One person’s view: “’Hangin’ Tough’ is one of the great embarrassments of popular music: a song so preposterously ill-conceived and performed that it really is a marvel. It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so annoying.” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 1.61 / 5.00, the second-worst #1 hit of the 1980s behind another song by New Kids on the Block
I thought my favorite radio station was trolling me. That was the only explanation for the new song they were playing, which featured a boy whimpering “Please don’t go girl!” in a preposterously high voice. “You would ruin my whole world,” the child added, as if anyone should be expected to give a shit about the emotions of such a whiney brat. I checked the calendar to see if it was April 1. Nope. A feeling of dread washed over me. What if this wasn’t a prank? What if this was like that other absurdly pathetic song the station had played a couple of winters ago, in which some pitiable buffoon said he would subtract 20 years from his life for a woman? That earlier record – Billy Vera & the Beaters’ “At This Moment” – was hilarious at first, but no one was laughing when it went to #1. And I was right to be worried about “Please Don’t Go Girl”, because it proved to be the first stage of a crisis that would last for more than two years.
The name of that crisis was, of course, New Kids on the Block. This group would ultimately have three chart-topping singles, which is approximately five more than they deserved. Their first, “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever)” is the proud owner of a 1.49 score on Rate Your Music – the lowest of any #1 Hot 100 hit of the 1980s. While “Hangin’ Tough” does slightly better by RYM’s measure, critics have savaged it as one of the most poorly performed and produced hit songs of its decade. It has certainly earned the honor of representing NKOTB on the Bad #1 Hits blog.
With their first few singles, the New Kids cultivated an image as a safe and non-threatening act. Grandma could buy their album for a 9-year-old with no worries that it might contain words like “reefer” or “poop”. The group seemed like the type of teens who spent their free time cleaning up graffiti and litter without even being told to do so by a court. But then they decided to destroy that façade with “Hangin’ Tough”, which recast the New Kids as a gang of ruffians who “stomped” anyone who crossed their path. It was a clean break from the past, a calculated effort to prevent the act’s audience from tiring of the New Kids’ wimpiness. The group didn’t want to go down the same path as Anne Murray, who had relied too heavily on gentle love ballads and found herself out of the limelight by 1989. If Murray had recorded just one song threatening to bash the listener over the head with a whiskey bottle, she might have still had a vibrant career.
Many youthful acts have successfully shifted to a more mature image as they aged. Justin Timberlake is probably filming an AARP ad as we speak. But “Hangin’ Tough” was so transparently phony that it set the New Kids’ adolescence back by at least six months and likely forced the younger members into reverse puberty. No matter how rough they claimed to be, these teens were always going to be about as fearsome as a beakless parakeet. Even Peter Cetera’s widely mocked swagger in “Glory of Love” was more convincing than “Hangin’ Tough”. Unsurprisingly, the New Kids reverted to their previous benign persona on their next release and never presented themselves as streetwise again.
The New Kids’ producer, Maurice Starr, was apparently operating with a single-digit budget on “Hangin’ Tough”. He plays all of the instruments himself, including an extended interlude on the album version that sounds like he is testing a used keyboard at a church rummage sale to figure out which keys don’t work. The guitar solo on the radio/video mix is slightly better, but only because it is shorter. Both mixes are punctuated by shrill bursts of a whistle to signify the hoodlum behavior that we are supposed to now associate with the group. Just as the police siren in “Straight Outta Compton” announces that Ice Cube has squeezed the trigger and bodies are being hauled off, the traffic cop whistle in “Hangin’ Tough” indicates that one of the New Kids has carelessly stepped into the street without using a crosswalk.
I try to find something nice to say about each “bad” #1 hit that I feature here, but sometimes I just give up. On to the next entry.
No comments:
Post a Comment