Old Guys and First Loves

New Kids on The Block is making a comeback, whether you like it or not.
by Andi Agnew
October 29, 2008

“Just thought I’d call and see if you wanted to get tickets to see your favorite band; they’re playing in New Orleans in October!” My best friend told me recently. She is overly enthusiastic, and I knew that she was also joking.


Had she called me 19 years ago with the same bit of news, she would have been right on. New Kids on the Block were most definitely my favorite band in 1989, when they were hot on the scene and I was 12 years old. Then again, there was no way in h-e-double-hockey-sticks that my parents would have let me go to New Orleans for a concert.

Next to Milli Vanilli and future drunken American Idol judge Paula Abdul—which really should tell you a lot about the music scene in the late 1980s—NKOTB was it. There wasn’t a seventh-grade girl alive who did not have her favorite New Kid picked out, and she sported his picture on a gigantic button to show her undying devotion.

My favorite Kid was Jordan Knight, with his puppy-dog brown eyes and inexplicable rat-tail braid. I scoured the pages of Tiger Beat, Teen Beat and Bop to find posters of Jordan and the other guys to put on my bedroom walls. He was 17, and I was 12, but I just knew that if we were ever to meet, it would be love at first sight. In some ways I think my New Kid worship was just practice for how I would handle dating real boys later on.

Believe it or not, Jackson was no more a music mecca in 1989 than it is today. For our beloved boy band to even bother to find Jackson on a map, thousands of teenage girls flocked to the mall to sign a petition to bring NKOTB to Jackson. My parents hauled my sister and me to add our signatures, and soon the announcement was made that the New Kids would be coming to Jackson.

My parents bought five or six tickets to the show (enough for them to accompany my sister, me and a couple of our friends) and we waited. And waited. NKOTB were not coming for another eight months.

When you are 12, eight months is a lifetime. Not only is it a lifetime to wait, it is also enough time to change your mind about hairstyles, crushes and even music. By the time August finally arrived and the show was upon us, I had begun eighth grade, was way too mature for NKOTB, and told my parents I really didn’t want to go to the show after all.

“You’re going, and you’ll like it,” my dad told me.

So we went, and we really did like it. My friends and I were jumping up and down, squealing with joy as we squinted to see the tiny specks that were our seventh-grade crushes. The flames were rekindled; we all got T-shirts and wore them to school the next week. Then, a week or so later, it was on to Boyz II Men, that “other” Wahlberg boy and real live boys at school.

The teenage girl is a fickle soul.

Because my personal experience as a fan of the New Kids was so short-lived, it is a bit hard to fathom that a reunion of the group would be very successful. But with a quick visit to the blog on the group’s Web site, nkotb.com/blog, I found that there are some die-hard fans out there. Many tout the fact that NKOTB was their first concert, and some lament the fact that it wasn’t their first concert. Well, the concert experience I described above was my first, but I admit I wish it had been someone else—U2, REM and Madonna were all touring back then, too.

I’m not sure how relevant NKOTB’s music is 19 years later. I don’t think the bubblegum pop of the late ’80s can stand up to the bubblegum pop of today. And the NKOTB’s new songs are, frankly, a bit creepy. Hearing nearly 40-year old men singing, “I’ll be your boyfriend” just seems a bit silly. We wanted them to be our boyfriends when we were 12. Now some of us are looking for second husbands.

The boy band was really nothing new even when NKOTB was truly “new” and made up of “kids.” Before them were The Monkees, and before The Monkees were The Beatles and The Beach Boys. Boy bands are a rite of passage for young girls, and for the most part, the music should stay in the hallowed halls of teendom.