And so I flag down a taxi and point out my destination on the map. It's a small city further north and inland, called Editiona Nueva, which my driver helpfully informs me is the local language for “New Edition”. Well, thanks for that Einstein! I could have figured that out myself! We travel for some time through deserted roads and past vast plains of sand before we come to a somewhat run-down town, with a village clock that seems for some reason permanently stuck at six-fifteen (whether this is morning or evening I don't know) and a lot of people roam the streets in unfashionable clothes. I'm right back where it started, and it looks like the inhabitants have remained there, in 1982. I check into the nearest hotel that doesn't look too rundown and seedy, and after eating and freshening up I head off to the local library, laptop under my arm, to make my first report.
And so it is, in the city named after the first ever real Boyband, I begin my tale. In 1982 New Edition came second in a talent contest and were “created” as a new version of the Jackson 5 by producer Maurice Starr, and included the now-famous Bobby Brown in their lineup. The original personnel were as follows:-
Bobby Brown
Michael Bivins
Ricky Bell
Ralph Tresvant
Ronnie DeVoe
Signed by Starr and taken to his recording studio to record their first album, 1983's
Candy Girl the boys must have been somewhat nonplussed to receive a cheque for the grand total of $1.87 each after completing their first major concert! This despite the fact that
Candy Girl had yielded them four hit singles, one of which went to number one!
Candy Girl --- New Edition --- 1983 (Streetwise)
Impressionable kids? Certainly sounds like it. Sounds like they were totally ripped off by an unscrupulous manager and record label boss - thank God that doesn't happen anymore!
But the average age of the band members, for want of a better description, in New Edition was fifteen, so I suppose the fame and glory must have gone to their heads, the money a secondary concern. You can be sure ol' Maurice Starr made sure he got his ninety-nine point nine nine percent of their earnings, though!
We'll return to the story of these guys later, and see how they got on, but for now the time has come that we all feared, me most especially: time to knuckle down and actually
listen to the music! Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...
It starts off funky, with vocoder and slap bass, then the almost childlike voice of Ralph Tresvant singing the rather incongruous, given their tender age, “Gimme Your Love”. Perhaps "Gimme Your Lunch Money" might have been a more appropriate song title! Of course, in any given Boyband it's really impossible to say who's singing the lead vocals, as they all seem to take that role, but Wiki says that Tresvant was brought on board as their lead singer, so I guess it's him. There's a female voice in there too - I think: I mean, these guys are so young it could be their not-yet-broken voices I'm hearing, but a girl is credited on the album - said to be one Tina B, and there's a lot of beginner's guide to rapping. All very embarrassing, but it must have struck a chord (not literally) as it sold very well and started a lucrative career for the guys. Well, initially as mentioned it just lined the pockets of Maurice Starr, but he was soon to be jettisoned.
“She Gives Me a Bang” does not after all seem to be about the latest hairdressing styles, but has some nice bright keyboard work, with some pops and whistles from the synth which would become quite synonymous with this sort of music down the years. The melody in places almost reminds me of Robert Palmer's “Some Guys Have All the Luck”, and again the vocals are shared, seems like just between two of them. Maybe. Hard to tell. Seems Starr plays keys, synth, bass, drums, guitars, vocoder …. obviously maintaining a tight control over his protoges. He also produces, engineers and mixes the album, and writes or co-writes all the songs bar one. Control freak much? I suppose at least he could say he earned all but $9.52 from the album's takings.
The first of no doubt many ballads comes with “Is This the End” (which sadly it was not), an odd song to put on your debut album, I would have thought, one of their hit singles, and it's not too bad. The drums are nicely measured, the keys just the right amount of sugary sweet and the guitars add a sort of George Benson flavour to the song. Hey, give me a break! I know virtually zip about Boybands, and have less interest in them! I'm doing my best!
“Pass the Beat” is a real “street”-song, with elements of rap and breakdance, lively keyboards and the ever-present grumbling bass that seems to always accompany songs of this type. It's sung in a type of playground chant, making it just that little bit more annoying than it was at first. Seriously, I'm going to make a real effort to find something to praise or something nice to say about these albums, I just haven't come across anything yet! Well, “Is This the End” wasn't completely terrible, unlike the rest of the album so far...
(Sorry to do this to you, guys, but you knew the dangers when you followed me to Boybandland!)
There surely can't be anything to look forward to about a song called “Popcorn Love”, can there? No, there isn't, and it sounds distressingly like the next track up, their number one hit single “Candy Girl”, which is right up there at the top of my list of songs I would cheerfully erase from history, had I the means. Like, what is the
point of a song like that? You won't be surprised to hear that I skipped right over it, but as I say, “Popcorn Love” is virtually a carbon copy of the hit single. Originality, zero.
