Dissident in the crowd

All right, I admit it: I listened to New Kids on the Block when they came out. I had the tapes, I had a poster or two, and I went to one of their concerts. In fact, a NKOTB concert was the first concert I ever attended. All I remember about it is one of the members wearing a harness and "flying" around the stage while singing a vaguely-Caribbean song, but hey, I was there.

I liked a few of their songs, but I wasn't on the level of the girls who scribbled "I love Joey" all over their Keds shoes. I didn't see the appeal of Joey, really... He was too young, and he had braces. If you're gonna lust after a boy band member, pick an older, hotter one. It IS fantasy, after all. When forced to pick a favorite group member, I picked John. He seemed the most subtle. And he also didn't have a rat-tail thing going on with his hair. Eeww.

Despite my lukewarm support for the group, the song "Hangin' Tough" was one song I could never get into. I just didn't get it, and I didn't like it. It seemed like the group was trying too hard to start a dance craze, when the "dance" amounted simply to waving one arm over one's head, as if signalling for help after a shipwreck. To further add to the confusion, the band did a DIFFERENT dance during the line about doing the "New Kids Dance" (and by "dance," I again mean weird arm gesturing), so which was the dance we were supposed to do? Even to my underdeveloped teenybopper tastes, this song sounded contrived.

This song, of course, was one of their bigger hits, so avoiding it was difficult. I had to feign enthusiasm on more than one occasion. The girls at science camp that summer, especially, were die-hard NKOTB fans, and I pretended to be one of them for the sake of my social life (yeah, yeah, I went to science camp. Bite me.). When the New Kids craze eventually waned, as all crazes do, I was pretty relieved. And already moving on to "cool" stuff, like R.E.M. And Guns & Roses. And Def Leppard. Don't judge me.