Here is a list of FAMOUS peops who like Hanson (email me w/ anyone else that isn't on the list)
Quotes:
"Oh, definatly 'MMMBop' by Hanson. I think they are doing so well. And they're so young! To write a song like that at the young ages, what they did is very cool. All credit to the lads." (answering a question about his favorite song on 1997)
"You're expecting me to say yes aren't you? No, they're not. I really thought they would be but they really aren't. We hung out with them for a while in the States and they were pretty cool. Its amazing how they all get along so well. If I was in a band with my brothers, I think I would have killed them by now. I can see the smallest one, Zac right? I could see him getting on well with Aaron (Carter)." ~Brian Littrel(Answer to question "Are Hanson brats?")
"Yeah, I think they're cool. They're very talented. I wanna make a movie with them! I don't see them as competition because we make different kinds of music. Who's tougher? I think I'm tougher than Zac but the other two are pretty big. Isaac is... seventeen? I'm nine! Taylor I think might kill me! No! Just joking. I don't really think about who's the toughest, I just like them." ~Aaron Carter
"We really do think that Ike, Zac, and Taylor are talented though -- they are really what you call 'boy wonders.' We are really happy for them -- they have been working hard for like five years for more to get where they are - they are not the overnight sensation everyone thinks they are." ~Nick Carter
"'MMMBOP' deserved to win and when I get home, first thing I'm doing is calling U-Name-It, and getting 'Hanson' engraved on my Grammy next to my name, because, in the true spirit of life, we're all winners." ~Shawn Colvin
Bob Dylan admitted, "I just don't understand. I voted for 'MMMBOP.'"
Ol' Dirty Bastard, that guy in the red suit who jumped onstage, later explained, "Man, y'know, Ah wusz jus' tryin' tah show muh support fo' muh Hanson Brothers! Family! Yo."
Will Smith sighed, "Geez, if I'd known this was going down, I'd have dedicated my award to them. But I'd already dedicated it to Biggie n' 2Pac, and you just can't take back something like that. But it's all good."
"I hate it when people say Hanson sucks...Hanson does NOT suck. They proved that at the grammy's they can rock..face it people, bow down to Hanson, they rock and will be around alot longer than most..." ~Steven Jenkins (Third Eye Blind's lead singer)
"I loved Hanson. I loved MMMBop. I love it. How could you deny that? It just sounded great! And that kid can really sing!" ~Shawn Colvin at a post grammy party on Hanson
"I was very impressed with Hansons performance. I thought that little drummer was a kick-ass drummer, and that they sang great. I mean I didn't know, their just little boys you know? I was very impressed. I think they they'll probably be around in 20 years writing good songs and being in a great band." -Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac at the Grammy's
A guy from Rage Against the Machine was asked "If Godzilla was made into a sequel, who would u want him to fight?" and the guy says "Hanson, because they have SO much rock power. I mean, their rock power is huge, and they'd kick Godzilla's ass!"
"I have met bands like Hanson too. Zac's really nice. Do you know when his birthday is? October? He's 12 and he's really tall. He's up to here [stands up and places hand 2 inches over his own head].I think I'm tougher than Zac though, heh heh.My twin sister Angel is taller than him!" -Aaron Carter
(When asked if there were any competition between BSB and Hanson, since they are the two most popular groups with the teen audience right now?)
"We bet this question would come up - oh you guys! We have a completely different sound and look and image and whatever have you, and we do not feel like rivals at all. Case closed. We really do think that Ike, Zac, and Taylor are talented though - they are really what you call "boy wonders". We are really happy for them - they have been working hard for like five years for more to get where they are - they are not the overnight sensation everyone thinks they are." ~Nick Carter (Backstreet Boys)
"Those kids in Hanson are so talented and cute. Someone should get them a sitcom." ~Rosie O'Donnell
"I think Hanson's gonna be around for a long time. I think that...they're 3 great, talented young men."
