MARXISTS AT THE MUSIC - New Kids on the Block - Step by Step (1990): The Backstage Bedroom
- Edward Francis
- Feb 9
- 21 min read
By Edward Michael Francis (they/them)
Marxists at the Music
Who Were New Kids on the Block?
New Kids on the Block were not a band in any traditional sense. They were infrastructure—five working-class white teenagers from Boston assembled in 1984 by producer Maurice Starr to perform a function. That function was straightforward: to replicate the commercial success of Starr's previous act, New Edition, while redirecting profits toward a white, middle-class, parent-approved teen market. Starr's stated goal was explicit—"I honestly believe that if they'd been white, [New Edition] would have been 20 times as big."
The group consisted of brothers Jonathan and Jordan Knight, Joey McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg, and Danny Wood. Starr wrote and produced nearly everything they recorded in their early years, maintaining total creative control over sound, image, and marketing. Their 1988 album Hangin' Tough made them superstars, spawning hits like "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" and "Please Don't Go Girl." By 1990, they weren't just a pop group—they were a commercial juggernaut, complete with dolls, lunchboxes, bedsheets, and a 1-900 hotline that received 100,000 calls per week.
The group's music borrowed heavily from Black R&B and New Jack Swing aesthetics—
rhythmic swing, layered vocals, call-and-response structures, occasional rap inflections—but stripped those elements of historical and social context, repackaging them as safe, sanitized desire for preteen girls. This wasn't influence. It was extraction. And by the time Step by Step was released in June 1990, the assembly line was running at full efficiency.
The “Watching” Machine
I didn’t come to New Kids on the Block as a fan. I came to them obliquely, through my sister, through her bedroom, through the intense seriousness with which she and her friends treated something I had been trained to dismiss. NKOTB entered my life not as music I chose, but as music that occupied space—on walls, on beds, in magazines, and in conversations that were not meant for me but happened close enough that I could not avoid them.
At the time, my relationship to the band was governed by mockery. My friends and I teased my sister relentlessly for liking them. We said their music sucked. We said they were fake.
We said they weren’t real musicians. This wasn’t just sibling cruelty; it was gendered enforcement. We understood, even if only intuitively, that music loved by girls—especially young girls—was culturally disposable, safe to ridicule, and beneath serious consideration. Liking NKOTB openly would have marked me as failing a test of masculinity I didn’t yet know I was taking.
And yet, in private, the dismissal was not complete. I secretly liked a few of the songs. Not enough to admit it, not enough to claim them, but enough to register the contradiction. That split—public disdain, private enjoyment—mirrored the larger cultural logic surrounding boy bands: derided as worthless, engineered junk, while still functioning as highly effective emotional technology. I learned early that it was acceptable to consume this music only at a distance, only through irony or denial.
The moment Step by Step entered our house is still vivid. My sister received it for Christmas in 1990—her first New Kids on the Block album—and it immediately became an object of gravity. She and her friends spent hours in her room listening, flipping through YM, Seventeen, and other teen magazines, studying photos, reading interviews, memorizing trivia. This wasn’t passive listening. It was devotional labor. The album didn’t exist alone; it was embedded in a ritual environment of posters, glossies, and whispered conversations about which New Kid was whose.
From the outside, it was easy to sneer. From close range, it was impossible not to notice how structured the experience was. The magazines told them how to look, how to rank the boys, how to narrate their feelings, how to convert desire into personality quizzes and safe fantasies. The album provided the emotional soundtrack, but the surrounding media taught the interpretive rules. Together, they formed a closed circuit in which longing could circulate
endlessly without ever demanding power, agency, or reciprocity.
What stayed with me was how adult the machinery was relative to the audience it targeted. These were grown men, backed by a professionalized production and marketing apparatus, selling stylized intimacy to children while insisting—repeatedly—that nothing inappropriate was happening. The insistence itself was revealing. Innocence wasn’t a natural condition of the product; it was something actively managed.
