Pop Stardom for Fun and Profit

By JAY COCKS

"Growing up in Boston and dancing in the streets," says Danny Wood, "you see a lot of things." Nothing like this, though. Not even in Boston.

It's as if the concert stage were a reef in some Sargasso Sea of raging teen hormones. Wood and his four pals, collectively known as the New Kids on the Block, dance, sing, break and rap together while thousands of mostly pre- and early pubescents trip over their own ecstasy. The audience shrieks. Screams. And clutches at its authorized New Kids T shirts ($20). Jangles its authorized New Kids buttons (three for $8). Finally departs, hoarse, sweaty, satisfied and somewhat lighter in the purse. This group has found the perfect place for contemporary pop icons: close to the heart and close to the cash.

Milli Vanilli. Madonna. Paula Abdul. You can't be a pop star these days if you don't dance. And what keeps you on your toes isn't just a choreographer and a trainer; it's the sheer momentum from all the money out there to be made, not by performing but by succeeding. Success can't be separated from impact anymore. Marketing and merchandising are integral parts of the pop machine, just as a movie's box-office receipts become part of its cachet. Show business is the latest American spectator sport, and the number of weeks a tune stays at No. 1 is as critical as a batting average for anyone who wants to stay in the game.

By those standards the New Kids are heavy hitters. To date they have sold a cumulative and commanding 17 million albums in the U.S. alone and have had five Top Five singles, of which three have made it to No. 1. Step by Step, their new album, went No. 1 in the second week of its release. A new single, Tonight, is on the way. So far, the three collections of New Kids videos have turned over 3.3 million copies, setting a sales record that surpasses even Michael Jackson's. Paperback band bios have occupied the No. 2 and No. 3 positions on best-seller lists simultaneously, even though both are officially "unauthorized." "I looked through one of them," says Jordan Knight, 20, the hunk of the bunch. "It's not good, but it didn't put us down or anything." A glossier and more expensive "authorized" biography has just been released.

Marketing and merchandising have always been important. But never have they been so prominent as they are today, and never so smoothly subsumed into the performing personality. There is a little debate about exactly how live the New Kids show is (is it real, or is it lip-synched?), and quite a bit more about how slickly the New Kids have been packaged and sold. The financial phenomenon of the New Kids is part of the total experience. As performers, Knight and his brother Jonathan, 21, Wood, 21, Donnie Wahlberg, 20, and Joseph McIntyre, 17, are as sleek, nimble and nifty as a pair of Air Jordans. The audience, overwhelmingly white female, is invited to enjoy their moves and their music. But their stage show, which has charm and vitality, is an unabashed commercial celebration of making it big.

Commercial calculation is crucial for pop survival and establishing a persona. Madonna sheds images like snakeskins: the bad-girl boytoy; the sassy feminist; the confused pseudo penitent; the ambisexual flirt; the wistful sex bomb, Marilyn Monroe reborn from a peroxide bottle with a genie inside, snuggling up to Dick Tracy. She is craftier and more gifted than anyone else playing the game right now, but all her identities have one quality in common. They are teasingly, patently artificial. They insist on their own calculation. They revel in it and induce the audience to do the same.

Madonna can get away with this because she knows how to draw on her reserves of mystery without tapping them out. Other performers have no mystery at all, but that -- at least in the short term -- seems to be no problem. An all- female group called En Vogue looks to have lifted its name from the same putative dance craze from which Madonna borrowed the title of her most recent hit single. They also sing a kind of wax-slick dance music that seems less written than cloned. Nevertheless, they have a No. 5 hit of their own, Hold On, and an album called Born to Sing, currently residing at No. 23.

Milli Vanilli has so far survived the hilarious barbs of Arsenio Hall, + almost unanimous critical disdain and its own supercilious egotism to score a total of five Top Five singles. Even the hotly debated rumor that they don't do their own singing in live performance doesn't diminish their commercial luster. "If I'd heard the first Milli Vanilli record, I would have signed them," says Geffen Records president Ed Rosenblatt. Notes Jeff Gold, a vice president at Warner Bros. Records: "They may not be what I listen to when I go home, but they have good looks and dancing ability that appeal to the kids. The same goes for the New Kids."

Indeed, the New Kids are a paradigm of pop's renewed stress on success and salesmanship. At their appearances, vendors hawking New Kids merchandise will help pull in an estimated $400 million this year. Giant video screens keep the crowd engaged during intermission with New Kids multiple-choice trivia contests (Q.: Who is Jordan's favorite singer? A.: Frank Sinatra) and with repeated, insistent references to McDonald's, which has pitched in a bundle to sponsor the group's U.S. tour. "They're a very wholesome, all-American group that has the same kind of family values that McDonald's has," explains David Green, the company's senior vice president of marketing. "We continue to search for new ways to get to the 'tween' market: a little too old for Ronald McDonald but a little too young for the car keys."