"What I really liked this year in music was the diversity this year from all of the new artists, whether it is Wyclef and the Carnival or his style of hip-hop...or there was my style of music which just sampled hit records... to even the records of our pain that I wrote about and just the other personal records that I wrote about on my album, to Hanson and just their style... I don't think you've heard a record like that in a couple of years... to the Spice Girls, to Prodigy. I mean, these are all different types of styles of music that have been exposed this year, just different feelings and different vibes that that just made the big musical jumbo that much more flavorful." "I think Hanson's going to be around for a long time. I think that they're three great talented young men and I think that what people need to stop doing to music is looking at the negative in everything. People are trying their best. It's great, and I think they're going to be around for a long time. You know, I like Hanson. When I hear them sing live, they have good voices, they play live instruments. I think they are going to grow as musicians. They are great entertainers and they have a lot of personality... some clean-cut kids trying to have a good time. They sound like the Jackson 5 to me a little bit. They got a lot of soul to them." ~Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs
"The guys can sing, they can play, good songs, they can all sing, got personality. They're brilliant."
"Ah, nice bunch of lads, totally different class, you see what I mean? Guys can sing. They can play. Good songs. They can all sing... got personality. They're brilliant, you know. I'd give it to them every time, you know? Well done. Brilliant. They deserve it. As Marilyn Manson, God forget Marilyn Manson, let's go get Hanson, yeah wow! Way to go Marilyn, ah yes, satanic verse." ~Jamiriquai (Jay Kay)
<"I really think that they're stuff is cheesy now, but I think that that's just because they're young."
"I think that like, you know, they seem like they really love music which means that they'll stick with it...I think that Hanson could probably be really good in a few years, actually." ~Fiona Apple
Here's An Article:
Resistence Is Futile: Nobody Really Hates Hanson
By Thomas Conner
Contrary to popular opinion, I don't hate Hanson. Sometimes I grow weary of dealing with the story - fielding daily calls from an endless stream of pre-teen girls, foreign journalists and creepy sycophants who think I have some inside track on the personal habits, bodily markings and whereabouts of the world's newest pop triumvirate. One guy even offered to snap infra-red photos of the boys in their secret rehearsal spot. Yeesh.
Nobody really hates Hanson. Even the ghouls who create web pages glamorizing fantasies about assaulting our cherubic idols don't really hate them. Real hatred rarely inspires such tribute.
Cynics who naturally rail against anything that becomes hugely popular can't hate them completely. The songs are too good, the melodies are too sweet and Taylor has too much raw soul. I can't tell you how many times such people - myself included - have begun discussions of the pop trio by saying, "Well, I don't have anything against their music, but..."
But what? All other arguments are irrelevant. If you dislike a group because of its look, you're shallow. If you dislike a group simply because of its popularity, you have an inferiority complex that should be dealt with. If you dislike a group because the members' personalities chafe you, you're missing the point of pop music.
As Diana Hanson, the Hanson mom, told me early this year, "All that stuff about what it was like for them to play Legos together is diversionary. The music is what matters, and that story is out there."
Hanson's "Middle of Nowhere" album was a triumph for pop music. The melodies are catchy - resistance is futile - and the words frequently nonsensical. It's bright, cheerful and completely disposable. "MMMBop" sounds great every time you hear it, even after a hundred listens, and it demands nothing intellectural of you That's pop. It could be gone tomorrow, but it will have served it's purpose well.
For those reasons, I love the guys. I'm a power pop fanatic, and this music fits into my personal groove. In my reporting and criticism, I attempt to craft a more personal tone than your basic national media outlet. In so doing, I often end up sounding more snide than is warranted.
The last thing I want to become is part of the Tulsa music scene's problem. Tulsa's scene suffers mostly because area media - and fans - consistently disrespect their own. I have infinite respect for what these boys have achieved this year, and I hope others join me, regardless of musical tastes, in puffing with just a bit of pride in our hometown sons' accomplishments. Perhaps we could do the same for numerous other impressive musicians in our talent-packed local scene.