Remembering Step by Step now, I don’t feel nostalgia so much as recognition. Watching my sister and her friends engage with NKOTB from the next room over gave me an early view of how pop culture aimed at girls is simultaneously trivialized and weaponized—mocked as silly even as it performs intense ideological work. This album wasn’t just something they liked. It was a coordinated lesson in how to want, how to wait, and how to accept fantasy as a substitute for agency.
Inside the Bedroom
The critics hated Step by Step, but who cares what critics think about music they were never meant to hear? The real story lives with the people the album was designed for—the girls who hung the posters, bought the lunch boxes, and learned every word by heart.
My sister Liz received Step by Step for Christmas 1990. She was seven years old—younger than the 12-16 demographic the product was designed for, but old enough to be captured by it. "I had the bed sheets. I had the lunchbox. I had the backpack," she recalls now, decades later. "I had it all. The t-shirts. Oh, the t-shirts."
The album didn't arrive alone. It came embedded in what Liz calls "the gateway"—boy bands led to the magazines (Tiger Beat, YM, Seventeen), which then taught the interpretive framework. The music provided the emotional soundtrack, but the magazines taught her how to want, how to rank, how to perform desire as personality quiz and safe fantasy. Together, they created what she describes as "a formative part of my childhood"—happy memories of "listening to those tapes over and over again on my boom box in my bedroom, learning all the words by heart."
This wasn't unique to Liz. A woman writing for The Strong National Museum of Play describes her own childhood bedroom covered in "over 200 posters," along with pillow covers, beach towels, T-shirts, ten-inch-diameter buttons, videos, dolls, action figures, and scrapbooks from concerts. She could recite everything about each band member "from when their birthdays are to their middle names, from their favorite books to favorite pets." She even camped out nine days for concert tickets. This level of devotion wasn't fandom—it was full environmental saturation, the bedroom transformed into a shrine where the product could operate without interruption.
What made Step by Step so effective wasn't mystery—it was familiarity engineered to feel like intimacy. Rebecca Wallwork, who wrote the 33 1/3 book analyzing NKOTB's Hangin' Tough, identifies age fourteen as neurologically critical for fandom formation. At that age, dopamine responses to anticipated experiences create bonds that can last decades. The brain is wired to attach intensely to whatever captures it during this window. NKOTB didn't stumble into this demographic—they were precision-tooled for it. And they caught children even younger. Liz was seven. The machinery didn't require the target age; it just required the target vulnerability.
Wallwork and other fans describe feeling that the band members "sang just to them personally"—a sensation they now recognize intellectually as manufactured but still feel emotionally. One fan writing about a NKOTB reunion concert decades later described the experience as "surreal, almost like being 15 again—only the best part of being 15." Another recalled crying herself to sleep at age nine "because we loved the band so fucking much our tiny little nine-year-old brain had a meltdown." These weren't casual listeners. These were children whose developing brains formed primary attachments to a commercial product designed to exploit exactly that capacity.
The safety narrative was crucial to the product's success and its ability to reach younger audiences. Multiple fan accounts frame NKOTB as a refuge from the predatory sexuality of hair metal. One analysis notes that Warrant and Mötley Crüe videos featured "women as prey," with songs like "Cherry Pie" and "Girls, Girls, Girls" framing women's bodies as "inanimate accessories of male fantasy." Watching those videos felt like "being hunted, the rockers stalking, the women prey, as if any moment one lion in eyeliner might reach through the screen."
NKOTB offered something different. Their videos showed "age-appropriate young women" on ferris wheels and in convertibles, fully dressed and celebrated rather than consumed. The New Kids were framed as "non-threatening boys that wouldn't dream of slipping roofies to the girls who worshipped them (even though these girls weren't even old enough to know what a 'roofie' was)." Liz describes it simply: "They talk about like, oh, I'm going to treat you right and stuff. And, you know, what girl doesn't want that."
This is where the grooming mechanism becomes structural rather than sensational. The "safety" wasn't protection—it was product design. By positioning themselves as the alternative to predatory masculinity, NKOTB could deploy R&B intimacy aesthetics (breath, groove, seduction) while maintaining plausible deniability about the age of their audience. The contrast with hair metal made the product feel wholesome by comparison, even as it taught seven-year-olds to learn lyrics by heart about adult romantic and sexual scenarios. The album positioned itself as the good option, the safe choice, the boy who would treat you right—and in doing so, gained access to spaces and audiences that more overtly sexual products could not reach.
