Danny ChaiApparently the New Kids on the Block are getting back together. I can’t say I have fond memories of them. In my recollection, they’re indelibly linked to girls’ first taste of teeny-bopper fanaticism; not a pretty sight.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I hung out with the cool crowd exactly once in my life, the summer of ’89. They had this program targeted for lower income school districts (feeders to schools like Yerba Buena and Andrew Hill) where they taught a year’s worth of math in a summer. It was mostly for remedial students who needed to catch up, but a few nerds in the system like me used it to get ahead.
The only other person I really knew going in was C@rla Ch@varria, since we were in band together, and she was cool, so that’s how I sat with the cool kids on the bus rides that summer. I distinctly remember what the cool girls were into then because it’s so comical now: New Kids and Milli Vanilli. I think that’s the same summer I learned that Z Cavaricci pants were cool.
I also remember what New Kids did to like this girl @pr1l, a classmate of mine in elementary school who was normal enough, but then in junior high, New Kids turned her to the teeny-bopper side. She wrote this comical “review” of a New Kids concert at Great America where she describes the wall of female screaming and the ecstasy of seeing the New Kids in person. What happened to my normal classmate?
My sister and all her friends got into it also. She had this one tape that she would put on repeat all night while she slept. I don’t know how my grandma (who slept in that room) didn’t go insane. Because whenever I had to use the bathroom at night, I’d hear that terrible music coming out of the room through the slightly open door along with faint tufts of Malibu musk. Drove me bananas.
And the music is bad. If you listen to it again now – dang. Terrible music. So I associate New Kids with a time when every girl my age went temporarily insane. Not good memories.