... they sing to New Kids on the Block!
Can you believe it? Anim still keeps her New Kids on the Block cassettes. We also found the Vanilla Ice and some other stuff released in the 1990s - all kept in a clean shoe box, looking like they were just a couple of years old instead of more than ten!
Somehow the 1990s was quite vague for me, save for a few memorable occasions like when my Tingkatan 3 Bunga Raya class got crazy playing the game Murderer (1993) or that time right after SPM when that cute pan-asian kid who was a year younger than me thought I'm the coolest sales assistant to date (t'was end of 1995, right after my first paycheck and I invested it on my first ever pair of contact lenses - the transformation must have been quite ekhem, significant) and oh yeah, my eldest bro got married in the same year and we had a good experience handling the kenduri.
But I remember NKOTB. Danny, Donnie, Joey, Jordan, Jonathan. Hangin' Tough. Tonight. Be My Valentine Girl. Blow Your Mind (Didn't I).
And see the girls with the curls in their hair-ee-air. They simply went crazy over these guys. The media said they were the biggest thing since Beetles and Michael Jackson - guess the benchmark is if a girl faints or get trampled and squeeze during the concert, the artiste is definately big - and NKOTB had that.
I wasn't much of an NKOTB fan - but I did buy one of their albums - Step By Step - I had to part with a big chunk of my saved pocket money. It was my first time buying a cassette - yeah, twelve years old me finally started her own collection.
I bought it not only cause I too thought they were cool and cute and sing nice songs, it also so that I wouldn't look odd. I mean, all my friends have NKOTB stuff - their album, their poster, their VHS music video, their stickers, their badges (man, oh man, why was I born during the badge era) a little diary with their photos splattered across each page, file folder, pen, mug, frame, whatever.
Shallow me never thought that my friends didn't mind that I don't have these stuff, they'd still be my friend. Shallow me never thought that I could have saved the money I spent on that cassette, invest it in my ASB and enjoy the dividends which would have multiplied my total savings by now (alright, maybe not that much, but that's not the point - kan sikit-sikit, lama-lama jadi bukit?.
But seeing Anim's NKOTB cassette nicely kept in her shoe box along with the rest of the 1990s collection does makes me feel that perhaps it was worth it. After all, it was an icon we all could relate to. We (my mates and I), were the teens of the 90s in the first place and that cassette - my Step By Step or Anim's Best Hits - is a symbol that we were there during the 1990s, when NKOTB was big and we enjoyed it.
I had lots of fun during that trip (we were actually on our way to our collegemate Brader aka Dzulkaedah's wedding in Rembau). The NKOTB song definately set the mood - we became young, once again, and we were still hangin' tough.
P/S: When I say we were hangin tough, I meant it figuratively and literally - not that Anim's a bad driver but she was very, very fast. I thought I was simply phobic cause of that stupid incident right before Raya, but as when we got onto the Rambau roads which was all skewy and curvy Anim's high speed pace sent Jenny B to scramble around for her seat belts as well. But we all finished the ride to Rembau and back to KL safely, and Anim was nice enough to let us come Raya at her home in Kajang. Hidup Anim!
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