More than ever, people want the stuff they buy to be hand-crafted. Lindsey and Jenny discuss why that is and what that means for big and small businesses. Is “craft” simply a meaningless marketing word? Is the movement dying now that big companies are trying to get a piece of the action? Can people tell the difference between “artisanal” and generic? The musicians behind the Hanson Brothers Beer Company explain why this is just the beginning of the craft revolution. Bloomberg Reporter Craig Giammonna spells out why for big companies, the race is on to think small. And the founder of Ample Hills Creamery talks about what it takes to grow into a successful business while staying true to the ice cream parlor’s Brooklyn roots.
As a person of—ahem—a certain age, 90’s pop music will always hold a special place in my heart. It’s the music I first partied to in public, the music I first got drunk to, the music I sang along to in my most joyful moments, and a certain amount of Alanis Morissette’s early canon even joined my most beloved standards and showtunes as Music For Melancholy Moods.
Fast-forward to today, and everything about the way we consume music has changed, but the content is still there. To that end, I have 90’s playlists on all of my devices, and tagged as favorites on the streaming service I use. So there I was one day, bopping along to the indisputable classic “Shoop” by Salt N’ Pepa, rapping every word with the track except for the one viciouslyableist one that was still gross but not really balked at back in the day.
The next song was “MMMBop” by Hanson, the pop prettyboy brothers who captivated everyone I knew at the time except me. I never got into their music, their image, none of it. It just wasn’t my cup of tea, and I ordinarily skip this song when it comes up on a playlist, but I was walking swiftly and my phone had shifted to a relatively buried position in my bag, and I thought, “Oh well, it’s not the biggest deal in the world, I’ll just let it play.”
Not only did I let it play, but I actually listened to it, probably seriously for the first time ever, and holy shit! “MMMBop” is actually one of the most existentially bleak songs ever written.
I had never noticed because I wasn’t really paying attention, and it seems like the record-buying masses of 1997, who made Hanson’s most successful track an international hit that reached #1 in 27 countries, were too jazzed by the aggressively upbeat tune and rhythm to notice that this is some heavy stuff.
I first started taking note upon hearing the lyric in the hook, “In an MMMBop you’re gone,” and I thought to myself, Wait, hang on, an MMMBop is a unit of time measurement? Even having personally dismissed the song so significantly, I couldn’t help but to have heard it several trillion times, ubiquitous as it was for so long. I thought I was at least familiar with it overall, and that the title was part of the quasi-gibberish/scatting that filled so much of it.
The revelation that “an MMMBop” is a thing was just the beginning of my edification.
What in the name of emo self-doubt is all this? Right out of the gate, after the aforementioned sorta-scatting, (sorry Hanson and Hanson fans, they technically are scatting but I’m too much of an Ella Fitzgerald fan to really give them that), we’re told, “You have so many relationships in this life / Only one or two will last.”
Let’s pause and remember that Isaac, Taylor, and Zac Hanson were only 14, 12, and 10 years old at the time.
Having established from jump that the majority of our relationships are doomed, the adorable trio grimly acknowledges: “You go through all the pain and strife/Then you turn your back and they’re gone so fast.”
“All the pain and strife.” …really, little boys?
I’m not doing that thing where adults question the sincerity of the “deep thoughts” of very young people just because they are very young. Rather, some filament of memory in my brain lit up with the knowledge that the Young Brothers Hanson had written it themselves, a fact that was undoubtedly spouted by some talking head back when MTV played videos and lodged itself in my subconscious to be put to use 20 years later. So my thought wasn’t that these children were parroting some approximation of “deep thoughts,” or that they were puppets for an adult songwriter, but omg this is so dark how did I never know this was so dark?
I can’t stand perky music that’s perky for perkiness’ sake. I don’t mind happy music and I appreciate joyful music, but peppy, perky, and other words that begin with P and end with Y generally make me nauseous. I do however, allow for perkiness as a melodic counterpoint to dark lyrical content, and greatly appreciate such juxtapositions, so how on Earth did I not know all this time that MMMBop was more than just mmms and bops?
