makes my heart actually skip a beat
"Candy Girl", being THE BEST, and legacies begetting legacies
The summer I was nine, my family took a weeklong trip to New Jersey. We stayed with distant cousins, and one of them, Shea, was my favorite. It seemed like whenever he saw me, he'd sing the chorus of a New Edition tune to me: Candy girl, you are my world!
My cousin was not the first person to know my name and link it to that song. He won't be the last. "Candy Girl" was released in 1983, a perfect debut single for the group that got their name because the members saw themselves as the new edition of the Jackson 5. The Jackson 5 were influenced by soul and doo-wop groups from the era before them, and even some by future labelmates The Temptations.
The origins of boy bands are similar to the origins of rock music. Yes, you can point to Beatlemania as a flash point, but The Beatles were just putting their spin on Elvis and the like, who were doing their best imitations and interpolations of bluesmen. Black barbershop quartets beget white groups that did the same thing, and during the 1950s R&B songs were famously being covered by white artists because it was uncouth for race records (as they were called then) to be consumed by anyone lighter than a paper bag. Jazz was just barely becoming accepted by a wider swath of the mainstream but Little Richard was a bridge too far.
So in the 1960s, there were two things going on at once that would shape popular music and a whole subsection of youth culture in the next fifty years. You had American and British men turning their version of blues into what music critics a generation later would consider the definitive sound of a generation, all while Berry Gordy and Motown began to bring the other definitive sound of a generation to a mainstream audience. And even then, nothing could have prepared the world for The Jackson 5. The opening paragraph of a Rolling Stone profile from November 1970 alone gives you an idea of the impact that J5 had just a year after their Motown debut:
At one point during the Jackson 5 concert at Madison Square Garden October 19th, a ten- or eleven-year-old girl standing on the seat in front of us turned to one of her equally young friends and, grasping the other girl's hand in excitement, said, "Feel my heart!" That's what it was all about: Heart Throbs. I hadn't heard such ecstatic, passionate, I-can't-stand-it screaming since the Rolling Stones played New York's Academy of Music in 1965. Police fortified the stage, people clogged the front aisles nearly in heaps, girls climbed frantically, screeching, over seats to get closer, no one downstairs was standing still much less sitting down. It’s one of those Phenomenons again, folks…
No wonder five boys from Boston aspired to be their heirs apparent.
I love when the nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are announced.
I know that getting in is like winning a Grammy or an Oscar or any sort of industry honor: antithetical to the whole point of artistry and a sign that we never truly leave behind our worst adolescent impulses of wanting to bestow popularity. Yet at the same time, it is a badge of honor; proof that you've created something that has become indelible enough that swathes of people want it to be remembered as THE BEST.
However, most of my enjoyment of the process comes in seeing the absolute outrage from certain sections of the population about who gets nominated. Mind you, these are just the people that the board is considering. The votes haven't been counted yet. And when that dust settles in mid-April when the new class is announced, the griping begins anew.
It's always the same thing: why are these non-rock acts being inducted? Because rock and roll in the case of the Rock Hall is less about rock as a genre and more about popular music in general. To include acts that are not archetypically rock associated is to widen the definition of THE BEST in popular music, to say that THE BEST is not just limited to four white guys playing guitar, bass, and drums. THE BEST includes The Queen of Soul (Aretha Franklin, first woman inducted in 1987), girl groups (The Supremes, inducted in 1988 and Martha and the Vandellas, inducted in 1995), soulful soloists (Dusty Springfield and Curtis Mayfield, both inducted in 1999 and Issac Hayes, inducted in 2000), and trailblazers in their genre (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the first hip hop act inducted in 2007).
You may have observed that most of the acts mentioned in that litany are Black artists, with the exception of Dusty Springfield. This is not to entirely praise the Rock Hall, though. One of the many criticisms of the institution is that it overlooks musical genres that primarily appeal to Black audiences, with some exceptions. This has changed some in the past decade, with the inclusion of NWA, Donna Summer, Bill Withers, Tupac Shakur, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Jay-Z, LL Cool J, Nile Rogers, Gil-Scott Heron, and the godmother of rock herself, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Yet with all of this excellence, it seems like there's something missing in this bunch.