"The magazines reinforced this framework relentlessly. They didn't just report on the band—they instructed readers on how to organize their desire. SuperTeen promised answers to 'YOUR MOST-ASKED QUESTIONS IN THEIR OWN HANDWRITING!'—the handwriting detail creating the illusion of personal correspondence rather than mass-produced copy. Teen Beat featured baby photos and childhood snapshots under headers like 'NEW KIDS THROUGH THE YEARS,' domesticating the band members into familiar figures readers had 'known since childhood.' Quizzes determined 'which New Kid is right for you.' Contests promised readers they could 'WIN A DATE' with the band, keeping the fantasy hovering just close enough to feel attainable. Puzzles and games—'NKOTB Place that Face'—required time investment that deepened attachment. Other fans testified in print: 'I Love NKOTB Because...' modeling the appropriate emotional response for readers uncertain how to articulate their own devotion.
This wasn't reporting. This was instruction. The magazines taught readers to treat intimacy as the accumulation of trivia (favorite colors, childhood pets, family members' names), to experience waiting as romantic devotion (contests you'd never win, dates that would never happen), and to mistake surveillance for connection (knowing everything about someone who knows nothing about you)."
Looking back now as a parent, Liz recognizes she "was a little bit too young for that scene." But that recognition doesn't erase the formation. She sees the same machinery operating on her own daughter through One Direction and BTS—different aesthetics, identical mechanism. The bedroom, the boom box, the devotional repetition, the words learned by heart. The assembly line updated its product but kept the blueprint. When adult women attend NKOTB reunion tours, they bring their daughters. Concert reports from 2024 describe three generations—grandmothers, mothers, and eight-year-old girls "who knew every word."
The product reproduces itself not despite its exploitative structure but because of it. It works so well that survivors become recruiters, passing the formation down as tradition.
The shame cycle operated alongside the devotion, and it was deeply gendered. I teased Liz relentlessly for liking NKOTB. My friends and I said their music sucked, said they were fake, said they weren't real musicians. This wasn't just sibling cruelty—it was enforcement. We understood intuitively that music loved by girls was culturally disposable, safe to ridicule, beneath serious consideration. A woman writing for Longreads describes the dynamic perfectly: "As is so often the case, the primary outlet for my burgeoning sexuality was also my greatest source of shame." By her freshman year of high school, most of her friends had turned against NKOTB following the tide of public backlash. "The only possible response to the omnipresent NKOTB backlash was total silence."
But silence didn't mean the attachment ended. The adult women who fill arenas for reunion tours decades later are proof that the bonds formed in childhood bedrooms don't dissolve on command. One fan describes attending a reunion concert and realizing, "For the majority of fans in the audience, this show wasn't a trip back in time—this was a celebration of music they loved not 25 years ago, but for every minute of the last 25 years." Another writes, "NKOTB won't tour forever, so I know how lucky I am to have had this special opportunity to relive part of my youth. As I look back, I can treasure both my childhood and adult memories with my favorite band."
These women understand what happened to them. They can articulate the machinery. They know the intimacy was manufactured, the safety was positioning, the devotion was engineered. And yet the feelings remain real because the feelings were real. The exploitation doesn't erase the experience; it explains why the experience was so powerful and so lasting.
What Liz describes as "formative" I witnessed as surveillance. From the next room over, I could see the structure even if I couldn't name it yet: grown men backed by professionalized marketing apparatus selling stylized intimacy to children while insisting nothing inappropriate was happening. The insistence itself was the tell. Innocence wasn't a natural condition of the product—it was something actively managed, something that required constant assertion precisely because it was always under threat from the product's own content.
When I asked my sister recently what she remembered most about Step by Step, she said "just a lot of happy memories." Then she paused and added that she was probably too young for it. Both statements are true. Both matter. The album was formative and exploitative. The memories are real and the machinery was predatory. Liz can hold both truths simultaneously because she lived them both.
What I couldn't see from outside her bedroom door was how the fantasy felt from inside it.