After warning us that life is about bullshit relationships and loss, the telegenic trio wisely advises: “So hold on the ones who really care.” Which seems fair enough. But they immediately double down on their Debbie Downer-ness by explaining that the reason to hold on is because “In the end they’ll be the only ones there.” Excuuuuuuuse me, cutie pies?
We haven’t even reached the hook yet when the boys are pleading, “And when you get old and start losing your hair / Tell me who will still care / Can you tell me who will still care?”
Mind fully blown, I hit up my good girlfriend Google to see if I was having some sort of personal crisis that made me read waaaaay into these lyrics or if others had documented this.
It all made sense when I learned that MMMBop was originally conceived and recorded by the boys as a ballad, and the version that ruled the world for a summer or so was (re)produced by the prolific producing team The Dust Brothers, whose work with artists like Beck and the Beastie Boys is anything but ballad-heavy.
They surely did their Dusty thing on MMMBop, transforming the boys’ existential lament into an uptempo boogie that, for me, unforgivably obscured the lyrical content. To be clear, the original version is still a mid-tempo jam and not some slow, string-filled funeral dirge in a musical sense, but it’s slower enough and sung more thoughtfully enough to make so much more sense to me than the manic track that topped the charts.
Though some of their follow-up songs indeed showcased solid vocals and great harmonization, MMMBop felt so thoroughly bubblegum to me that I was always confused when I heard Hanson describe their sound as R&B, as inthis recent interview where they described their music as “Jackson 5–esque soulful songs.”
That’s a bit of a reach, until you factor in that original MMMBop, which is… exactly that. Where was this song in 1996? Had it not been buried, I might be Hanson’s #1 fan today!
Lyrically, after that first chorus, MMMBop goes on to cast a negative pall on the unpredictability of life, which could be viewed as a beautiful sea of unbridled possibilities, or, through Hanson’s eyes, as an answerless void where you keep planting seeds without knowing what may or may not ever grow from them. The song’s final minute or so is spent in a downward spiral of repetition, with the boys answering their own desperate plea “Can you tell me who will still care?” with a terrifying “Can you tell me? / Oh / No you can’t ’cause you don’t know.”
“Can you tell me? You say you can but you don’t know.”
THAT song would have fit in just fine with my Morrisette-heavy playlists, and it’s no wonder to me that CDs of the original MMMBop, which the boys had recorded themselves and sold only at their own perfromances and at regional outlets in Oklahoma until they landed a record deal, sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
Perhaps you already knew that the lyrics to MMMBop are an emotional journey to the heart of existential darkness, but this was news to me, and the chart-topping version will never be the same again.
I have brothers now, but I didn’t in the ’90s. I really, really wanted a brother. Mostly so I could have someone to fight meanies for me, but also so I could play Pokemon with someone who could play Ash (I wanted to be Pikachu, duh). There were lots of reasons for wanting a brother in the ’90s. A lot of them had to do with Hanson. Who were also a lot of our reasons for wanting a boyfriend. It was a fairly confusing time for feelings of fraternity and also of lust. Blame Paul Rudd in Clueless.
Brothers can be annoying. They fart on you or near you and it’s horrible. They give you wedgies and pretend to spit huge gobs of saliva on you. They tease you about the things they know you’re insecure about. But then as you start getting older, something magical happens. They start being your confidante and you theirs. You support each other. They lift the heavy things you can’t lift yourself because you might be small and/or have pathetic upper body strength. They become your best friends. (The farting never stops, though.) Here are 12 reasons why all you wanted was a brother in the ’90s.
1. So You Could Have Someone To Harmonize To “MmmBop” With
Sure, the Hanson Brothers were confusing because not only did you want brothers like them, you wanted to be on them. But overall, having someone to start a family band with: priceless.
The title “MMMBop” is 20 years old this year. And while millions of people are able to hum these heady notes, the singers of this mythical air revealed that nobody could sing it properly!