The Jackson 5 were inducted in 1997. If you don't count The Beatles, they're the only boy band adjacent group in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Their influence is massive in a way that we all understand. After all, one of the most famous singers of all time emerged from this group. The same way that dozens upon dozens of future rockers and songwriters took to their guitars after falling for The Beatles, future groups would follow the lead set up by the Jacksons, including the young men from the projects of Roxbury, Massachusetts.
And like their predecessors, New Edition went through it. There wasn't an abusive father a la Joe Jackson, but they had their shady manager Maurice Starr, who famously paid Ricky Bell, Bobby Brown, Ronnie DeVoe, Michael Bivins, and Ralph Tresvant $1.87 a piece after their first tour. Their struggles didn't disappear after parting with Starr, either. While they promoted their second album the group discovered that they weren't actually signed to MCA Records as they thought but were, instead, linked to a production company. Each member had to borrow money from the label to continue working with them, essentially mortgaging themselves to MCA.
Meanwhile, Maurice Starr decided to see if he could replicate New Edition's success with a white group. New Kids on the Block's rise was concurrent with NE gaining a new member (Johnny Gill) after Bobby Brown was voted out, and its members worked on spin-off projects like Bel Biv Devoe. Michael Bivins would then use his clout to sign a group who, along with New Kids, would influence the next generation of boy bands: Boyz II Men.
We know how the story goes from here. Another shady manager would also create two groups and introduce them to the public as rivals, though the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC were exclusively all-white presenting. What wasn't as apparent was the influence of New Edition still working with predominantly Black groups. There was Boyz II Men, of course, but also Immature in the early 90s. Then B2K in the early and mid 2000s. Mindless Behavior in the early 2010s.
To qualify for induction in the Hall's Performers category (the only one that sees new entries every year), a musical act is eligible twenty-five years after the release of their first record. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the release of "Candy Girl", so New Edition is well past that first step.
The fact that they've never even made it to the ballot stage—the one we're in as of the time of this writing—is, well, just wrong. They're the template for a whole category of music across genres. The members found success on their own and together. Bobby Brown's basically a rock star front man, strictly on behavior alone! But, in the words of LeVar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it. Vibe laid out the argument for New Edition induction back in 2012. Andscape made an even stronger case four years later. There are comments on Future Rock Legends (a popular Rock Hall tracking site) from as recently as November of last year calling the snubbing of New Edition egregious.
In 2021, the Backstreet Boys—the best-selling boy band of all time—became eligible for Rock Hall induction. As much as I can't wait for the inevitable outrage whenever (or if ever) they make it to the ballot round, I hope that New Edition gets in before them. I have my doubts. This is America after all, and this country famously adores Black contributions to popular music while also pushing it to the side; see Sister Rosetta's induction not happening until 2017. A few years after Shea sang "Candy Girl" to me on vacation, I was at a Girl Scout meeting gushing about liking the Backstreet Boys only for one of my troop leaders to comment, "They're just copying our music."
However, Black groups that are considered to be boy bands among mainstream media circles aren't always viewed as such within Black communities. For Ricky, Bobby, Mike, Ralph, and Ronnie, the Jackson Five were aspirational. A generation later, those five (plus Johnny) were goals for Nate, Michael, Shawn, and Wanya from Boyz II Men. This difference is, I think, an advantage that New Edition has over their counterparts. This acceptability among male members of their audience may be the key to get them the wider respect that they deserve.
But at the end of the day, it's always those Candy Girls that got them to even be considered in the conversation. Those girls, like the girls who screamed for Elvis and The Beatles.
Those girls, always ahead of the curve.
Before I go, though, I'm going to leave you with one of THE BEST performances from the American Music Awards. In 2021, New Edition and New Kids on the Block teamed up to perform a medley of all their hits. In the opener, Donnie Whalberg says straight up that without NE, New Kids and the groups that came after would not exist. Halfway through, the camera pans out to the audience where BTS are absolutely vibing to the whole thing. Go forth and watch The Battle of Boston, friends.