What she couldn't see from inside the fantasy was how deliberately it had been constructed for her. We're both right. That's what makes it so effective. The product worked precisely because it could be experienced as genuine connection while functioning as mass-market manipulation. It could feel like love while teaching the opposite of love—teaching that desire means waiting, that intimacy means one-sided devotion, that your feelings matter less than your loyalty.
Step by Step didn't just occupy space in my sister's bedroom. It organized it. And in organizing that space, it organized her understanding of what it meant to want, to wait, to believe someone when they promised to treat you right. The album wasn't playing in the room. The album was constructing the room, and everyone inside it.
The Racialized Assembly Line
New Kids on the Block did not emerge as a band in the romantic sense—friends with guitars, shared artistic vision, mutual discovery. They emerged as a solution. Specifically, a solution engineered by Maurice Starr to a problem the pop industry had already identified: how to retain the sonic prestige, rhythmic authority, and commercial momentum of Black R&B and hip-hop–inflected pop while redirecting its profits toward a white, middle-class, parent-approved teen market.
Starr's earlier success managing and producing New Edition is not incidental background—it is the precondition for NKOTB's existence. New Edition had demonstrated that young Black male performers could anchor a wildly lucrative model combining R&B harmonies, dance, romantic address, and youth appeal. Their 1982 debut single "Candy Girl" reached #1 on the UK Singles Chart and sold over a million copies. Starr wrote and produced every song on that album. He had proven the formula worked. Then he proved why, from the industry's perspective, Black performers presented a problem.
Despite the album's massive success and a lengthy tour, New Edition members were paid less than two dollars each. In late 1983, they fired Starr, accusing him of embezzlement. They retained industry attorney Steven Machat, sued Starr for damages, and won—along with the right to continue using their group name. The financial exploitation wasn't accidental. It was structural. Starr had created a hit-making machine, but one in which Black performers retained too little economic autonomy, remained subject to racist panic cycles, and—critically—were harder to safely market to white suburban parents at scale. The response was not to abandon the sound, but to extract it.
Starr was explicit about his intentions. As he told reporters: "I honestly believe that if they'd been white, [New Edition] would have been 20 times as big." This wasn't speculation—it was a business plan. In 1986, Starr and his business partner Mary Alford set out to "create a white counterpart act." According to NKOTB's manager Dick Scott, "Starr decided to go one step further after New Edition by creating a group with five young white boys. White middle America hasn't had a group like this since the Osmonds."
NKOTB represent that extraction made flesh. Their formation replicates New Edition's structure almost point for point—group size, age range, vocal role differentiation, choreography-heavy performance, romantic branding—but replaces Black bodies with white ones while preserving the sonic and stylistic markers that signified "cool," "urban," and "authentic" at the turn of the 1990s. Donnie Wahlberg, who became the group's first member at age fifteen, later described the process: "When New Kids were formed, Maurice Starr was looking for anybody that could sing, dance and rap. Maurice almost got arrested for driving around schools looking for young white kids."
The group was initially signed to Columbia's black music division and originally marketed to Black audiences—a telling detail about where Starr understood the sound to come from. But the long-term strategy was always broader. The group even performed on Soul Train and Showtime at the Apollo, borrowing credibility from Black cultural spaces before pivoting to the white teen market that would make them twenty times as big.
This is not influence; it is industrial translation. Black musical labor becomes a template, stripped of racial threat and reinserted into the market as mass-safe desire. Starr maintained total creative control over the product. The Hangin' Tough album carried this credit: "All instruments played or programmed by Maurice Starr." He often sang backup vocals as well. In a 1990 Entertainment Weekly profile, Starr stated matter-of-factly: "Everything I've produced in the past two years has been a hit." When asked about his approach to talent scouting, he said: "I think I can make anybody a star."
His comments about race were remarkably candid, even as they exposed the machinery: "I do think that almost every black family has as much talent as the New Edition. There's just something about the ghetto that makes people interesting." When asked about white families, he smiled and replied: "I'd have to say that most white families have as much talent as New Kids on the Block." The implication was clear—talent wasn't the variable. Race was.
