I confess -- I like the New Kids On The Block. Until last summer, though, I didn't know who they were. For some reason that escapes me now, I took three under-the-age-of-ten girls to a Tiffany concert at Great Woods. (For those of you not up on the Nutra-Sweet, steamy pre-pubescent pop music scene, Tiffany is a teenage phenom with just enough good-intentioned verve and wholesomeness to keep jittery parents happy.) What I didn't know until I got there was that Tiffany was the warm-up act for -- you guessed it -- New Kids On The Block (or NKOTB, as they're known).
I liked their music. As they used to say on American Bandstand, "it's got a good beat and you can dance to it." It's a music much like the eight-to-fifteen age group that soaks it up: momentarily effervescent, straddling the grey area between innocence and sensuality (one Kid cultivates the image of a smoky James Dean while another looks like a ducktailed member of the Brady family), and commercialized to the last drop.
NKOTB has, in the past year, acquired something like cult status. They have, for instance, their own 900 area-code fan line with impersonal personalized recorded messages. One concert was canceled because the security forces couldn't guarantee their safety against the press of giddy youngsters in the arena. One mother claimed that her autistic child, seeing the video for "Hanging Tough," began singing and dancing to it. (The problem, it seems, is that this is all she'll say and do.) Door-size posters are marketed right next to iconographic lapel buttons, and, as with the Beatles, kids argue seriously which of the five is the best. (I remember similar long, drawn-out fights about who was cooler, John or Paul.)
I know, the parentalized, rational voice of Tipper Gore might think that all this fan worship and ballistically-driven bass-dominated musical production is Satanism in the offing, but it's really just a whole lot of fun. Sometimes it's a good idea to give in to the enthusiasms of kids and pick up some hints about how to nurture the child in ourselves, that life-filled part of us that loves to indulge the moment and is too often punished by routine and loss of nerve. At the concert there were as many parents as kids, all dancing together and having an unembarrassedly good time, and for a while that night many well- worn, too-experienced adults reacquired the knack of having nine- year old hearts thump in their chests. Every once in a while it's good to hip-hop to the beat and clap your hands over your heads. It'll at least keep the joints from freezing up and make the heart feel good, and, at the best, will break apart the foginess that threatens to cholesterol up the coming years.
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