New Kids on the Block: Merry, Merry Christmas, 1989

The biggest boy band of the '80s capped their biggest year with a holiday album

You know one way to know, definitively, when you’re a pop star in your Imperial Phase? When you have three albums in the top 30 of Billboard’s pop album chart — let alone two of those in the top 10. And on the final album chart of the 1980s, New Kids on the Block did just that: their sophomore album Hangin’ Tough was at #6 in its 70th week on the chart, their eponymous debut was at #28, and their third effort, Merry, Merry Christmas, climbed from #14 to #9.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Merry, Merry Christmas was the first holiday album to make the top 10 since such albums were re-allowed to chart on the main album listing in 1974. (For about a decade prior, holiday records were sequestered on their own chart.) The album’s lead single, “This One’s for the Children,” rose into the Hot 100’s top 10 this same week, notching the Kids their sixth top 10 single of 1989. The last artist to do that was Michael Jackson, in 1983.

As for the album itself, however, it’s nothing special. Actually, “nothing special” would elevate it — this is the epitome of a cash in. Of the album’s nine songs (the tenth is a 1:12 reprise of “This One’s for the Children”), six were written or co-written by the New Kids’s manager, Maurice Starr, clearly hoping for his own “White Christmas,” or “Last Christmas” for that matter.

Not only did Starr not succeed in that regard, but unfortunately, five of those six songs are thoroughly, utterly awful. I’ll defend New Kids as having made some solid pop singles, especially “Step by Step” and “You Got It (The Right Stuff),” but while they were many things, the quintet was not know for being particularly funky. Ergo, titling a song of theirs “Funky, Funky Xmas” was, perhaps, not the greatest idea, especially as it’s the inverse of funky. The song’s lead vocals are by Donnie Wahlberg, brother of “Marky” Mark Wahlberg, and if there’s one thing those Wahlbergs aren’t, it’s funky. Or good rappers. And Donnie was generally the rapper on New Kids records.

“Last Night I Saw Santa Claus” is along the same lines, though paired with an ill-advised faux-’50s beat. “I Still Believe in Santa Claus” goes in the other direction: it’s a treacly ballad featuring Joey McIntyre’s piercing falsetto, which I can’t imagine even their hardcore teenaged fans enjoyed hearing in their heyday.

The exception to this cavalcade of crap is the single, “This One’s for the Children,” which somehow succeeds in spite? or because of? its sentiments. Working strongly in its favor: lead vocals by Jordan Knight, always the strongest singer of the quintet. It’s a fairly anodyne record, but something about the moment the children’s choir comes in gets to me. Of all the newly-written songs on Merry Merry Christmas, it’s also the only one written solely by Starr, so perhaps his problem was his collaborators?

I also suspect that, apart from NKOTB being the hottest things in America in late ‘89, something else that helped “Children” make the top 10 is this: there are no “Christmas touches” to the record. No sleigh bells, no snatches of traditional Christmas songs, just a straight-up boy-band pop record that barely even mentions the holidays. (It was also a charity record, with proceeds going to United Cerebral Palsy.) I applaud the Kids, and Starr, for releasing an essentially “regular” pop album for the holiday season that’s not draped in said season’s signifiers. That shit gets old real fast. And not terribly surprisingly, the songs that sound the best on the album are the three classics: “White Christmas,” “The Christmas Song,” and “Little Drummer Boy.” There’s no dressing up of these songs, they’re just sung straight, and well.

Starr was smart, though: he knew that cutting and releasing a quickie Christmas record while the Kids were at their peak would make him some coin, and he was right. Merry, Merry Christmas went double-platinum in the U.S. and in Canada, gold in Finland and the U.K., and made the top 40 in nine countries. It may not be an enduring classic of any kind, but — actually, that’s a complete sentence. The end. Merry Christmas.

[Originally written for Rock and Roll Globe in 2019.]