MMMPop Payback Time: Bands Say and Play Thanks

By JON PARELES


For bands with Top 40 pop hits, this is payback season. Across the country, radio stations present concerts like the annual Z100 Jingle Ball, which filled Madison Square Garden with squealing girls on Tuesday night for a 10-act bill. Hit makers appear as an act of fealty to their so-called friends in broadcasting, dutifully thanking the radio stations that along with MTV control their commercial fates. Even Celine Dion, whose last album reportedly sold 25 million copies worldwide, showed up unannounced, lavishing lung power on "The Christmas Song." (She was in town for the Unicef benefit at the Beacon
Theater the next night.)

The Jingle Ball raised money for Share, a support organization for breast and ovarian cancer patients, and for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. It also relentlessly promoted the station, and like a Top 40 broadcast, it put together bands that would never otherwise share the same bill. The performers met Top 40's core audience: teen-age girls in search of cute-boy crushes, advice to the lovelorn, sympathy and pep talks, always eager to sing along.

The Jingle Ball was a not quite representative sampler of the pop Top 40 circa 1997. Hip-hop was missing, as were the ska-based bands that bounced into the Top 40 in the wake of No Doubt. Yet the concert retained Top 40's haphazard mixture of pop contrivances and earnest confessions, novelty acts and long-term careerists, even a wild card.

The girls screamed loudest for Hanson, the band of three blond teen-age brothers from Tulsa whose buoyant "MMMBop" was the summer's ubiquitous single. Hanson's members play instruments and write songs, which is unusual among teen-age pop fabrications, and they keep on pop's sunny side. "MMMBop" compares relationships to flowers, urging listeners to keep planting them; other songs promise love and devotion.

On its album "Middle of Nowhere," Hanson's music resembled the Jackson Five, but onstage, the band sounds more like 1970's Southern rock, with the gospel-tinged keyboards of Leon Russell and the scrubbing guitars of the Doobie Brothers.

The group's lead voice, from 14-year-old Taylor Hanson, is already dropping, but he's learning to trade boy-soprano perkiness for grainy earnestness.

Younger listeners hear pop without much historical context, giving songwriters a chance to recycle. At the Jingle Ball, most groups played as if the 1990's hadn't happened. From the 1980's stylebook came Savage Garden, an unctuous Australian band torn between Duran Duran and A-ha, and the BackStreet Boys, who revived the MTV-ready dance routines and pop-soul crooning of the New Kids on the Block. Out of the 1970's came the accomplished, thoughtful Christine McVie and Joni Mitchell updates of Sarah McLachlan and Lisa Loeb, along with the priapic arena-rock of Aerosmith, a 1970's band still
making hits now and still full of cartoonish vitality.

And looking back to the 1960's were the Wallflowers, playing staunch folk-rock modeled on Bob Dylan's bands but backing the wooden vocals of his son, Jakob Dylan. In a classic of onstage banter, Jakob Dylan sang his "Sixth Avenue Heartache," spoke about living briefly in New York City, and then asked, "You guys have a Sixth Avenue here, right?"

The salable pop posture of the year was a perennial: tearfulness. Band after band sang about crying over heartbreak. Aerosmith belted its 1993 hit, "Cryin'"; the four-woman rhythm-and-blues vocal group Allure cooed about being "All Cried Out," and Savage Garden was ready to "cry-yye" its "tears of love." Promises of devotion were also heard throughout the concert. And a touch of 1990's self-assertion also emerged, as the audience took over the BackStreet Boys' "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)" and sang along wholeheartedly with Ms. Loeb's "I Do," in which she insists, after crying, that "No one pushes me around."

The feistiest performer was Fiona Apple, whose songs anatomize the power games and guilty secrets of romance. Her music harks back to rolling, piano-based rhythm-and-blues, and her husky voice is full of troubled determination; at the Jingle Ball, even when she overacted, she cut through pop's romantic platitudes.

The concert's other wild card was Chumbawamba, an English group that has been singing agitprop songs since the mid-1980's. It now has a huge hit, "Tubthumping," which proclaims, "You're never going to keep me down",and it used its short set with maverick glee. One song denounced neo-Nazi racism in the a cappella harmonies of English folk tradition; the frisky electropop of "Amnesia" proclaimed, with mocking cheerfulness, "Out with the old/Cheated by the new." It was the show's only glimpse of concerns beyond the next romance.