Teenage Mutants

Aaron Carter, still only ten, is an established star already, the Spice Girls' fans are barely out of nursery school.. has pop become terminally infantile, wonders Michael Braceweell. Who better to ask than Hanson, the band with the 12-year-old drummer? They say age is irrelevant. Try telling that to Jimmy Osmond.

"Judge us by our music, not by our age - that's what it's all about." With a hint of weariness way beyond his years, Taylor Hanson, the 14 year-old vocalist and keyboard player of teen-sibling pop sensation Hanson, has just put his finger on the blessing and curse of being an extremely young pop star. With the exception of 17-year-old Isaac, who is the oldest of the three Hanson brothers (Zac, the drummer, is just 12), this is a group whose early adolescent androgyny has lent them angelic, if cracking, treble voices.

With a strain of Dane that lends the boys that perfect shade of natural blond hair, dark, straight eyebrows and wide mouths, the Hanson countenance oozes an ambiguity of gender that plays havoc with the hormones of teenage girls from Tulsa to Tokyo.

Taylor is not only regarded as the brains of the outfit, he is also routinely compared - in appearance, at least - to the young Kurt Cuban. On closer inspection, however, he resembles a cross between Oscar Wild’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and a young Merrill Strap. Zac, meanwhile, has something of the full-lipid sensuality of Brooke Shields about him, which helps create a sexual anarchy beneath the standard white American puppy-fat of his pre-teen features. Isaac alone is growing out of the awkward-adolescent phase and into the features of manhood.

Sitting in a bouncy row on a sofa in their New York hotel suite, the Hansons present a triptych of bright faces. They are eager to talk and extremely good natured.

"Think of us as old guys with high voices - that oughta do it," pipes up Zac, as the discussion turns to the problems of being perceived as too young to be in a pop group. His point, which gets to the heart of the matter, is met with a sudden, brief silence. Zac shrugs, and starts playing with a miniature brass tripod and a magnifying glass. From time to time, he holds the glass over his right eye and stares ghoulishly with enormously enlarged pupil at whoever might be watching. Taylor tends to speak with a healthy degree of conviction, while Isaac, one feels, is a little too ready to respect the opinions of his critics. Zac alone, imperious within the fun factory of his 12 years, does not seem to care that much what anybody thinks of Hanson, because the facts speak for themselves.

Hanson's debut single, MMMBop, went to number one in 20 countries, and the subsequent album, Middle Of Nowhere, has sold around six million copies worldwide. What you get is a highly polished rendition of white American soul, with musical references to early Sixties close harmony singing, as well as a reasonably sharp edge of post grunge rock. They write and perform a proportion of their own material, and their collaborators on the songwriting front include Mark Hudson of Aerosmith, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, writers for the likes of the Righteous Brothers and the Crystals. The album was produced by the ultra-hip Dust Brothers, who also produced Beck's celebrated Odelay, and Steve Lironi, who has worked with Black Grape. Middle Of Nowhere has been widely acclaimed as a classic pop album.

The three Hanson brothers are middle-class boys from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who father was an oil manager - the family lived in South America for a while when he was posted there - before becoming the band's manager. It is a close-knit, comfortably off, quietly Christian family. All three of the boys studied classical piano for between five and seven years. They have two younger sisters and a younger brother, none of whom is involved in music - yet. When the latest Hanson, Zoe Genevieve, was born earlier this year, Top Of The Pops magazine commented: "Not long before she starts playing the maracas we don't suppose!"

This notion - that the group will almost inevitably expand to include other family members, as the Osmonds and the Jacksons did before them - is met with the nearest that the Hanson brothers seem to come to indignation. But even in their disagreement with the cynical notion that Mrs Hanson can more or less give birth to cash flow, the group manage to show not only respect for their ancestors in pop, but a worrying amount of modesty with regard to their own achievements.

"I really don't like comparing us with the Osmonds, the Bee Gees, the Jacksons . . ." begins Zac, shaking his head at the madness of such an idea.

"Right," affirms Taylor, preparing to brandish the party line on this particular point. "We hate to compare ourselves with those groups, because those groups were so incredibly successful. I mean, like, we're successful now, but who knows . . ."

"Those group had careers that lasted decades" says Isaac, "and, for us, we can only hope that we can do this for as long as possible."

