Hanson mentioned in Slovenia article

By | January 31, 2009

Just got a tip about this article – Zakaj ne prenehamo peti Y.M.C.A?

Looks like it is from Slovenia, and is therefore not in english. It also features a photo of the Village People so I am slightly curious to know what it says…

Hanson is mentioned in the last paragraph:

Katere so najbolj nadležne pesmi? Village People: Y.M.C.A., Queen: We Will Rock You, Bobby McFerrin: Don’t Worry, Be Happy, Right Said Fred: I’m Too Sexy, Hanson: MMMBop, Lou Bega: Mambo No. 5, Baha Men: Who Let The Dogs Out, Beyonce: Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It).


Source

Article: Brain Itch Songs

By | January 31, 2009

Beyonce has finally infiltrated my house. My kids and my wife are all singing “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” Nonstop. Every day. It’s the answer to every question and the response to every statement. It’s worse than waterboarding. I’d leave, but I know they’d follow me.

There are songs you wish you could forget but can’t. They’re like a virus that won’t leave your system no matter how hard you try. You’re in the shower, and before you can stop yourself “Y.M.C.A.” pops out of your mouth. You catch yourself chanting, “Who let the dogs out?” in the car. You respond to a friend’s recent troubles with “I get knocked down but get up again.”

You try to erase these unwelcome melodies by thinking about something else. Nothing. You sing them ten times really loud and fast, hoping to push them out of your head. No luck. They won’t leave you. You’re afraid to go out at night. You used to be so much cooler than this.

Go easy on yourself. You’re not to blame. There’s a name for the affliction, and it’s called “brain itch.” And the type of song that causes the brain itch? That’s an “earworm.” Dr James Kellaris of the University of Cincinnati has studied the phenomenon (for real). It seems the combination of repetitive words and unchanging melody makes for the perfect earworm. We’re helpless against its power.

Here are the all-time itchiest of the brain-itch tunes. You can rest easy knowing that it’s not really you singing that song. It’s that earworm dug into your mind, like in the movie “Scanners.” At least now no one can blame you when your friends ask what you want for lunch and you say, “I want my baby back, baby back.”

THERE’S MORE: See our gallery of all 10 of the worst brain itch songs.


HANSON: “MMMBOP”
Produced by the Dust Brothers (the dudes who brought us some of Beck’s, the Beastie Boys’, and Tone Loc’s best work), this tune from the Tulsa brothers’ major label debut was originally written as a ballad. Definitely not the tune to seduce a date.

Source (for the full list)

Fuji Fine Pix – Hot Or Not Edition

By | January 30, 2009

Hanson was featured in a write up about a “new edition” of a FujiFix camera. Poor 1997 Isaac.


Every new camera on the market is touting some powerful facial recognition software. But according to Gizmodo engineers, there’s a lot more that can be done.

Straight from our R&D department, we’ve received this crude mockup of a “Hot or Not” Fuji Finepix camera. It features:

• Attractive Facial Recognition
If you’ve got it, flaunt it! Finally, a camera made by beautiful people, for beautiful people. A heart-shaped matrix surrounds the heads of worthy and automatically snaps the shutter at peek hotness levels (smiles, lustful gazes, or just staring off in the distance with absolutely nothing, and we mean nothing, going through your mind).

• 14 Megapixels
Take sharp photographs that can be enlarged for family, friends and guys who say they’re agents! Choose between “billboard” and “ultra big billboard” sizes and just wait for your face to go on the next Gap sign, or just a very high resolution amateur pornography site.

• Audio Alert If “Third Friend” Detected In Frame
While competitor’s products can become confused if two hot friends are standing next to a third, unattractive friend, snapping a shot none the wiser, the Fuji Finepix is equipped with a blazing fast processor that picks out the frumpy with greater accuracy than humans in clinical trials.

• Ugly Facial Deletion
Maybe it was a platonic friend. Maybe it was just a fat kid. It’s not their fault (well, maybe it is), but the last thing you need is to fold photos in half to cut out the troll standing beside you. The FinePix will autocrop the ugly subject out, or just put a big “X” over their face along with some stink lines.

• Self-Portrait Mode (may not function for all customers)
A special auto shutter takes shots as soon as your beautiful face enters the frame. And it will not stop taking pictures until it either runs out of batteries or you gain the freshman fifteen.

• Wireless Uploading to Facebook
The Finepix makes sure every single picture you ever shoot uploads instantly to Facebook, in duplicate, just in case. Automated metatagging includes “hot person who would never think they were hot” and “Barbizon 2009.”

Coming Christmas 2009, pending our lawyers can figure out the clear licensing issues and those ab growth pills we ordered out of the back of Men’s Fitness ever start working.

Source

Article: Every Song Is About Heroin

By | January 27, 2009

Once again, having a google alert on the word “mmmbop” has proven to be quite interesting, as I’m not sure this article would show up on a search with the word “Hanson” (although the author does seem to jump between spellings) Be sure to check out the source for more reasons why some other songs are also about drugs/heroin.