This matters because Step by Step arrives at the precise moment when this translation is no longer tentative but triumphant. By 1990, NKOTB are not a gamble; they are proof of concept. The industry has learned that it can route R&B production values through white performers and sell them to children—particularly girls—without triggering the moral panics that so often attach to Black male sexuality. The result is a product that feels transgressive enough to be exciting and sanitized enough to be "wholesome." A CBS Records executive, Burt Baumgartner, articulated the strategy without shame: "Look, this new generation didn't hear that song 20 years ago when the Chi-Lites or whoever did it. A lot of these kids think the Beatles were Paul McCartney's backup band."
The amnesia was the point. R&B's Black origins could be obscured, repackaged, and sold as new precisely because the target demographic—children between ages 8 and 14—had no historical memory of the source material. Those children, according to industry estimates, had a combined $6 billion per year to spend. Starr understood that as long as the lyrics stayed "squeaky clean"—one of his acts released a song titled "Rated PG"—the parents providing that $6 billion would stay happy too.
Teen magazines like YM and Seventeen function as the ideological lubricant in this system. They bridge the gap between sound and subjectivity. Where the music borrows Black-coded rhythms and vocal styles to generate affect, the magazines translate that affect into safe fantasy: crushes, quizzes, confessions, and carefully managed intimacy. The boys are framed not as sexual agents but as objects of care, emotional companions whose desire is implied but never fully articulated. This framing is crucial. It allows the industry to deploy R&B aesthetics—which historically carry adult sexual connotations—while insisting the product is appropriate for preteens.
Seen this way, NKOTB are not a betrayal of R&B so much as a containment strategy. They allow the industry to monetize Black musical innovation while disciplining its social meanings. The white boy band becomes a buffer zone: close enough to Blackness to feel modern, far enough from it to feel controllable. That buffer is racial, but it is also gendered and age-coded. It exists to manage young female desire—encouraging it, scripting it, and ultimately limiting its demands.
The financial stakes were enormous. By 1991, NKOTB topped Forbes' list of highest-paid entertainers, ahead of Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, and Bill Cosby. The Wall Street Journal reported that Starr sometimes earned $6 million per week; Starr claimed it was sometimes more. The group's official fan club had over 200,000 members—one of the largest in the United States. Their hotline, 1-900-909-5KIDs, received approximately 100,000 calls per week. This wasn't just a band—it was an industrial revenue stream, extracting maximum profit from the very demographic (young girls) whose cultural tastes were simultaneously dismissed as frivolous.
Step by Step is not an aberration in this process; it is its most confident expression. By the time this album is released, the assembly line is running smoothly. The question is no longer whether the model works, but how much ideological work it can be made to perform—how effectively it can teach young listeners to desire without power, intimacy without reciprocity, and rhythm without its history. The album's title track, "Step by Step," had first appeared in 1987 via Starr's earlier group The Superiors—another attempt to replicate his formula. When that version failed, Starr simply lifted the song, gave it to his more profitable white act, and watched it spend three weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Same song. Different bodies.
Twenty times as big.
Track-by-Track (Oh, Baby!)
“Step by Step”The title track is anchored by Jordan, whose vocal agility and brightness make him the obvious center of gravity, but the song is explicitly engineered to showcase the entire lineup. Each member gets a numbered solo line—Wood, Wahlberg, Jordan, McIntyre, then Jonathan—turning the track into a literal meet-the-band exercise. This structure reinforces the commodity logic of NKOTB: five differentiated male personas packaged inside a single hit. The New Jack Swing production is competent and contemporary, but notably stiff; it swings just enough to signal R&B credibility without ever feeling lived-in or embodied.
“Tonight”Jordan again handles the primary lead, carrying the song’s dramatic arcs, while McIntyre supports with higher harmonies designed to soften the track’s bombast. Wahlberg is largely absent vocally, which only heightens how strange this track feels so early in the album. The self-referential lyrics and overproduced synth brass make this sound like a victory-lap closer misplaced at track two, and Jordan’s earnest delivery can’t compensate for how self-satisfied and backward-looking the song feels.
“Baby, I Believe in You”This is Jordan front and center, with his breathy phrasing pushed hard into sensual territory. McIntyre shadows him in the choruses, reinforcing the emotional pull, while the other members recede almost entirely into background texture. The whispered ad-libs, sighs, and soft “yeahs” are unmistakably erotic in tone, which is precisely what makes the song uncomfortable given the band’s audience. This is R&B intimacy language repurposed wholesale for a preteen market.
“Call It What You Want”Here the album briefly finds its footing. Jordan and McIntyre share the vocal space more evenly, and the groove—clearly modeled on New Edition—suits both of them. Wahlberg contributes rhythmic emphasis rather than a full rap, keeping the track grounded without tipping into parody. This is one of the few songs where the band sounds comfortable inside its borrowed aesthetic, though that comfort only underscores how derivative the material is.
“Let’s Try It Again”The lead shifts away from Jordan here, most likely to McIntyre, whose softer, less commanding tone is immediately noticeable. The extended intro and tentative delivery expose the group’s internal hierarchy: not everyone is equipped to carry a ballad. The song’s theme of persistence and retrying frames emotional endurance as romance, a pattern that recurs throughout the album and becomes increasingly manipulative with repetition.
“Happy Birthday”Jonathan appears to be featured more prominently here, supported by layered group harmonies. His restrained delivery aligns with the song’s faux-innocent tone, but the lyrics are deeply unsettling, leaning on youth and age as romantic framing devices. The 12/8 doo-wop pastiche attempts to launder the song’s implications through nostalgia, but the result is one of the album’s most overtly groomy moments.
“Games”Wahlberg steps forward on this track, contributing rhythmic spoken lines that flirt with toughness while never fully committing to rap. The funk-inflected bass line gives the song a momentary physicality, and Jordan returns in the chorus to smooth out the edges. The Wizard of Oz chant is juvenile enough to defang any menace, reducing the song’s posturing to harmless play-acting.
“Time Is on Our Side”The lead again shifts away from Jordan, likely to McIntyre or Jonathan, and the drop in vocal authority is palpable. The song leans heavily on inevitability—time, patience, destiny—rehearsing the album’s core lesson that desire should wait and trust rather than act. The performance is earnest but undistinguished, dissolving into the album’s growing mass of interchangeable ballads.
“Where Do I Go from Here?”This track is vocally anonymous, with no clear standout lead. Jordan may be present, but if so he’s buried under the same syrupy production that flattens every other ballad here. The song exemplifies the album’s midsection malaise: identical keyboard tones, identical emotional cues, and nothing vocally distinctive enough to justify its existence.
“Stay with Me Baby”Wahlberg dominates here, and for all the wrong reasons. His exaggerated reggae accent turns the track into outright racial caricature, with the rest of the group joining in on the affect. Jordan and McIntyre’s smoother vocals only highlight how offensive and lazy the genre cosplay is. This is appropriation without even the pretense of respect—pure novelty Blackface masquerading as flavor.
“Funny Feeling”Jordan returns to the lead, but the material gives him nothing to work with. The Frankie Valli–style melodrama is delivered over the same generic keyboard bed that plagues the album’s ballads, making the song feel like a karaoke track rather than a performance. Whatever emotional sincerity Jordan brings is smothered by repetition and low-effort arrangement.
“Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” The closer splits focus between Jordan’s lead and Wahlberg’s rhythmic interjections, reintroducing rap-adjacent elements just as the album ends. The upbeat tempo masks a bitter lyrical stance: wounded masculinity, love withheld, devotion turned into leverage. Ending the record this way reframes everything that came before as conditional affection, reinforcing the album’s manipulative emotional economy rather than resolving it.
The Bedroom, Revisited
What Step by Step ultimately clarifies is not why New Kids on the Block succeeded, but why they could never be mistaken for New Edition. The difference is not talent alone, nor even authenticity in some romantic sense. It is structural. New Edition emerged from a cultural lineage that treated rhythm, desire, and performance as lived social practice. NKOTB were built to simulate that lineage while neutralizing its risks. What they inherited was the sound; what they stripped away was the context, the reciprocity, and the accountability.
