NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK – "Hangin' Tough"

I’m afraid to say that I bought this when it came out (it had a different cover, this one – http://www.mattscdsingles.com/acatalog/15724.jpg ) but I was 10, and my taste would improve very soon. It’s a lot more ludicrous than I remember, the worst part being the dance in the video. What exactly are they doing? It still gets a ‘4’ from me, though, as I love that weird electro noise that comes in every few bars of the verses.

This is so hopeless it’s genuinely embarrassing to listen to. 2 for comedy value.

Both East 17 and Five would have beaten them to a pulp.

Once again goes on far too long but hardly dismal. NKOTB seem rather naively cute in hindsight – rather silly and definitely a thing of the past from a 2010 viewpoint.

It’s such a tinny track.

While in the Sixth Form a mate and I used to DJ once a week for the first years at our school’s youth club. We played this once and my mate dropped all the bass out, and it sounded no different.

If might have been the same week we played Happy Hour by the Housemartins and an 11-year-old girl ran up to the DJ booth and screamed “turn this sixties shit off” at us.

Ah, memories.

Good review Tom but there’s surely an inauthentic rap number 1 that’s worse than this later in the year.

# 7 I am surprised the record lasted that long; I’d have thought it would have been repeatedly broken throughout the 90s. That’s a real indictment of this shite.

I think there are a couple of #1s from early 1992 which may have sold fewer than this did, if not to get there than certainly later during their reign.

How very strange, just this lunchtime I heard “Step By Step” being played over the speakers in a City of London Sushi Bar; quite probably the first time I have heard that track “in public” for the best part of 20 years.

I think it was quite clear that there was a very big progression – both in terms of musical production – and in the confidence of the singers/”performers” themselves -between the second NKOTB album (the one that “Hangin’ Tough” is on) and the third album (the one that “Step By Step” and “Tonight” – which is also great fun, in a moderately are-they-poking-fun-at-themselves kind of mildly preposterous way). “Step by Step” kicks ass, in a showmanslike and self-conscious way, for sure (Where each Kid chants a line in turn “Step one! We can have lots of fun”….even if the “Step three!” is eardrum-breaking in its highpitchedness. Is all this an allusion to self-introductions of each of the cast that we hear on The Floaters’ “Float On”. Almost possibly it is. . “Tonight” too self-consciously apes I think both the Beach Boys and the Beatles, and also tries (I hope with more than hint of irony) to present the Kids as old-timers who’ve experienced so much “we told you you had the right stuff, showed you we were hanging tough”, and now they’ve even met some girls (as well as people)…

Both those tracks are immeasurably more fun to listen to, and consequently more fun to talk about, than this one, however.
(Oh, and on the sleeves: the one at the top is IIRC from the original 1989 release; the one linked to by Weej in post 2 is this reissue).
“Hangin’ Tough” is dire. Dire dire dire dire dire dire dire. To say the least. You Got It at least at some potentially interesting backing music, and interesting melodious progression, even if it didn’t follow through and quickly wore itself out.

“Hangin’ Tough”, however, doesn’t even get off the ground (and like “you Got It”, but unlike the two later 1990 tracks I mentioned above), it’s another one that sounds (in this case only marginally) better without the video accompaniment. The track (I am reluctant to categorise it as a song) is rank jock posturing; nice, gentle (but muscular through physically and socially healthy involvement in sports) middle-class (as we would say in England) suburban lads trying to pretend they are hard. But they aren’t they are wholesome. Too wholesome. “Cross our paths and you’re gonna get stopped”. Yeah, right. And that oooooooooohhhhh chanting thing. Should be against the law.

They remind me of the gaggles of youth who one sometimes encounters on late night trains especially on a Friday or Saturday night between Leigh-on-Sea and Chalkwell (the real “golden mile” of Southend) (I don’t think this quite translates to London), basically respectable kids who know that the ticket barriers will be open and no ticket inspectors will be in sight. They hang about on the platform in a (notably well-attired) gaggle, perhaps with a can of lager in hand each, get on the train, be self-consciciously noisy and drawing attention to themselves in a look-how-young-and-virile I am (and how fortunate I am to be far from anywhere when anyone genuinely “tough” lives) fashion, before all trooping off at the next station to go and drink beer in someone’s house or park, or possibly a bar.

We’re rough? No, rather, you’re shit. Sorry, no other way to say it. Now clear off and don’t cross my path again.