The New Kids are not at all defensive about being in-betweeners. Unlike their musical elders, who might fret about being corporately co-opted, these boys see sponsorship as just another welcome token of their sudden, lavish success. "Fans chasing me, McDonald's offering us endorsements -- to me, that's big," says Wahlberg, the group's offstage leader. "I mean, I came from food stamps and nothing. I'm not going to look at that and be, like, 'Oh, get out of here, McDonald's.' I'm like, 'You want to work with me?' "

At a New Kids show, everyone works hard. The boys sing (and yes, sometimes lip-synch), slide and twirl around the stage in a congenial mixture of old Motown precision choreography and up-to-the-minute street-dance steps. Although they do some occasional pelvis wiggling, the reaction they elicit is just like their moves: high velocity but chaste. They would pass the most stringent Tipper Gore litmus test. Manager Dick Scott describes audience response this way: "These young girls, it is the first time they are experiencing something called the libido. The New Kids provide it, but in such ; a wholesome way that it is refreshing. There is nothing lewd or vulgar or frightening or threatening."

With those time-honored rock-'n'-roll staples removed, the New Kids stand revealed pretty much as they are: peppy, ebullient popsters getting a big buzz off their success. If they are pop product, they are product that gives good value. As Michael Marsden, professor of popular culture at Ohio's Bowling Green State University, points out, "You can't manipulate an audience. You can take a group that's coming along and you can package them. But if the audience is not responsive to their music or to their style, you're never going to force them down its throat." Says Warner's Gold: "It's impossible to manufacture big acts that don't have something big in their corner already."

The big guy in the New Kids' corner is Maurice Starr, 36, a Boston-based producer, songwriter and talent groomer with a proven track record (New Edition). Starr put the New Kids together in 1984, still writes or co-writes most of their material and keeps a strong hand on the till as well as the tiller. Starr's method was shrewd and had a notable precedent. He scoured the streets of Boston to find a group of attractive white kids. Then he forged a sound that borrowed liberally from both black rhythm and straight-ahead pop, tutored the kids in some moves and watched while . . . nothing happened.

"It was a lot of letdowns in the beginning," admits Jon Knight. The first album, released in 1986, stiffed. The second, 1988's Hangin' Tough, would go on to sell 11 million copies worldwide, but, as manager Scott describes it, "not only did it take off slowly, it almost died too." If Starr and Scott had a formula in the New Kids, it wasn't working. The catalyst was a disk jockey in Tampa who started to play Please Don't Go Girl heavily. Then the New Kids hit the road, appearing as the warm-up act for then teen-fave Tiffany. "All these young white girls seein' us," laughs Knight. "I guess they fell in love with us." Scott's analysis: "At first, Columbia Records tried to make the Kids black, which is what made the act fail." Success came, he says, only when "the pop people took over" and the New Kids could become what they really are: "the perfect Middle American group."

The New Kids resent imputations that their show is canned and that they continue to play Pinocchios to Starr's funky Gepetto. Says Jon Knight: "I think we have a lot of spontaneity, if there is such a word." Beefs Wahlberg: "People don't give us credit. Janet Jackson sat down with her producers and came up with the concept of Rhythm Nation. That's the same thing we did with our album." If there is a unifying concept behind Step by Step, it is one of forthright -- indeed, brazen -- commercial calculation, which is one thing that sets the Kids apart from the Ninja Turtles and the Simpsons, who fell into their fads and weren't made (or drawn) to order. "We created a niche," Scott says. "And we filled a void."

If that void should ever become vacant, lots of candidates are waiting to fill it. "You can't take the New Kids and make a clone," warns Capitol Industries-EMI president Joe Smith. But Starr and Scott are way ahead of him. Starr's 12-year-old son is opening for the New Kids as part of a trio called the Perfect Gentlemen, whose debut album is titled Rated PG (Senator Helms, take note). We may also look forward to the re-emergence of Tiffany, whose album and merchandising are now being handled by Scott. "We'll try to follow the same pattern, make all the right moves for her," Scott says. "And we hope that will create another profit center." There will also be an album by Biscuit.

This is not a singing dog. As any devoted fan can tell you, Biscuit is a security guard for the New Kids. He is, Scott swears, "a huge guy who, it turns out, is a great artist. All the fans know him. He's going to be in the New Kids cartoon series, he's going to be in the New Kids comic books. So it's built in. People are going to think I'm a genius. But it doesn't take a genius to see what the marketing potential is." There must, inevitably, be a Biscuit T shirt. Perhaps even a Biscuit biscuit. Maybe Bart Simpson could be persuaded to do an endorsement. One good profit center deserves another.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland and Kathryn Jackson Fallon/New York and Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles