Growing Up Is Hard to Do

By Guy Garcia

ADOLESCENCE IS THE PITS. YOU'RE not quite an adult and no longer a child; you don't seem to fit in with either camp. You have your own ideas now; you want to be taken seriously, but people keep patting you on the head and telling you to run along and play with the other boys. Not to mention that embarrassing way your voice keeps cracking when you get too emotional.

The New Kids on the Block were still teenagers when their 1986 debut album, New Kids on the Block, changed the face of prepubescent pop by putting a teen- idol spin on a black urban beat. Eight years and 60 million albums, singles and videotapes later, the group -- Donnie Wahlberg, Jordan Knight, Jonathan Knight, Danny Wood and Joe McIntyre -- are no longer new and no longer kids. Now in their mid-20s, they have, in show-biz terms at least, reached that other awkward age, groping for a way to reach an adult audience without alienating the screaming teenyboppers who made them rich and famous. So what's an old New Kid to do? Change the band's name, for one thing, to NKOTB (not, obviously, a radical switcheroo) and hire a team of crack producers to give them a slicker, more grown-up sound. Thanks to studio pros like Teddy Riley % and Narada Michael Walden (who have separately produced records for Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey), Face the Music is the most polished album the Kids have ever made.

Unashamedly derivative, Face the Music lifts -- sometimes actually samples -- grooves from 20 years of soul, funk and rap, at different moments aping the likes of Earth, Wind and Fire, James Brown, Bell Biv Devoe and Prince. After a short introduction in which the Kids announce, "We've been away for a while, but we're back," the record gets off to a promising start with You Got the Flavor, which sets silky harmonies to a hip-hop beat before sliding into a bratty rap digression worthy of Wahlberg's younger brother Marky Mark.

Dirty Dawg, with its thrusting rhythms and rich harmonies, flirts with -- but stops short of -- the gangsta rap misogyny of Snoop Doggy Dogg. Jordan Knight sounds more peevish than menacing when he sings, "I gave you all that I can/ Till I caught you swinging with another man/ But this time you strayed too far/ Now you come begging like the dog you are."

The Kids also take a stab at social relevance on Keepin' My Fingers Crossed. Their naivete is almost charming as they fret over violence and the dire state of humanity, concluding, "I guess the only thing you can do is keep your fingers crossed."

The rest of Face the Music is bubble-gum sweet, alternating between mid- tempo make-out sound tracks and swooning ballads whose message is pretty much summed up by the dilemma expressed in Girls: "What would boys be without girls to love? . . . / Can't live with 'em, can't live without girls." That's the first thing boys learn when they grow up to be men.