Hanson represent a new generation of bright young Americans who have succeeded the Prozac nation of grunged-out slackers for whom glazed-eyed, smart , negativity was an ideology as well as an aesthetic. They are un-ironic materialists for whom the stance of slackerdom is irrelevant - Isaac goes so far as to suggest that one of the benefits of conformity is to be a "more productive co-worker". Their values are closer to the classic American ideal of church, home and family: Apple Pie America.. They are, in short, regular guys. But herein lies a further problem for Hanson as a group: they sometimes feel that their wholesome, positive image distracts from their musical talents, even as it provides them with nearly all of their audience.

"When we were doing our latest video " Taylor continues, in his fast, targeted manner, "there were these punk guys in it with tattoos and stuff, and earrings all over their faces, and they were saying how they'd never do a video with Hanson. But once it was over, they were saying that they really liked our music. Which I guess is totally understandable - that someone would see just three guys who are extremely young and cute and say, `Oh, those kids', but then they hear the music and they really like it."

"A lot of people have asked us,’Why are you in a band when you’re so young?’, and we say, ‘Well, what are we meant to do? Wait until we are 21 before we start making music? We couldn’t just not make music." "Or wait until we’re 18, and then say that we wanted to be doing this ten years ago," adds Zac.

The fact that Hanson are from a middle-class background and raised within the work ethic of business-class America has been used to explain not only their success, but their very existence as little more than a carefully-manufactured showbiz product. This would place them in a long line of commodified American child stars, stretching from way before the reign of the Osmonds, who began as a novelty act on the Andy Williams TV show in the Seventies.

America's tradition of child performers goes back to child stars of Hollywood such as the Little Rascals and the Dead End Kids - names that sound like second-generation punk groups now. It's a risky route to follow: unlike credible pop-soul outfit the Jackson 5 - who just about re-invented Tamla Motown as a vehicle for black music in a white marketplace - the Osmonds, for one, were regarded as a strictly pre-teen phenomenon and therefore something of a joke. In 1997, a documentary made about the Osmonds, a now middle-aged Donny made the perceptive and courageous observation that, "You have to remember that teenagers, for most part, hated us. Young kids and old people loved us. But the teenage rock fans couldn't stand us." And this is a problem that the Hansons have inherited, and one that their immaculate choice of songwriters and producers on Middle Of Nowhere must be trying, to some degree, to solve.

"People say that girls like us, so we can't be any good," begins Zac, "but . . ."

"I'm sure that the fact we all have long blond hair doesn't help much, either," interjects Isaac. "A lot of people, when we go to a radio station, say to us, `Do you use tapes?"' explains Taylor, "and we say, `No, we really play.' And then they say, `Oh, so you use tapes some of the time?' And we say, `No. We're in the band! We do it! It's just us!' And it's like nobody seems to understand for a single second that it could be possible that we are actually playing our own music."

Isaac is slightly worried by the forcefulness of his brother's argument. "Well , I can understand their point of view," he says. "I mean, for me, it would be hard to take myself seriously. And from the point of view of a person just standing there watching all of this happen to us, I guess that I would be very, very skeptical."

In keeping with the traditional American ethos of family groups, of child entertainers - to say nothing of the showbiz mythology of the local kid, as defined by those countless Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland films in the pre-dawn of the teenage musical, who gets spotted at a talent contest by the big producer - Hanson's earliest success came from "doing the show right here!": they would sing acapella, in perfect pitch, for whoever would stand still for long enough to listen. "We wanted it to be a Boyz II Men/Ace Of Bass type group, where we can sing harmony and dance," Isaac announced to Urban Tulsa magazine at the time.

Eventually, at the South By Southwest music conference at Austin, Texas, in March 1994, they caught the attention of a Grateful Dead fanatic and entertainment lawyer called Christopher Sabec, who asked to represent them. Encouraged by his interest, the Hanson family put out an independantly produced album, Boomerang. This, remember, was at a time when the big record companies were looking for the next Nirvana rather than the next Osmonds or Jacksons - Hanson’s route to celebrity is important in its conformity to a modern American fable and, to a great extent, its stamping of their image as a group with a particular morality. The Hansons were not so much rebels without a cause, as a cause without any rebels.

The Hanson family’s Christianity is something that the group are proud to acknowledge but refuse to dwell upon. Unlike the Osmonds-whose global power as unofficial evangelists was such that, between 1971 and 1974, the Mormon Church to which they belonged was besieged by teenage girls trying to join it - the Hanson brothers have no desire to emphasize their faith in their music. They are unlikely to record their equivalent of The Plan by The Osmonds, in which the latter group delivered their theological worldview, but they do attempt to make all of their music "positive". Similarly, they are extremely anxious to avoid making their faith central to their image.

