Now we come to a disproportionately important band in my history with pop music.
It is the spring of 1991, I’m 12 years old and finishing the 6th grade. I’m starved for in my rural Alaskan hometown with 3 TV stations (one being rebroadcasted TV from Anchorage, the other two re-transmitted Detroit NBC & PBS). Our only radio station has a country/gospel format and the idea of Cable TV is so exotic and unfathomable.
I started getting music videos from NBCs Friday Night Videos on the rare occasions I’m able to (on Friday nights only).
I buy my first cassingle. Phil Collins “Do You Remember. I want nothing more than all of the pop culture the kids in the Lower 48 have so much access to.
I’m aware of the existence of The Disney channel mostly through trips “outside” to the lower 48, and time in hotels but it’s an ungraspable aspirational thing for the most part.
But I have a friend who moved into a trailer park that has Satalite TV (not the tine little DSS dishes of today but the huge ones from the 80's)… and for a brief while they THE DISNEY CHANNEL.
That Disney Channel has two things perfectly geared towards a 12-year-old Kids Incorporated and THE NEW MICKEY MOUSE CLUB and that New Micky Mouse Club has a band… Now you’re probably thinking of course it has a band… Britney Spears, Christina Agulara, Justin Timberlake, and JC Chasez were on that show…
No, this was the first manufactured pope from The New Micky Mouse Club featuring Albert Fields, Tiffini Hale (RIP), Chase Hampton, and Deedee Mango Hall.
There was no way this wouldn’t be the group of my first casingle “I Found Love” and one of my first albums (their EP followup placeholder between studio albums “In the Meantime, In Between Time”. You took what you could get as a child in Alaska and I played those to cassettes to absolute death.
I actually got to see the music video for the single from the 2nd studio album Free on TV as well (I’m not sure how I managed that, getting to see music videos you actually wanted to see when they were only on super late on Friday nights was a total crapshoot).
They may have been a super generic manufactured pop group but they were MY FIRST super generic manufactured pop group. Also, they may have factored into one of my earliest crushes which of course is the thing that determines all of your musical tastes in your pre-teens, so there’s that.
I will *NEVER* have an objective take on The Party, they will always be one of my favorites.