A definite contender for worst number 1 of the year, already. One-out-of-ten. Do not pass go. A great pity that their two number 1s were among their weakest singles.

Six million times better than “The Right Stuff,” but still not very good. “We’re rough!” always puts me in the mind of a theme song for a late ’80s Saturday morning cartoon about rapping dogs.

Like Lonepilgrim above, I’ve no memory of this, and listening now the musical lifts from We will Rock You and (Joan Jett’s version of) I love Rock&Roll are so glaring and the upshot so inferior to the sources that ‘Why bother?’ is almost the only real response I have to this track.

The ‘tough boy band’ schtick doesn’t work at all – this feels like a step towards Bros for the NKOTB compared to YGI(TRS) and that’s the *wrong* direction!

Tom’s not wrong about rap splintering at this time. I heard Eric B and Rakim’s great Let the rhythm hit ’em on the radio in March 1990 (I think), bought it and dug it, but by the time the album came out in June it was already supposed to be a form of Rap that was completely over/dated etc.. Ker-razy.

And so did the nineties begin with a group of questionably groomed, well behaved lads who pretended to be hard. “Hangin’ Tough” is both slower and lower than I remember it but its risibility remains intact. At least the Osmonds made a fair effort of baring their teeth on “Crazy Horses,” but “Hangin’ Tough” is a murky bouillabase indeed, sounding like “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll” at 16 rpm combined with “You’re The One For Me” played backwards. They were beastly boys indeed with their knees-knocking-a-trembly threat of “Don’t cross our path ‘cuz yer gonna get stopped.” Fear the hydraheaded Wahlberg monster! They might stick their tongues out! Still there is some useful post-Descartian theory at work here: “Don’t worry ’bout nuthin’ ‘cuz it won’t take long.” I’d like to see Sting do a concept album about that (note: when I say “I’d like to see Sting do a concept album about delete where applicable” I do not actually mean “I’d like to see Sting do a concept album” although deleting Sting where applicable sounds a reasonable and fruitful pursuit). “We’re RRRRRROUGH!” the Not That New Kids conclude – not so much the Osmonds of their day, more the Hair Bear Bunch. Can anyone remember what exactly constituted “the New Kids’ dance” apart from alternately jumping and slouching around with hands in pockets like peas reluctant to be mushed?

#19: cogent explanation please or my office 9 am tomorrow sharp.

No, the Beastie bit.

Oh dear – Its that awful skwalling guitar solo that I really can’t stand – aiming for another slice of rockin’ credibility on top of their dubious street credentials. Its more memorable than ‘The Right Stuff’, but not in a good way.

Everyone hated this at sixth form, of course.

“deleting Sting where applicable sounds a reasonable and fruitful pursuit”

– Rosie, your blood pressure tablets are in the cabinet.

‘bi-product’ = a product with two features (like bi-plane)?
A very long time ago I worked at a KFC and had to wear a stupid paper hat as part of my uniform. On the hat’s inside surface were printed two patent-pending notices. This bothered me at the time because this nasty strip of paper hat seemed to me to barely have two features (barely to be a bi-product…. haw haw) let alone to have two things about it that were conceivably patent-worthy.

#14: ‘Step By Step’ really is a marvellous record – my favourite bit is the aural-illusion slow down “ma-tter [beat] of ti-i-i-me”. I had to check it didn’t hit #1 itself and it didn’t – it fell just short – but it deserved to. They were certainly packing ’em in in 1990 (six more top ten hits to follow!) but never reached the top again.

re #15 check the video for “Tonight”, and the Kid wearing a hash-leaf t-shirt that is pixellated out

isn’t it just an AdiDAS logo? this was the first time i’d seen a pixelled out logo in a music vid.

On the one hand, the Beasties inspired kids like me to grow intelligent beards and make terrific jazz-hip-hop mixtapes, on the other they led to my mate snapping the badge off a Mercedes. Yes, a Mercedes.

NKOTB, well, they firmed up a template that produced some decent pop even if they never quite had the chops themselves. They just seemed so squaaaare. ‘Hangin’ Tough’ is of course rank, a showcase for “street” “smart” Donnie Wahlberg to look all unconvincing. I was disappointed in the British public – they should have been obsessed with Happy Mondays or The House Of Love. Or, erm, My Jealous God.