According to the Hanson Group, we would be millions not sing as necessary “MMMBop”. For 20 years, a mystery hovers around the pronunciation of these words frantically swaying on techno notes. The three brothers are rather clever. As if it were a joke, Isaac, Taylor and Zac fun of the inability of fans to transcribe the words: “You know why because people fail to properly sing the chorus?. most of the time, they hurt syncope “explains Taylor. The rhythm method is indeed difficult to execute.
Isaac, a famous singer would certainly be the only one to do it “! But if Bruno Mars was interested to sing, he would rip surely”
Finally, the three singers have finished this interview Vulture Magazine explaining that contrary to popular belief, the lyrics are very sad and not happy! “Take for example the verses:… ‘You have So Many relationships in this life Only one or two will last through You go so much pain and strife You turn your back and they’ re gone so fast.” The person they talk through very sad times. She has a lot of frivolous relationships. Yet only one or two people actually will mark his life. In short, we did not understand at all!
If there’s one band that I remember being a big fan of with cringe levels embarrassment, it’s Hanson. It’s not that the band was bad or anything, but simply that my love for them spiraled out of control. Like, I’m not kidding: The extent of my obsession was insane. I collected foreign magazines with them on the cover, I made my own T-shirts with the band on them, I drew their band logo onto my school bag, and I wrote “Mrs. Taylor Hanson” over anything and everything as though my belongings could magically and legally pronounce us husband and wife. I was woefully uncool about it all, and it’s painful to remember (why am I even telling you?), so to listen back to Hanson as an adult has felt like peeling off the faux-cool veneer that I’ve cultivated as an adult to expose my awkward, obsessive and distinctly lame interior.
What I’ve realized as an adult though is that, actually, Hanson were a pretty great band. They were talented, thoughtful, and wrote songs that were bewildering and catchy in equal measures. For those of us who were super-fans of Hanson, this comes as a distinct comfort; of course we were obsessed, they were awesome. There are, actually, more than a few things which do stand out when listening to the band as an adult:
1. They Had So Much Extreme Existential Angst
Who knew that Hanson were such philosophers? Whilst their contemporaries were happy to just sing generic love songs addressed en masse to people called “baby,” Hanson delved deep. “Weird” is a razor blade against my fragile emotions, you guys. It’s basically the musical equivalent of that moment in The Breakfast Club where Emilio Estevez tells the group, “we’re all bizarre, some of us are just better at hiding it.” With lines like “when you live in a cookie cutter world/ if you’re different you can’t win/ so you don’t stand out but you don’t fit in…”, the song is all about how we’re all different but that some people are really different and they get treated super unfairly for it. I get it, guys.
2. Their Love Songs Are Kinda Weird To Listen To Now
Hearing 14-year-old Taylor Hanson sing that he’s going to come to me when “the night is dark and stormy” is a little creepy. Which is a shame, because 9-year-old me thought that was the cutest thing in the world. Having said that, I do often feel like my “soul is dying” and that I lack the “strength to keep trying” as suggested in the song, so I don’t know, maybe we could all just hang out and play Monopoly some time?
3. Hanson Just Wanted Everyone To Get Along And Be Happy
For the record, “Where’s The Love” is Hanson’s best song. It was clear to me when I was a kid and it remains the case even now. The song also cements something which is clearly present in so many of their songs: they just want humanity to chill. It’s like they picked up the peace baton that John Lennon had left for them and sprinted the musical relay with it. These boys are so pure at heart and full of peace and love that they feel almost alien to me; has modern culture become that cynical? Why can’t more kids be like Hanson? *Shakes fist at cloud like Grandpa Simpson*
4. They Should Never Have Included Scratches In Any Of Their Music
I’m sorry, but do you see any of the Hanson brothers mixing decks and scratching vinyl? No. It sounds beyond bizarre against harmonicas and blues guitar riffs.
5. “MMMBop” Is Unbearably Sad
This isn’t big news for anyone who used to love to read Hanson’s lyric inlays whilst they were blasting the album, but “MMMBop” is a devastating song about loneliness and, well, death sang by a bunch of teenagers who don’t even know how bad life gets yet. Listening back to the song at an age where you’re waking up at 4 a.m. in a cold sweat over bills and guzzling wine to make dates seem interesting is like hearing someone throw a sparkling, glitter parade for your own personal misery.