Perhaps the only potential bright spot is their cover of the Bo Diddley number “Ooh Baby”, but no, they've removed all the soul and blues from it and made it another vacuous pop song. Well, I guess Starr is to blame for that. Still, at least the germ of a good song remains: can't kill the classics! More tinny keyboard and whistling synth, as well as the never-far-from-the-melody bass on “Should Have Never Told Me”, then we're into (thank the stars!) the penultimate track, “Gotta Have Your Lovin'”, and you wonder where bands like this would be without a vocoder? It's used so often it's almost overused, and it becomes a real pain listening to every bloody line routed through its circuits. Oh well.
The album closes on “Jealous Girl”, which rather surprisingly is only the second ballad on it. Nice piano and some decent guitar work with a sort of waltzy beat which would be revisited by the likes of still-to-be-discovered Boys II Men on their big hit “The End of the Road”. There are definite elements of the Jacksons here too, not a surprise as this band were conceived as a replacement for them.
Well, I still hate Boybands, but this is just the first of three albums from each band I'm going to try to struggle through. Perhaps my opinion will change over the course of these articles, but I wouldn't bet any big money on it!
TRACK LISTING
1. Gimme Your Love
2. She Gives Me a Bang
3. Is This the End
4. Pass the Beat
5. Popcorn Love
6. Candy Girl
7. Ooh Baby
8. Should Never Have Told Me
9. Gotta Have Your Lovin'
10. Jealous Girl
After the debacle of their first concert, New Edition successfully sued Starr and his company and were released from their contract, signing to record giant MCA and releasing their second album, which they simply entitled “New Edition”, no doubt as a sign they were being reborn, leaving behind the highs and mostly lows of the Starr era, and starting over again.
New Edition --- New Edition --- 1984 (MCA)
With a label giant behind their second album, New Edition were promoted as more of a clean-cut, boy-next-door image which would in fact characterise most Boybands for the next quarter of a century, with bands like Boyzone and later Westlife, Nsync, Backstreet Boys and Take That all projecting a wholesome, “safe” image that would appeal as much to teenage girls as to their parents. Boys like this couldn't possibly be a bad influence, could they?
MCA also gave the boys top writers and producers to work on the album, among them Ray Parker Jr., later known for his megahit “Ghostbusters” (who ya gonna call?) and as a result the album was more cohesive, mature and gained a much larger and more diverse following than New Edition had enjoyed up to now. Also, without Starr, the boys finally made some decent money, no doubt welcome after being ripped off for two years by their producer-***-taskmaster!
“Cool it now” opens the album, with a beat and melody that would later surface on Whitney Houston's “I wanna dance with somebody”, and became an instant hit single when released, as did the second track, the Ray Parker Jr-penned “Mr. Telephone man”, recalling the motown hits of the sixties and seventies, with nice vocal harmonies and a lush keyboard sound. Definitely a more mature sound, less of the kids snickering about girls that more or less permeated the first album, and music aimed at an older, and more demanding audience.
Another ballad follows, this standing out as being the first New Edition song written by members of the band. “I'm leaving you again” also has a motown feel to it, and was written by Ricky Bell and Ralph Tresvant. To be completely fair, for a first attempt at songwriting it's not half bad, with that squidgy bass and paced out drums while in the background the synth lays down a pretty sumptuous backing track. Digital piano features heavily on this album, in line with the thinking about eighties ballads, which always seemed to have to have a digital piano melody running through them. “Delicious” is a mid-paced ballad, inoffensive but with plenty of synth and piano. Also features some pretty good acapella vocal harmonies at the end.
In comparison, “My secret (didja get it yet?)” is just intensely annoying --- I really couldn't care what their secret is. Was a single though. No accounting for taste. “Hide and seek” makes me want to hide and never be found, blatantly ripping off the Eagles' lyric
“Sneakin' up behind ya/ Swear I'm gonna find ya” from “One of these nights”. The saving grace of this album, and I would venture to predict, most if not all Boyband albums, are the ballads, which at least are bearable. Even though the digital piano is in overdrive again, “Lost in love” is a nice little song with good harmonies, though it is pretty devoid of ideas and just more or less repeats the same phrasing over and over.
The first songwriting credited to the whole band is nevertheless nothing to write home about, and “Kinda girls we like” fulfils its exceptionally limited potential, with an annoying rap before “Maryann” closes the album with another eminently forgettable track which does at least have a decent line in sax.
TRACKLISTING
1. Cool it now
2. Mr. Telephone man
3. I'm leaving you again
4. Baby love
5. Delicious
6. My secret (didja get it yet?)
7. Hide and seek
8. Lost in love
9. Kinda girls we like
10. Maryann
So that's the second album from New Edition. A little more mature yes, but ultimately I don't see a massive difference between it and the debut. The army of songwriters and producers seem to have failed to have come up with any noteworthy songs really, and after the second track it all kind of descended into more mediocrity for me.