Listening to Step by Step now, without the insulation of nostalgia, the album plays less like pop and more like instruction. It teaches patience as virtue, waiting as romance, persistence as proof of love. It borrows the language of R&B intimacy—breath, groove, seduction—while redirecting it toward an audience too young to act on desire and too carefully managed to challenge it. The creep factor is not incidental. It is the price of maintaining a fantasy that must remain erotic enough to hook listeners and innocent enough to be sold to their parents.
The women who lived inside this product as children understand this now. They can articulate the machinery with startling precision—the dopamine engineering, the safety narrative that functioned as access mechanism, the magazines that taught them how to organize desire, the shame cycle that forced their love underground. They know the intimacy was manufactured. They know they were too young. And yet the feelings remain real because the feelings were real. What Rebecca Wallwork and thousands of other adult fans demonstrate is that you can hold both truths simultaneously: it worked, and it was exploitation. The formation was genuine, and the formation was predatory.
My sister Liz holds both truths too. She can say "just a lot of happy memories" and "I was probably too young for it" in the same breath because both are accurate descriptions of the same experience. The album was formative and inappropriate. The devotion was authentic and engineered. The safety was comforting and controlling. These contradictions don't cancel each other out—they explain why the product was so effective, why it created bonds that lasted decades, why adult women still fill arenas and bring their daughters to continue the cycle.
I used to tease Liz for loving this band. I said their music sucked. I said it was fake. I wasn't wrong—but I didn't fully understand why it bothered me. Now I do. What unsettles me about Step by Step isn't just the low-effort production, the racial cosplay, or the embarrassing rap and reggae detours. It's the way the album positions itself as a trusted companion inside a child's private space, whispering reassurance, devotion, and control while presenting itself as harmless fun. It's the way it taught seven-year-olds to learn by heart the language of adult romantic negotiation. It's the way it framed waiting and patience and belief as the proper posture of desire, training an entire generation of girls that love means staying loyal to someone who will never know your name.
The fan testimony makes clear that this wasn't a bug—it was the entire design. The bedroom wasn't just the site of consumption. It was the laboratory where the product did its real work, where posters and magazines and boom boxes combined to create an environment where fantasy could circulate without ever demanding reciprocity, where longing could be cultivated and managed and monetized without the risk of actual intimacy, actual agency, actual power.
When I think back to that bedroom now—Liz, the magazines spread out on the floor, the posters on the walls, the tape deck playing Step by Step over and over until every word was memorized—I don't see innocence corrupted by pop culture. I see pop culture doing exactly what it was designed to do. The album wasn't just playing in the room. It was organizing it.
And in organizing that space, it organized my sister's understanding of what it meant to want something, to wait for something, to believe someone when they promised to treat you right.
The machinery is still running. Those eight-year-old girls at the 2024 NKOTB concerts who know every word? They're the third generation being formed by the same blueprint—different aesthetics, identical mechanism. Their mothers learned from Step by Step. Their grandmothers learned from Hangin' Tough. Now they're learning from whatever iteration of the product their parents have passed down as tradition, as shared culture, as harmless nostalgia.
But it was never harmless. It was precise. It was effective. And it worked so well that the people it formed can see exactly how it operated while still feeling the bond it created. That's not a failure of critical consciousness—that's proof of how good the engineering was.
So when adult women say they treasure their memories of NKOTB, when they say the music was formative, when they say they've loved the band "not 25 years ago, but for every minute of the last 25 years"—believe them. And when they say they were too young, when they recognize the safety narrative was product positioning, when they understand the intimacy was manufactured—believe them then too.
Both truths exist because both were built into the product from the beginning. Step by Step was designed to feel like love while teaching the opposite of love. It was designed to create devotion that would last a lifetime while offering nothing in return but the permission to keep waiting, keep believing, keep buying the next album, the next tour, the next piece of merchandise that promised the fantasy might finally become real.
The album succeeded not despite this contradiction but because of it. And the bedroom where my sister learned every word by heart? That wasn't a sanctuary from the machinery.
That was where the machinery did its finest work.
Hammer and Sickle Rating: 1.5 out of 5 ☭½
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