Mmm Bop

Going through some content mill website yesterday I came across something like,

"This will make you feel really old! Mmm Bop by Hanson turned 20 today!" The story was accompanied by a picture of Hanson today, looking as rosy cheeked, cocksure and wholesome as ever.

Actually, seeing this didn't make me feel old. Feeling old happens when you start to find yourself surrounded by adults born when you were in high school. What it did do was remind me of what this awful fucking song meant to me when it took America by storm in 1997, and when it unfortunately re-entered my life on one fateful evening years later.

When I was in high school in the early 90s, the airwaves were dominated by heroin-fueled grunge rock. It had an edge to it, and it felt legitimate and real. It was great. My dad even started buying rock albums again. Then Cobain died in 1994, and it seemed like he took the music with him. It wasn't really his death that did it, but a sequence of events in the mid-90s followed on his suicide that largely ruined rock music forever. Pearl Jam took on Ticketmaster and lost, and then decided to pick up their toys and go home, which for them meant disappearing deep inside their own asses. Clinton de-regulated radio in 1996, killing independent FM stations nationally and giving rise to the monster that is Clear Channel overnight. Douchebag A/R guys who had been chomping at the bit for years to push manufactured commercial garbage again started filling our ears with crap like Ace of Bass.

And then came Hanson, to announce that it was all over, and that popular music (at least white pop music) was going to suck from now on. For months, you could not escape these saccharine-sweet Tulsa Aryan Jackson Five wannabes. I consider myself lucky to have survived 1997 with my sanity. Hanson's Operation Rolling Thunder-esque carpet bombing of the national musical consciousness paved the way for its wholesale surrender to the likes of Backstreet and N'Sync a few short years later.

None of that is why hearing Mmm Bop fills me with unutterable loathing to this day. There's a very personal reason for that.

In 1999, I went to Switzerland, my first ever trip abroad alone and my first trip to Europe. I was 22 years old, hopeful and expectant. When you come from a hick meth lab of a town whose sole claim to fame is what is alleged to be the world's tallest barber pole, you tend to put the Old World on a pedestal. For the first time in my life I felt like I was where I truly belonged: surrounded by cosmopolitan, interesting, well-educated people in a place steeped in history. Then one night, I was at a party in an ancient guild hall under Bern when the DJ put on Mmm Bop. I groaned aloud, expecting everyone to join me in getting him to put on another record. It was obvious to me that no thinking human being could possibly want to hear Mmm Bop ever again.

To my horror, all those around me - these people I wanted so badly to impress - started to smile and get up to go and dance. To Mmm Bop, in 1999. I was aghast, and actually angry. I felt betrayed. Having had a few, I actually tried to stop some of them from dancing. They angrily brushed past me and took the floor, dancing horribly, as Europeans do, loving every second of the song I hated so, so much. I sank back into my seat and held my head in my hands. Mmm Bop had come back from the grave to crush another part of my soul, and I was completely helpless.

That's why, to this day, whenever I hear Hanson, I'm not nostalgic. I'm not annoyed. I'm upset. Somehow, this shitty fucking song managed to alienate me from two cultures. It has actually harmed me.

And now it's stuck in my fucking head AGAIN.