There’s a sort of law-of-averages effect at work with JT: if you’re going to ask people in boy bands to approximate street culture, and if hip-hop and R’n’B are increasingly the bedrock of that street culture, then the chances of getting people in your boy bands who can actually do it well begin to increase, even if that was no way your intention going in.

Of course, once this actually happens, it has massive implications for streetwise-ness in teen pop. This is a story we’ll get to tell, though.

Probably not; #108 is a bit late this week due to a combination of lousy weather on Tuesday, resultant colds and um Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals but I’m typing it up tonight.

Hello all

I am new to Popular and at present in 1986 trying to catch up

As Donnie’s brother gave me my, hopefully ironic, nickname I thought this would be an ideal opportunity to say hello and to say how much I am enjoying your comments

Pretty average fare from NKOTB so a 3 from me as well but my comment would be that for me this record highlights an issue about the 90’s in general.

My memory was that the New Kids were rightfully pilloried in the UK for their supposedly tough image at this time not entirely representing what they were.

My question would be as Record companies became ever more sophisticated in creating images and personas to sell more product, as a reaction to this did we as an audience develop a greater cynicism in the nineties and demand that the acts were somehow more authentic?

In the Eighties I always felt that authenticity mattered less but we will soon see Seattle bands dismissed for being opportunistic and not Grungy enough, Sylvie Young Theatre pupils criticised for acting at Hangin’ Tough and not being actually tough and a Colchester band mocked for being Mockney.

I appreciate that some of this will be coming up (Is this what you mean by Bunnyable?)and we may not be able to discuss it.

The next record featured was No1 on my 18th birthday so it may just have been I started to become more cynical about the music industry but interested what other think in general?

@41 Maybe the first massive, for-obvious-commercial gain split between authenticity and commerciality came in the 1930s, when the folklorist Alan Lomax befriended and began promoting Leadbelly. Leadbelly was former convict, so Lomax ordered him – against the singer’s will – to wear prison overalls on stage, knowing that a white audience would not want to see a black man dressed in a clean and pressed suit, that the way to reach the largest audience possible was to present a noble savage. American folk musics, especially, have tended to be presented in massively contrived ways, despite their apparent authenticity being their main selling point. Faking It, by Yuval Taylor and Guy Barker (pub Faber) details this very well.

Probably the first music producer was Pope Gregory I at the tail end of the sixth century when he tidied up all those awkward free-form chants which were being used or (more commonly) improvised throughout different strands of Catholic churches in Europe and set them to a standard musical procedural for common use (i.e. the Gregorian chant). There may be earlier Hebrew and/or Byzantine precedents but this is most likely the first occasion when the form of music is imposed from outside circles of musicians.

it took me a while to work out who the second major player was – at first all i could think of was poor rob from milli vanilli!

agree that ‘faking it’ is a brilliant book. i think maybe there’s too slightly different splits. there’s the traditional authentic vs commercial (i.e. doing what you do for the love of it and if anyone else likes it its a bonus vs compromising with the man to make it) this was kurts problem (among others) and i think i’d agree that this peaked as something people really cared about with grunge and has since declined –on a localised level maybe a lot to do with britpop deliberately stepping over that line, for better and worse, but probably also a lots to do with a more general societal acceptance that in a consumer capitalist world there’s not really any way to avoid being compromised.

maybe because of this, the idea of ‘real’ vs ‘fake’ on a personal level seems a lot more important now both for pop and for young people generally (judging by what i see on big brother). so you get fans of the x-factor (none more beyond the pale according to the first test) hating on Katie because she’s somehow failed the second test by presenting herself on the show in a way that doesn’t quite tally with the biographical details of her life. (i thought she was great on Saturday, incidentally).

having read ‘bring the noise’ over the weekend, with its ‘white music does this, black music does that’ running theme, i’m duty bound to say that both these things have probably always worked slightly differently in mainly black and mainly white music cultures.

Not really; it was a common reaction – Haley came here in 1957 to a hero’s welcome but once the audiences saw him close up they realised that he didn’t quite fit the bill. Note the abrupt drying up of Haley UK hits from early ’57, which was a direct consequence of this.

The current problem – namely, the international lingua franca of accepted modes of Soul, Passion and Honesty and the main reason why you can’t stand The X-Factor – stems from early eighties guilt about New Pop.

Second major player = elliot smith?

At any rate, I don’t believe smith was eaten up by stardom/authenticity/faking it kind o’ worries, he was just a tragically lonely and insecure guy (this is from reading about him and from knowing people in Portland who knew him a little).