At the end of 1985 Bobby Brown was out of the band, replaced by Johnny Gill, who went on to record three more albums with New Edition, and is in fact still with them. The first he recorded with them will be the last example we'll look at here, 1988's “Heart break”, said to be yet another move in the direction of more mature, polished pop and away from the “bubblegum” music of their previous years. Yeah, well, we'll just see about that...
Heart break --- New Edition --- 1988 (MCA)
Interestingly, it starts with a synthy, almost prog-like intro, with a spoken vocal behind rising cheers and applause, which makes it sound as if the thing is live, and in fact segues into what also sounds like a live song, the actual opener (as the intro --- called, in a flash of original thinking, “Introduction”! --- lasts just over a minute) “That's the way we're livin'”, which comes across a little Prince-y circa “1999” or “Purple rain”, with some surprisingly good guitar parts and for now, no rap. Very eighties dance, kind of reminds me of Five Star, though of course they were a female band. Fairly generic, but not too bad.
“Where it all started” continues the Prince/Janet Jackson style, a slower, funky song with much programmed synth and keyboards, and a lot less guitar than the previous, and things slow down a little for “If it isn't love”, a semi-ballad that gets a little more intense and passionate near the end. The album is peppered with things called “skits”, which are apparently twenty or thirty seconds of “street talk” as the guys discuss their conquests, real or imagined. They're nothing to do with the music, such as it is, so although there are three of them in total I'm going to ignore them.
Next up is “NE Heartbreak”, a dancy, Paula Abdul-inspired number, followed by a short annoying rap then “Crucial”, with more funky bass and stabbing synth --- you know the sort: remember “What have you done for me lately?” That sort of thing: sudden, loud stabs of chords either on their own or in staccato sequence, the sort of thing pioneered by the likes of Jackson, Abdul and Prince, and which became an integral part of most dance music, it would seem, right up to today.
The first proper ballad comes in the form of “Superlady”, with some very tasty horns and a nice piano and guitar backing, and there's another laid-back smooth ballad following it, the rather not-bad “Can you stand the rain”. Okay, okay, it's actually quite good, in fact I'd pin it as the standout track on the album thus far. Very mature sounding, well crafted and quite effective. A third ballad follows, in the shape of “Competition”, and I have to admit, when they pull out the stops on the slower songs on this album they really do sound good. Lovely addition of sax helps to create a really cool atmosphere for this song.
And yes, there's a
fourth ballad to come! Talk about throwing everything together! “I'm comin' home” is really nice, but to be honest I think these songs would have been better spread evenly throughout the album, where they would have had more of an impact, and serve to break up the faster (and quite frankly, inferior) songs. Also, having them one after the other lessens their effect, I believe, as you kind of think, “Oh here's another ballad”.
And yes, you guessed it! The album closes on yet another ballad: that's five in succession, almost half of the album. “Boys to men” is a nice song, and did in fact apparently inspire the creation of another Boyband --- can you guess which one? --- but at this point it's number five of five, and though it's very good in its own right it would have had more effect I think had it come after a fast song, or even a bad one. As it is, I find it a case of the shrugging of the shoulders, a very small bit like the recent John Sykes album I reviewed, “Loveland”, which is nothing but ballads and slow songs. I love them, but they have their time and place, and unless you're someone like Air Supply (and even they rock out very occasionally!) you really can't expect a full album of ballads to hold the attention.
So that's the last of our look at the first credited Boyband, New Edition. I'm not singularly impressed by them --- but then, I didn't really expect to be --- but I have to grudgingly admit they have a little bit more about them than I had originally expected. This
is the band that gave us “Candy girl”, after all! Nonetheless, I don't see their albums remaining on my hard disk once this article is finished.
TRACKLISTING
1. Introduction
2. That's the way we're livin'
3. Where it all started
4. If it ain't love
5. Skit #1
6. N.E heartbreak
7. Crucial
8. Skit #2
9. You're not my kind of girl
10. Superlady
11. Can you stand the rain
12. Competition
13. Skit #3
14. I'm comin' home
15. Boys to men
After fleecing New Edition and then being sued by them, thus having to release them from their ironclad contract, our good friend F@gin --- sorry, Maurice Starr! --- simply dusted himself off and went in search of another band he could make money off. This time he went for five white guys as opposed to black, and so New Kids on the Block were born.
And so I pack up my laptop (after having availed of the hotel's power supply to charge it up for the journey) and pop on my shades as the early morning sunlight filters through the far-off mountains and sparkles off the pools of unnameable substance that dot the ground around here. I hear my taxi arrive, pay my bill and head out to the car, jumping in the back.
We're on the road again, where rather worryingly, more Boybands await...