone else on set. During the montage in which Flanagan and Jordan are day-drinking, horseback riding, and beach bumming, Jordan seems more like a caretaker to someone with palsy than she does the film’s romantic interest.
But enough about Cocktail. The music video is otherwise the scene of a fake beach concert filmed at Disney’s Grand Floridian. Filmed weeks before the resort and spa opened, The Beach Boys were the hotel’s first guests—them, and the UNLV cheerleaders who were shipped in to twinkle and titillate in the front row of the video. The cheerleaders wear bangs and semi-perms, thin bandeau tops and high-leg string bikinis. In addition to swaying, they also run through post-production mist, a few long strides in the wake, enough to get the breasts to jounce in sync with Mike Love’s voice: “Port-au-Prince, I want to catch a glimpse.” At the three-minute mark, they maneuver their hands in generic hula kahiko; one imagines the director offered a thirty-second demonstration sprung solely from his own imagination.
If anyone is “perfecting their chemistry” in this music video, it’s not Flanagan and Jordan, but rather, Mike Love and John Stamos. Oh, you didn’t know? Uncle Jesse has been touring on-and-off as a Beach Boys drummer for decades. And not just drums: in the case of this video, it’s drums, conga, and steelpan. Every time he pantomimes a goofy-looking drum fill, the camera cuts to Love eye-fucking Stamos. The flirtatiousness is a feature of their live shows too.
If the link between Stamos and The Beach Boys sounds familiar, it’s probably because his relationship with the band was the basis for their repeat cameos on the popular sitcom, Full House. If Al Jardine had shown up on the doorstep just a few times more, he might have replaced Kimmy Gibbler as the Tanners’ new persona non grata. A Rolling Stone article puts it like this:
the most vexing questions [about Full House] revolve around The Beach Boys. They often materialize almost out of thin air to help the Tanner family get out of a jam, whether Jesse needs permission to record their material, their telethon needs an act or D.J. wins a radio contest to see them live and the entire band comes to pick them up and personally escort them to the show. That was the plot of “Beach Boy Bingo,” a second season episode that aired on November 11th, 1988.
1988 was a yearlong last gasp for The Beach Boys.
Is “Kokomo” bad? I’ll do you one better. Not only is the song bad—even The Beach Boys seem on the verge of admitting to that—it’s vile.
*
The Kokomo of “Kokomo” is pure synecdoche. It’s kind of like when my mother tells me her friend has recently been to the Caribbean, by which she means her friend was shuttled from Lynden Pindling International Airport directly to the resort where she baked herself in the sun for a week as she took and posted photographs suggestive of the Bahamas. I scroll through her vacation on Instagram, recognizing the ways in which she tries to pass landscaping off as ecology, the aquatic petting zoo as wildlife encounter. Her hotel offers cultural experiences that are carefully apolitical (e.g., fire breathing). And the “locals” (her word) she poses with all wear resort nametags. It’s the most profound form of xenophobia—getting so close to the real thing, but not having the fortitude to dip toes in waters beyond the resort’s private beach. Where does one get the permission to disengage upon arrival? For starters, it’s all there in the brochures. Your private island getaway/adventure/escape awaits. They might as well drape a jumbo Privacy Please sign around the neck like a lei. There’s a marked difference between the tourist who would “forfeit” their vacation to become a cultural ambassador and the one who fully embodies the solipsism of “Kokomo.”
What’s less clear: where else should I go at the end of the day, if not to the cocktail lounge for a negroni and glimpse of the live band?
Rather than describe an island, Kokomo’s lyrics seem to describe the all-inclusive hotel concept in the Caribbean. In fact, after learning the hit song inspired thousands to call the Key West Chamber of Commerce (“Where is Kokomo please?”), Sandals Resorts International opened up their own Kokomo, a private island in Montego Bay. (This real-life emplacing of Kokomo would bring the total number of Jamaican references to three in the song.)
Cultural critic Susan Harewood has pointed out that all-inclusive hotels first emerged in Jamaica “as a way to shield tourists—and for tourists to shield themselves—from any sensory awareness of the sounds, tastes, smells, or feel of political and economic upheaval in a post-independence Caribbean state.” It is an effort to delink “as much as possible from the island nation in which it [is] located.” She argues that this is how silence became a trope of Caribbean tourism. By designing all-inclusive hotel spaces with this critical silence in mind—from sound-proofing rooms to ambient soundtracks in the spas to the far-flung cabanas on private beaches where tourists recline on divans surrounded by tiki torches, within earshot of waves and gulls and whatever wind catches the curve of the ear—resort managers are complicit in the erasure of local voice.
