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hanson radish johnny lang used to be, teen idols were proud to serve their peers. From '50s star Frankie Lymon to New Kids on the Block, they made music for fans their own age -- it was a happy accident if someone old enough to vote even cared. No more. Anxious to prove how serious they are, teen artists today hire the hippest producers and pose for 10,000-word magazine portraits. When they don't write their own songs, they get help from '60s pop sophisticates or cover '40s blues standards. Their youth is supposed to grab our attention, but they'll be damned if they'll be confined by it. Thanks to their blond beauty and a relentlessly cheerful single, the Hanson brothers -- 11-year-old Zac, 14-year-old Taylor and 16-year-old Isaac -- have already proven themselves a quick sell. Because these brothers hail from a forgotten burg (Tulsa, Okla.) and sing like pros, they present an easy comparison to the Jackson Five. Their first hit, "MMMBop," shares some of the hard-to-contain joy of "I Want You Back," but unlike the early-career Jacksons, the Hanson brothers write their own songs and play their own instruments. Well, sort of. They also employ an army of session musicians and call '60s songwriting duo Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for detail work on those hard-to-finish power ballads. They're even savvy enough to hire the Dust Brothers, best known for producing Beck's "Odelay," to oversee the first two songs on "Middle of Nowhere," their third (!) album. With its light turntable scratches and nonsense chorus, "MMMBop" is a great wad of multi-flavored bubblegum. It's the best song on "Middle of Nowhere," but the album is solid whenever the boys sound true to their age, especially with the little-kid regret of "Lucy" and "Man From Milwaukie," a demo-quality bonus track about some wacky guy they met while traveling. (That this stranger was probably creepier than they realize only makes the song more touching.) Things get rocky, though, when the brothers imitate their elders too closely. Home-schooled by their mother, the Hansons seem to have begun their studies with '60s Brill Building pop and ended them with a chapter on the late-'80s. On "Speechless," they ape the post-"Thriller" pop-funk of Michael Jackson, and with "I Will Come to You," they offer a string-soaked ballad that wouldn't sound out of place on a Bryan Adams retrospective. If Hanson is harmless, mostly retro fun, Radish sounds like the final shudder of the alternative nation. It doesn't seem possible that anyone could make Silverchair seem deep, but Radish's 15-year-old lead singer-guitarist, Ben Kweller, manages the trick neatly. He's a facile guitarist and songwriter, but you get the sense he doesn't know anything that can't be learned from watching MTV, playing computer games or listening to his home-schooling mom. On "Restraining Bolt," he strains to imitate Kurt Cobain, but winds up sounding like Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, the one-album wonder that produced a pair of mid-'90s hits in "Buddy Holly" and "Sweater, The Undone Song." To lend Radish the patina of indie-rock, most of "Restraining Bolt" was produced by Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie, who also steered the ship on Hole's "Live Through This." Unfortunately, this doesn't disguise the album's shiny, shallow core. It's certainly not Kweller's fault that the New Yorker devoted one of its rare pop-music profiles to Radish a month before the release of "Restraining Bolt." Still, it's depressing to think that Kurt Cobain died so some Dallas teen with an attention-deficit disorder could imitate his scream and win a major-label bidding war worth millions. But at least Kweller is imitating someone only twice his age. With his golden locks and smooth skin, 16-year-old Jonny Lang looks like a Hanson but plays guitar like a 60-year-old bar vet. On "Lie to Me," he sings in a voice seemingly splashed with whiskey and stained by nicotine, but really he's a clever, middle-class kid who lives with his parents just outside of Minneapolis. Mixing new songs by hired guns with older material from Ike Turner and Syl Johnson, "Lie to Me" sounds better than the house band at a typical blues club, but not so much better that Lang deserves to be this year's best-selling blues artist. It's true his playing and singing are remarkably self-assured on songs such as "Darker Side" and "Still Wonder," but compare Lang's careful cover of Sonny Boy Williamson's "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" to the original. When Williamson sang the song, it was raw and reckless -- the sound of a man tempting danger, not to mention statutory rape law, until he loses for good (Williamson was murdered in 1948 on Chicago's South Side). When Lang sings, "Tell your mama and daddy/I'm a little schoolboy too," you have to laugh. Sure he is -- unless, of course, he's home-taught, too. The real problem with Lang, though, isn't his age; it's that every persona he adopts -- from the title track's wounded lover to the pool shark in "Rack 'em Up" -- is a just-add-water cliché. Like Kweller, he doesn't seem capable of writing or singing a song with as much meaning as "MMMBop." Maybe that's because Hanson, at their best, are what many adults wish they still were: kids.
-- Keith Moerer Keith Moerer is a regular contributor to Salon. |