Of course, there's the rub: Hanson may have been born and home-schooled within our city limits, but they are hardly a product of the local music scene. The 300-plus local gigs Hanson publicists love to tell you about likely were as much as 95 percent private functions - not exactly dues-paying circumstances. They made virutally no effort to test their mettle in the Tulsa marketplace, where clubgoers choose to pay for the performance.
In the end, bypassing that probably helped Hanson succeed better than anything. After all, Leon Russell - previously Tulsa's most famous rock 'n' roll product - usually charges a greater fee when he playes Tulsa. Why? Because the audiences here aren't as big, and they don't respect him. Had Hanson suffered in the local concert scene, Mercury Records might not have mustered the confidence to support the boys as heartily as they did.
Therein lies my only valid gripe against the group: since the album hit, Tulsans have not seen hide nor hair of the boys. They have completely ignored their hometown fans. They even canceled their scheduled appearance at Tulsa's centennial homecoming celebration in September - a bad PR move that only made their heads look larger from the persepective of us little people back home in Green Country. Then again, maybe this is why Tulsa fans are so punchy; if we do help someone reach stardom, we'll probably never see them again.
It's something to think about the next time someone coplains about Tulsa's dearth of culture and fame. Suggest that next weekend they blow their movie-rental bucks on a cheap cover charge at a local club. Hear some music. Socialize instead of retreat. See what happens.
And thank you for your support.
Songwriting Whiz Kids Can Do It All
By David Cantwell
"Perhaps the most pernicious strain of contemporary criticism says one thing before it says anything else...'You can't fool me.' I think criticism ... has a good deal to do with a willingness to be fooled: to take an idea too far, to bet too much on too small an object or occasion, to be caught up or even swept away. What I am always looking for... is an objective platform for a subjective revision of our relations to the past, the present and the future."
There, I've said it.
And since the truth can set you free, and give you the strength to persevere against all obstacles, I'm plowing ahead. Even if something better should come along in '97, I'm still certain of two things: One, Middle Of Nowhere should be recognized as a great album; and two, it won't be. Even those who dig Hanson's "MMMBop"??the Single Of The Summer??are already hedging their bets, scurrying into an armor of predictable defenses so as not to be caught playing the fool.
The predictable defenses are predictably foolish. First off, fans and critics are already dismissing Middle Of Nowhere because it was made by three junior high kids, which is just another way of saying that people don't believe kids could really have made it. But Isaac, Taylor and Zach wrote or co-wrote all of the songs, four of the best here (including the Single Of The Summer) all by themselves, and they did the singing, too.
Granted they got songwriting help on the rest (Mark Hudson on a few, Mann and Weil on another), and surely they also got a ton of assistance from their producers (the Dust Brothers on two tracks, Stephen Lironi on the rest). But anyone who thinks that this assistance somehow diminishes the record isn't just dismissive of teenagers; they simply don't understand the collaborative way, generally, that a lot of great rock music has been made, or the role, specifically, that song doctors, producers and studio musicians have regularly played in that process. Can you say: The Corporation?
Just as predictable is the way people are calling this a "bubblegum" record. While Hanson's debut certainly has the kind of impossibly sweet and catchy hooks that bubblegum is known for, a sweet pop melody, alone, does not a bubblegum record make. The music on Middle Of Nowhere swallows bubblegum whole. The funk-hard "Look At You," "Speechless" and "Thinking Of You" sound like the J5 teamed up with a post-hip-hop Ohio Players. "I Will Come To You" and "With You In Your Dreams" are gorgeous, soaring pop-gospel ballads. Throughout the album, Taylor Hanson's MiJack-influenced singing is far too fierce and church-based to ever be reasonably called bubblegum.
Even if the Hanson brothers had nothing at all to say, this'd be a cool record, worth listening to just for the sheer visceral windows-down, summertime wonder of it.
