** Note that portions of this article not pertaining to Jordan have been edited out.  If you would like to see the entire article, email me at jody@jordanknight.com

It's 1989, and New Kids on the Block are everywhere.  Barely pubescent females and their kid sisters wet themselves over the teen-mart faces and clumsy-dancin' bods of Jordan, Joey, Donnie, Danny and Jon.  Department stores overflow with New Kids clothing, bedding, lunch boxes, dolls and, oh yeah, CDs.  Pop-dance R&B-harmony acts dominate the charts, New Edition are peaking like crazy, and the Latin version of bouncy-boy madness, Menuda, celebrate their twelve-year anniversary with another departure:  seventeen-year-old Ricky Martin - like all Menudo cuties - is retired, to be replaced by a fresher corazon-throb.  Meanwhile, a Manhattan retail establishment known as Menuditis sweeps away its obsolete merchandise to make way for the new.

Now it's 1999, and although they split up five years ago, when the girls dropped them for Jodeci and Green Day, the New Kids are once again everywhere.  The influence of these hype-not-hip harmonizing hotties on Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, 98 Degrees, 5ive, Boyzone and all other bubblegum brothers is as obvious as the money in their managers' bank accounts.  Lip-smackin' cheese is no longer confined to the dairy counter.  Jingle-ready choruses and crunchy beats rule.  Even the artiets alt-rockers wanna go pop.  Menuditis has reopened, and thre isn't a mall in the U.S. today that doesn't honor that special bond between a girl and her willfully manufactured beloved.  The timing couldn't be better for New Kids' true crooners - Joey McIntyre and Jordan Knight - to stage solo comebacks, or for Ricky Martin to crack Menudo-wary mainstream America.

It makes sense that McIntyre, as the youngest Kid, adheres to the boy-band formula he helped create, even if the pretense of urban adulthood surfaces in his arrangements' allusions.  "Couldn't Stay Away From Your Love" evokes the old-school funk of the Gap Band even more religiously than "Everbody (Backstreet's Back)," while "Give It Up" samples a Puffy-size replayed chunk of GQ's "Disco Nights (rock-Freak)."  And on the climactic chamber-orchestra workout "Without Your Love," an unbashful bluesy guitarist evokes The Dark Side of the Moon.

It can't be denied that lil' Joey has grown big time as a singer.  Nonbelievers might be startled to hear how masterfully McIntyre can belt a ballad or slide across a dance rhythm.  Yet his cliched, self-penned lyrics suggest a youth spent dodging tutors, and their fixation on trite surface thrills makes his soulman phrasing too mannered for the rote riffs he rides.  Its title refers to a well-meaning lyrical message directed at a self-doubting friend, but Stay the Same might as well be summing up McIntyre.  He still comes across as a frustrated actor, and this script feels like a calculated rewrite.

Remember when Janet Jackson went from sitcom-teen has-been to chart-dominating wildcat with Control?  Jordan Knight has that same at-last-I'm-free-and-I'm-gonna-work-it vibe, and its foolhardy to ignore the parallels, considering the common ingredient:  songwriter-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.  For more than a decade and a half, J&T have been the standard-bearers of tasteful, tuneful R&B.  And although their work on Janet's The Velvet Rope was risky, it's on their four cuts here (three of them co-written and co-produced with Knight and Robin Theicke) where they get savage.

The album opens with a case study in how to take a forgotten musical fragment and turn it into a new composition.  "A Different Party" samples the guitar groove from Sugarloaf's 1970 lounge-rock opus "Green-Eyed Lady" and then overlays multiple punchy countermelodies and funky-ill lyrics.  "We can all go to a different party/Dancin' in the street with some girls from Maui," sings Knight, whose most formidable interpretive challenge as a NK was how to get the most mileage out of his puppetmaster's obessive use of the word girl.  The current hit single, "Give It to You," alternates minuet-ready interludes in 3/4 time, herky-jerky Timbaland-inspired verses, Beatle-y bridges and boomin', Miami-bass choruses.  There's a point to all the fetishlike formal twists:  This complexity-wielding Knight suggests that he can satisfy, no matter how ornately freaky the desire.  The result will go down as the years' most sensually subversive single.

What's more remarkable is that the sharp stuff doesn't stop with the Jam and Lewis tracks.  newcomer Thicke (who has his own album on the way) is a fitting collaborator for a former goody-goody intent on establishing a fresh adult identity.  Their rock soul combines the rough with the smooth, yielding uncommon nuance.  Whereas McIntyre hits you with every note in his considerable range to the point of insincerity, Knight woos with more-modest technique but fuller feeling.  He turns Prince's boppin' "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" into a pensive slow jam that unwraps the delicate, despondent sophistication not even its originator could reveal.  The highly believable darkness of cuts like "Change My Ways" and "Don't Run" suggests that Knight is either love-damaged or a good guesser.  Those Blockheads knew it all along.  This Kid's all right.