6. They Harmonized Like Angels
I don’t know if it was the age difference, the disparity between voices which hadn’t yet broken and those which had, or whether they were just on top of their melodies, but whenever they harmonize, it’s just ludicrous. Like, they must have just practiced nothing but harmonies for endless hours on end to get a harmony game that flawless.
7. There Was A Song On Middle Of Nowhere About A High School Murder Mystery?
I used to be obsessed with this song. After managing to listen to “Where’s The Love” and “MMMBop” enough times to feel insane, “Yearbook” swiftly became my third favorite Hanson song. I never knew what it was about except that there was a kid called Johnny who wasn’t available on the day that the yearbook photos got taken, there was a blank space where his photo should have been and that Taylor Hanson wanted answers for it. “There’s a lying in your silence, tell me where did Johnny go?” the three brothers ask over and over again to a seriously dramatic melody which includes a string section and piano. It’s totally about a murder right? Johnny got murdered. Or, he just moved schools? It’s an enigma, that’s for sure, and one that I dearly hope David Lynch puts to film one day.
8. They Wrote Party Songs For Awkward People
And there’s nothing wrong with that. I was and still am one of those deeply awkward people (and maybe so are you? Own it!) and you know what? “This Time Around” is the kind of song which unites people around pizza and beer, and when someone inevitably asks you, “oh hey, this song is kinda great! Who is it?” you can tell them, with pride, “it’s Hanson. You’re now a Hanson fan. I made that happen.” And that’s how friends for life are formed.
9. Their Video For “The River” Is A Perfect Titanic Parody
Not only does it star Weird Al Yankovic but it also has a guest turn from Gloria Stuart (aka, Rose as an old lady) as a Hanson super fan, complete with the tattoo to prove it, looking back fondly on her youth as a fan of the band. The song shows off the fact that Isaac Hanson (the older of the three brothers) should have totally been allowed to take lead vocal duty more often.
10. Their Voices Were Spectacular
Honestly, anyone who hated on Hanson clearly had some jealousy issues to sort out.
11. They Developed Into A Much Better Band Than I Ever Thought They Would
Seriously, why didn’t I get this memo? “Thinking About Somethin'” is amazing. It’s total blues brilliance with a spectacular Blues Brother homage video to go with it. (Hold up, Weird Al Yankovic is making yet another cameo? What is with that guy?) It’s also super nice to hear that the summer-blues depressive pop vibes which seemed to weigh down many of their early songs in their career was instead replaced by a much happier power-pop blues tone. Hanson got happy, people. I’ll sleep well tonight knowing that.
Does Hanson still grace the front covers of international music magazines? It might be time for me to start up my collection again. But as a grown up, which will just make me quirky and definitely not lame.
Many of you probably know Nick Navarre as “Tall Bald Guy” – he has just started a Hanson podcast called “The H-Bomb Show” and the first episode was recorded over the last weekend at Hanson Day along with fans Nick, Heather and Morgen.
Unfortunately the app I was using to keep track of the playlist decided to eat half of it before I could get the playlist put together. If you remember Taylor playing any songs that are missing, let me know and I will get the playlist updated!
Emilia Clarke showed off her Dothraki skills during a stop at ‘Late Night With Seth Meyers.’
As part of the fantasy world ofGame of Thrones, Emilia Clarke has mastered the Dothraki language to play Daenerys Targaryen. The actress explained the language during a visit toLate Night With Seth Meyers.
As Clarke reveals, the Dothraki language is a real language and not just words she makes up on set. “You can study it,” she says, before explaining that linguist David Peterson created the language for the show.
She went on to explain the process of rehearsing the language for the show, getting the script in English first and then later getting a mp3 with the Dothraki version. She even admitted that sometimes she may even mess up the language on camera, mostly because most of the crew don’t know if it’s wrong or not.
To later emphasize how one can master the language, Clarke teased an off-camera moment where she decided to sing Hanson’s hit “Mmmbop” in the language and sang it for Meyers. “I can’t stress how much less catchy that is,” the host said.