"Our faith is definitely very important to us," says Taylor, "but we don't like to make that an issue with other people."

"It's just another box that people could put us in," adds Isaac. "It's what we're about, but we don't want people to feel any segregation because of that."

Asked what their record company would say if the group chose to record an anti-war lyric in the event of, say, a new Gulf war, Zac replies with disarming honesty: "They'd most likely ask whether or not the radio stations would play it. And, as long as the radio stations would play it, that would be okay . . ."

"I think that Dylan did influence people back in the Sixties, with all the protests against Vietnam and stuff," adds Isaac.

"Dylan and Joplin absolutely changed things," says Taylor, "but I don't know if a record could elect a president or get somebody out of office."

For the Hanson brothers, it was a Time Life tape of Fifties rock'n' roll that became the primary inspiration for their own music. Their musical tastes as much as their beliefs (in as far as it is possible to judge a teenager by their emerging opinions) have jumped three generations to miss out all of pop and rock's principal function as protest music be that punk, hip-hop or the long shadow of Woodstock. Their innocent brand of good-time pop is most reminiscent of the innocent age of American pop itself, when teenage TV shows - such as John Waters satirised in The Corny Collins Show! featured in his film Hairspray became the rallying point for effervescent teenage pop fans.

With this lineage in mind, it comes as no surprise that Hanson are struggling slightly to attain serious musical credibility. Seized upon in Britain by the heart-throb-hungry teenzines, a group such as Hanson invariably finds their principal audience in the millions of young girls who are historically famous for their fanaticism, but for whom pop music is a kind of hormonal gymnasium in which to develop their emotional muscles. These are the daughters, quite possibly, of the women who screamed at the Osmonds in the early Seventies, and the younger sisters of the girls who mobbed Bros in the late Eighties.

Now, in the late Nineties, with the rise to commercial power of children's TV programmes such as BBC1's Live And Kicking - on which every teen group should showcase if they want to get straight to the payload of pocket money - it seems that a significant amount ' of pop is being marketed and mediated to an increasingly younger audience.

In the past, child pop stars such as Little Jimmy Osmond - whose solo recordings were as lucrative in some territories as those by the Osmonds as a group -were regarded for the most part as novelty acts. There was a grotesque aspect to their performance that blurred the boundaries between cute and curio, and led to Little Jimmy Osmond's Long Haired Lover From Liverpool being regarded as a cabaret novelty act, as was Lena Zavaroni's 1974 hit, Ma, He's Making Eyes At Me. Less well known were The Williams Twins (Andy Williams's nephews) and Liverpool's Our Kid, none of whom made much of an impact beyond being test-driven as potential teenzine heart-throbs.

Singing acts such as these had their equivalent, at an amateur level, in the late Sixties on British TV shows such as Junior Show Time, which maintained the tradition of the local talent competition but seldom treated pop as a major part of children's activities. Closer to the pop sensibility was the TV series The Double Deckers, which took the innocent comedy of Cliff Richard and his pals in Summer Holiday, and drained off the songs and the love interest, but kept the double-decker bus. Similarly, Ed "Stewpot" Stewart's Radio 1 show, Junior Choice - on which the Osmonds guested in 1972 - was the only radio show to broadcast music for a young teen and pre-teen audience. Pop, per se, was still seen as an adolescent option because it was linked to post-pubescent sexuality.

But the loose cannon in child pop has always been the vital element of sexuality. Pop, traditionally, is built upon the translation of sexual desires into a musical form that can make the sexual element as suppressed or explicit as you want. A major aspect of the appeal of very young stars, as well as of boy groups, is the projection of their safe, fun-loving ordinariness - thus the likes of Hanson can be presented as idealized, pre-teen boyfriends.

And the current trend in younger pop groups demands a notion of sexuality that can be flaunted and disarmed at the same time - which, perhaps, explains Hanson's occasional "mad" antics - thus satisfying the crush factor without straying into irresponsible precocity. Zoe Ball, the co presenter of Live And Kicking, signed off a recent editorial in the programme's hugely influential magazine of the same name with the command, "Keep On Snogging!", which seems to sum up the febrile mixture of late childhood innocence and early adolescent passion that keeps the young pop stars in business.

Revolutionised by the sexuality of Madonna in the mid-Eighties, and accelerated by the brilliantly designed sexuality of Take That and the Spice Girls, the marketing and language of pre-teen pop has been expanded to place child fandom in adult packaging. Today, the hits of ten-year-old American Aaron Carter-including Crush On You and Crazy Little Party Girl - are marketed in the same arena as records by older boy groups such as 911, 3T and Five, or the reigning girl groups, N-Tyce and All Saints.

