New Kids on the Block Must be Stopped

According to the investigative journalists over at Yahoo Headlines, the groundbreaking boy band New Kids on the Block will be re-uniting for a world tour. This means that somewhere out there, five special guys are getting shot up with Botox and fitted for new sequin vests, while hundreds of thousands of women in their 30s and 40s will soon be Hanging Tough and abandoning their children for the night so that they can rekindle the magic of decades past.

I was thirteen when the New Kids phenomena first hit. The girls in my eighth grade class talked about them incessantly, and possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of each member’s personal information that extended from their favorite food to the color of their underwear. For those unaware of the phenomena, here is a breakdown of the group's members:

Jonathan Knight-The ring leader who ensures that everyone is focused on the gig at hand by shouting catchy phrases like “yeah” and “come on.”
Jordan Knight-The bland older brother kept around for supervision and in case anyone needs to serve jail time.
Danny Wood-The pseudo-ethnic complete with fake tan and gold chain. Often mistaken for limo driver/cook/housekeeping.
Donnie Wahlberg-The guy with premature facial hair who looks like he’s got a pot of meth and a fourteen year old backstage.
Joey McIntyre-The androgynous young heart throb. Took longer than a member of the girl’s Chinese gymnastics team to reach puberty.

The success of these five kids spawned not only lucrative albums and concerts, but dolls, lunch boxes, t-shirts, and anything else you could imagine affixing their image too and selling at a 2000% mark up. One girl actually trampled me, not out of malice, but because I was standing between her and her hot pink New Kids thermos that she had to show to her friends so that they could come in with one the next day. The fact that the thermos was empty, or that I was on the ground suffering from internal injuries, was irrelevant. More important than the merchandise, New Kids would create the blueprint for future acts like NSync, 98 Degrees, and Backstreet Boys, who carried the boy band mantle into the new millennium.

Looking back, my only regret is that no one stopped New Kids the first time around. I was merely a child, but where was everyone else? Where were the listeners of good music to combat the possessed pre-teen hordes? Where were the parents to tell their children that supporting certain musical acts was unacceptable and would result in grounding? Where were the Terminators? If the future could send them to fight over scruffy resistance leader John Connor, you would think that someone in 2050 would care enough to send them to stop New Kids and save the future from generations of shitty rip off acts.

But none of this happened. New Kids thrived, and if the reports are true, they’ll be back shortly. Although it seems as though it’s too late to put the breaks on NKOTB, perhaps their inherent suckiness can somehow be counter-balanced in the musical cosmos by the reunion of an amazing group. As far as I’m concerned, there is only band up to this challenge: Guns N’ Roses.


The original Guns N’ Roses, the one with Slash instead of that guy wearing a KFC bucket, is the only antidote to the bubble gum scented, streamlined pop of New Kids. In case you’ve somehow forgotten, absorb an eye full of the pic above, and you'll be reminded how every song on Appetite for Destruction reeked of booze, cigarettes, and cheap perfume. Mix in thrashing guitars and Axle Rose’s catchy, misogynistic lyrics, and you have arguably the greatest album of all-time.

I know there are challenges to a G&R reunion; particularly that everybody in the band hates Axle, and the original drummer, Steven Adler, had a drug induced stroke that left one side of his body paralyzed. However, money, time, and more money are known to heal major rifts among bandmates, and as for Steven, if Def Leopard can play with a one armed drummer, then I’m sure Guns could rig something that would work for Steve (Maybe saw a drum set in half, let him play with his good side, and then crazy glue a couple tambourines to his bad side).

Whatever the answers, a plan for G&R is needed, and quickly, because a New Kids on the Block reunion show may be coming to your town sooner than you think. Without at least the promise of a G&R concert in the near future, there will be nothing to sustain you if you happen to find yourself standing between a much older, much bigger, yet no less passionate New Kids fan and her thermos, a position just as dangerous today as it was in 1988.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/eonline/20080128/en_music_eo/3740734d8c3a_43e3_9959_6a0ee4d6832a

[New Kids on the Block] [Slash] [Guns N' Roses] [Axle Rose] [Backstreet Boys] [Def Leopard]