It’s almost second-nature for musicians to write about drugs. Especially when you’re dealing with rock, where the idea is to do what everybody tells you not to do, and make it look like it’s cool. (This is probably where spandex came from.)

The catch is that musicians aren’t supposed to openly write about drugs (except in the case of rap, discussed here recently). They find metaphors, and usually those metaphors are about as complex as John Wayne’s dialogue. Everyone knows about the La’s “There She Goes,” i.e. the girl-as-heroin metaphor; or the Beatles’ “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” whose blatant “shoot, shoot” euphemisms all but sell the stuff. The chemical factor in David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was even spelled out clearly in “Ashes to Ashes” (with the line “We all know Major Tom’s a Junkie”), in case the kids missed the classic “floating above the earth” metaphor.

With songs like “Hotel California,” “Under the Bridge,” “Golden Brown” and “Comfortably Numb” all containing their crystal-clear to slightly hazy euphemisms, the list of artists who have poetically flouted their bad habits before the mainstream media is eons long.

But what about the more cleverly disguised songs? You won’t convince me that the only heroin songs out there are the obvious ones. It’s almost guaranteed that somewhere, some good-guy songwriter is kicking back, having pulled off such a well-disguised smack anthem that no one even noticed it. My mission is to uncover some of these sneaky writers. They deserve, at the very least, to be recognized for their ingenuity, and praised for fooling everyone.

Hansen, MMMBop – Dude, Hansen is totally on drugs. They may look innocent with their grinning, middle-school charm, but what they wrote here is more or less a side-spun commercial for the smack. Take the deceptively negative opening lyrics: “You have so many relationships in this life, but only one or two will last.” “Hold on to the ones who really care, in the end they’ll be the only ones there.” Such a verse could have come from Layne Staley himself, holed up alone in his apartment with his one lifetime companion. It sounds like a cold, pained wake-up call to the futility of meaningful relationships outside of substance abuse. Yes, I can see it could also just be about friendship. But let’s go further. “Plant a seed, plant a flower, plant a rose … keep planting to find out which one grows.” Now, experimentation is built into the teenage mind, and we all know what comes from poppies. It’s a safe bet that any flower reference in a rock song is a neon arrow pointing to a drug reference (the classic example is the Stone Temple Pilots line, “pick a flower, hold your breath and drift away”). But still, it’s not enough. No, the real beef is the chorus: “MMMbop, tick a ta ba do ba, dooby dab a do ba, tick a tab a doo.” Have you ever heard more nonsensical singing? Those scattered, meaningless words are perhaps the biggest sign of an in-over-his-head singer who forgets his own lyrics, and if you don’t believe me, listen to anything off Down in Albion. I rest my case, Hanson are a mess of substance abuse. I’m definitely taking this to the authorities.

Source

The Rock Boat: Palladium Show

By | January 27, 2009

Here are some photos from Hanson’s second show at the Palladium on The Rock Boat. Once again, I’m not tagging these but if you plan to use them please credit HansonTickets.com

The lighting wasn’t as good as the Lido show as we were inside, so I didn’t manage to take as many good photos, but here they are anyway.

I still might post some additional photos later on, I haven’t really had much time to go through them to see what ones are good and upload them!

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Article: MUSIC: Top Ten now and then

By | January 26, 2009

Do you remember the first “NOW” CD that came out and how awesome it was? We’re now 29 albums deep, and I think it’s about time there was a “Best of Now” disc. Here are my picks for the 10 best song hyper-compilation from the first eight volumes (where the best songs clearly are).

7. Hanson – “MMMBop”; “NOW Volume 1”

From the original NOW album, back in the days when we couldn’t figure out how many girls were in Hanson, the greatest song around was “MMMBop.” It’s really catchy, even if the chorus is just a bunch of random syllables. And the lyrics are actually kind of deep … right? Either way, listening to this song really brings me back, and hence makes the list.

Source (for the complete list)

The Rock Boat: Hanson jams with Cowboy Mouth

By | January 25, 2009

Totally stumbled upon this collaboration. We were getting some ice cream (24 hour soft serve, woo!) and were going to sit down behind the stage when Fred mentioned that Isaac, Taylor and Zac would be joining him. This video is from the side of the stage because it was as close as we could get at that time. But a TON of the non fans were totally impressed that Hanson did this with Cowboy Mouth.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNSzGV4zE08&hl=en&fs=1]

The Rock Boat: “Gilligan” Dancing to Blue Sky

By | January 25, 2009

I had been calling this guy “The Captain” but then Murphy from Gaelic Storm dubbed him “Gilligan” and I find that to be much more fitting, so it’s stuck. Here is Gilligan and his friend dancing during Blue Sky.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcozGaWy8Gk&hl=en&fs=1]