The boundaries of age have been blurred to accommodate the fact that children now grow up with pop in a heavily sexualised culture, where pop is no longer nailed to youth. As a consequence, All Saints can pose as "babes" on the cover of FHM magazine, but appear with equal ease in the more innocent pages of the Live And Kicking magazine.

In many ways, this corresponds to the manner in which an adult pop showcase such as Chris Evans's TFI Friday models itself on very similar lines to its pre-teen equivalents. The slightly suggestive edge to Zoe Ball's co-presentation of Live And Kicking, to say nothing of her cover-starring on a recent issue of Esquire, is matched by the cleverly self parodic atmosphere of TFI Friday as an adult programme that is driven by an infantilist need to re-create the latter-day hijinks of Seventies TV shows such as Saturday Scene or Tiswas.

At its most extreme, this childing down of pop produces such anomalies as Channel 4's Mini Pops in the mid-Eighties. Starring very young children who were dressed as established pop performers such as Madonna or Michael Jackson - and, as a consequence, heavily sexualised - the Mini Pops were an essentially innocent novelty act whose demise was caused by concern that the show presented the children as sexual beings, and would therefore inevitably encourage paedophile interest. It proved a salutary, if uncommon, example of the ultimate destination of child pop, in which the agenda of pop and the reality of children finally implode.

The new Mancunian girl group, Cleopatra - three sisters of 17, 15 and 13 - find themselves placed alongside Hanson and Aaron Carter as pop performers who are technically too young to know about the emotions described in their songs. It is the same problem that Kylie Minogue faced when she sought to create a new identity for herself as she graduated from the Eighties teen-pop of I Should Be So Lucky to Nineties duets with indie godfather Nick Cave, and hoping she'd still be lucky after the transformation.

So where does all this leave Hanson's attempts to create a new audience for their music, beyond the armies of screaming girls who have greeted them at record signings in shopping malls from Canada to Korea? On the one hand, they have been credited with producing a great pop album that has the potential to cross generational barriers. On the other, they are staring down the barrel of the same cynicism that questions their "authenticity" as much as their age.

Taylor is swift to defend their right as musicians - not as young teenagers, or Christians, or child celebrities - to sing about whatever they want, providing they are being true to themselves. "Music and songs are just a description of life, not of your age or who you are," he says. "We always say that we don't think of ourselves as 17, 14 and 12, because we're not thinking, `Let's write a song about lollipops'. The feelings are the same whatever your age in life. If your girlfriend rejects you, the feelings are going to be the same whether you're 12 or 18 or 45 you're still, basically, going to feel really bummed about it.

And feeling awkward and uncomfortable, like you don't fit in, it's going to be the same whatever your age." "Of course, you hope that your career will last decades," says Isaac, "but you never know. You just have to keep on making music and hope that people will continue to find what they found in your music originally. And you hope that people will continue to expand with you, as you advance in your musical style."

Interviewed in 1973, Alan Osmond stated, "We try to stay one step ahead of our fans if possible. If we are good musicians, then the fans will grow up with us. In two years, we'll have an older audience -just as the Beatles took their audience right with them." For pop groups that have their first success very young, there is always the danger that they will be judged by their youth forever - locked for life in a version of themselves that can never age. They become Dorian Grays in reverse: their pictures stay young and wholesome while they must parade their age, mistakes or misfortune.

We tend to judge groups such as Hanson, or the Osmonds or the Jacksons - or Musical Youth, or Five Star, or anyone who became a star very young - with an eye to their possible downfall. We buy the records, but at the same time can't wait for the market to take its revenge on performers who present a sanitised view of a society we know to be irrational and immoral. From Judy Garland's decline into addiction through Karen Carpenter's coronary brought on by bulimia, to the reduction of some of the Osmond brothers to little more than cabaret entertainers, to the decline of members of Musical Youth into a life of crime and the Michael Jackson child-abuse allegations, this falling of the mighty satisfies some unattractive but primal sense of justice.

Hanson, however, are sons of the material world. Whether it is instinctive or tutored, there is a robust logic to their polite refusal to discuss anything about themselves save their music. As musicians, they can succeed or fail according to their talent and their luck. As vulnerable teenagers - made into interesting cases by the discrepancy between their youth and their celebrity their every unguarded utterance could come back to haunt them. Their very regularity as middle-class young Americans is their last line of defence. They like to hang out with their friends and go to the movies.