The book Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism reveals the audible history of labor. In his prologue, ethnomusicologist Steven Feld writes, “it is impossible to separate the history of tourism from the history of slavery and colonization, the history of the gaze, the history of reproduction of power relations of tourists and touristed.” For example, the Pompey Museum of Slavery and Emancipation, site of an historic slave auction, gets 4.5 stars on TripAdvisor. We all circle poster boards with grim facts about the Middle Passage, about human cargo “packed below [on slave ships] … with scarcely space to die in.” We take it all in, clockwise or counterclockwise, standing briefly or prolonged before the iron tandem collars. We walk freely in a space others could not. Moments later, a British man logs into WiFi at a pub down the street and gripes on TripAdvisor that the museum “left no endearing emotion what so ever.” He craved “powerful imagery and perhaps more paraphernalia.” He gives it two stars. I feel surrounded by him in the cocktail lounge on that last night as he and dozens of ruthless customers like him sing: “Aruba, Jamaica: Ooh, I wanna take ya.”
Because of the strict adherence to the amphibrachs, the subsequent ‘to’ gets elided. When it comes to tense singalongs, there’s a world of difference between “I want to take you to…” and “I want to take you.” Just imagine colonizing hordes—Spanish, Dutch, and British descent—singing these lyrics: ˘Aˊru˘ba ˘Jaˊmai˘ca ˘OohˊI˘wan ˘naˊtake˘ya. It’s a catchier version of Columbus’s journal entry when he first arrived in the Bahamas (and not India) in October 1492, writing of the indigenous Lucayan: “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
There must be fifty of us in the lounge tonight. In a region whose GDP is sustained by tourism, full-time musicians must be deployed in all-inclusive hotels, forced into the contradictory space where their voices are unwelcome, but also “for hire.”
At the same time, Feld notes that one of the essays in Sounds of Vacation deconstructs “dismissive commonplaces about tourism and tourists as an inauthentic or spurious subject, including assumptions about tourist music as ‘bad’ music, bad in both musical form and content, and bad for local integrity.” In essence, the fact that “cosmopolitan set lists” came to replace 1970s calypso is not ipso facto insult or injury, but more than likely, a symptom of globalization. Perhaps the contemporary Afro-Bahamian lounge singer grew up listening to The Beach Boys, not Lord Kitchener; Abba, not Calypso Rose; and god forbid, Jason Mraz, not Harry Belafonte. There was a wishful period when calypsonians were confident American musicians would gravitate toward their style, and not the other way around. In Wilmoth Houdini’s “Bobby Sox Idol,” for example, he sings an open invitation to Ol’ Blue Eyes: “Ah Frankie Sinatra / Ah Frank Sinatra / Frankie me boy you don’t know / You have a perfect voice to sing Calypso.” Houdini could have never predicted that this writer would first encounter his voice as a sample on a track by Australian electronic group, The Avalanches.
While “Kokomo” may be bad in form and content, it is definitely bad for local integrity in Aruba, Jamaica, Bermuda, Bahama, Key Largo, Montego Bay, the Caribbean at large. Its badness is due to its central premise: a distortion through doudouisme. Créolité writer Ernest Pépin’s analysis of doudouist literature could apply equally to the lyrics of the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo”:
doudouisme inscribes the Caribbean in a sort of ideological vacuum, deporting it to an Eden located ‘elsewhere’ and defaced by all the clichés that the colonial gaze has come to expect… Blue seas, golden sands, humming birds, luxuriant vegetation, and the physical grace of the Creole doudou are the stock elements of this anesthetic divergence, guaranteed to inspire a cheap wonder based on the illusion of an innocent paradise. Far from being in any way natural, this is a crudely staged sham, its very excess annihilating nature and preventing all possibility of meaning, so that there remains only a hollow, exotic stage-set of fantasy islands caressed by a vanilla-scented breeze. Human beings are airbrushed from this landscape which is thus utterly untouched by social or historical reality.
Before the lounge band is finished for the night, Jermaine dedicates the last song to me. “For our friend, on the house,” he says, glancing at his vase, which at this hour, is stuffed full of crumpled bucks.
“How about another Beach Boys song?” he asks.
I shrug. Still preferential to punk, I’d rather hear something like “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.”
“Here’s a song not many people know is from Bahamas.”
A few synthesized notes in, and I recognize it as “Sloop John B.”
Before The Beach Boys ever laid hands on those notes, before The Kingston Trio plucked it on the banjo, before Carl Sandburg claimed it for his American Songbag, “Sloop John B” was a Bahamian folk song whose haunting lyrics are being sung at me now, and directed at me forever after: “Let me go home / I want to go home / why don’t you let me go home?” Soon enough, Jermaine unstraps the guitar from his shoulder, and does just that: leaves by the resort’s service entrance, taking the local bus to his home over the hill where all-inclusive might even apply to him.
Lawrence Lenhart studied writing at the University of Pittsburgh and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage (Outpost19), Of No Ground: Small Island/Big Ocean Contingencies (West Virginia University Press), and a book-length essay about the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret to the Colorado Plateau. His prose appears in Creative Nonfiction, Conjunctions, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Passages North, and Prairie Schooner. He is the Associate Chair of the English Department at Northern Arizona University where he teaches fiction, nonfiction, and climate science narratives. Lenhart is reviews editor for DIAGRAM and founding editor of Carbon Copy.
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.”
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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.