But bubblegum isn't just a sound. It's also a steadfastly innocent escape-based music. And anyone who's actually listened to Middle Of Nowhere knows it is neither. The "secret that no one knows" about Middle Of Nowhere (to lift a line from the "Single Of The Summer") is that the entire album is about loss and how to move on in its wake.
"MMMBop," a song about how unpredictable and tenuous our lives really are ("In an mmmbop, they're gone"), is the only most obvious example. A little like a rodent-less "Ben," "Weird" is about the loss of identity in a world where "you don't stand out, and you don't fit in."
Funky and rocking as all hell, "Speechless" is about a loss of innocence. Soaring to string-inspired heights, "Yearbook" reads like a pop ballad about the loss of a friend who has disappeared from the viewpoint of those left behind to worry. "Lucy," sung by the breathy-voiced Zach, is about the loss of love. The stirring "I Will Come to You" is about the loss of a loved one.
"With You In Your Dreams," the most completely gospel moment on the disc, is dedicated to the memory of the boys' grandmother and, as a huge gesture, it's even written in her voice. The song's a dying message, an urging for those left behind to keep on living. And though it springs from the mouths of babes, I'm not certain I've ever heard a truer (albeit metaphorical) testament to the way those we love continue to guide, influence and comfort us (and haunt us too, but that's a different song), even after they're dead and gone. "And though my flesh is gone, hoo ohh," Taylor sings, "I will still be with you at all times... I don't want you to cry and weep, hoo ohh/ I want you to go on living your life." You can hear in Taylor's voice that this isn't just some song; this song has to matter. And by working from that point of view, it does.
Now, I know that for many listeners and critics it is just this sort of song??earnest, dramatic, poignant, and as simple and direct as real speech??that's going to drive people toward all those face-saving defenses in the first place. Well, what else is new? In our cynical, post-modern age, any strong statement of hope or faith expressed sincerely, without any poetic distance or winking irony or absent any undercurrent of rage, is supposed to be automatically suspect ("You can't fool me!") and to deserve instant critical trivialization.
(Here's an example. In a generally positive Rolling Stone review of Middle Of Nowhere, critic Chuck Eddy wrote that the ballad "Weird" is "silly," explaining himself by writing it's "about not fitting into a cookie-cutter world." So it has come to this: Expressions of rock 'n' roll's central dilemma are silly, by definition. Don't get me started...)
So how in the world did three teen-age boys, who've grown up entirely in the age of cynical grunge, create an album that so strongly rejects cynicism as reflex? And with today's guitar rock scene about as encouraging of big public emotional gestures as, well, the typical homeroom, then how in the hell did these kids find the guts to risk making an album that's so willing to just express strong emotions in unmistakable language??and to surround it all in larger-than-life arrangements that are unafraid to mirror the larger-than-life way such emotions are often felt?
Perhaps being from out-of-the-loop Oklahoma played a role in this somehow. Certainly their home-schooling, fundamentalist Christian parents have been doing something right, not the least of which was home-schooling them on the Time-Life Rock & Roll CD series. And maybe the fact that they spent several years growing up with their parents in Venezuela, where they could have been influenced by the unabashed emotionalism of so much Latin music, played a factor too. I don't know.
But I do know this album sounds like a wake-up call to anyone with enough heart left to be paying attention, with enough guts to let their guard down and just feel. Whether deliberately, accidentally or instinctively (who cares?), these kids have brought it all back home in a way today's coolest musicians and hippest critics haven't had the guts to.
In a recent ATN column, the always-gutsy Dave Marsh noted that meaning isn't just in the world inherently, we put it there. Well, stuck in these emotionally cautious times (which result in emotionally cautious music, and cautious criticism too), I find great meaning in Middle Of Nowhere. And never more so than in a great pop-rock, throw-down anthem called "Where's The Love." In the bridge, calling and responding and reaching out to his brothers, Isaac lays it on the line, like a challenge: "We have to change our point of view, if we want a sky of blue."
Oh my. Kids sure do say the damnedest things.
