HANSON BROTHERS ARE TEEN IDOLS FOR THE 90'S

Now this is pop.

Hanson is that far-too-rare discovery, a band of kids playing music for kids and doing it awfully well. Teen-age girls everywhere should be thrilled, and rock fans everywhere should be thrilled teen-age girls have something worth being thrilled about. Following in a hallowed rock tradition that stretches from Ricky Nelson to the Jackson Five and now into the '90s, the three Hanson brothers - 16-year-old Isaac on guitar and vocals, 14-year-old Taylor on vocals and keyboards and 11-year-old (!) Zac on drums and vocals - aren't capitalizing on any current wannabe trend in rock. They're just delivering catchy, frothy pop tunes that seem custom made for radio and summer vacations. And the word is spreading like wildfire across junior high school campuses, fueled by the band's first single, the jumping '90s bubblegum concoction "MMMBop." The group's most potent weapon is undeniably Taylor Hanson's soulful crack of a voice (if hormones kick in and kill this kid's pipes, it's going to be an American pop tragedy), and it's impossible to ignore the similarity between his singing and the young Michael Jackson's, even if it's mainly a matter of quality. Taylor, though, has a not-so-secret weapon in dinky Zac's playful harmonies (another hormone disaster waiting to happen), while old man Isaac fills in the (comparatively) low parts. Taylor has a perfect singer's knack for playing with a song without overdoing it (the curse of Mr. Jackson's latter years): He can whine and wail with the best of them (listen to "Speechless"), but he hasn't yet fallen prey to his own affectations. The kids have their signatures on every tune written here, and actually wrote some of the best songs - "Thinking Of You," "MMMBop" - without any help. And there's an undeniably sweet naivete that works in these songs, where the worst fear is "When you get old and start losing your hair" ("MMMBop"). Hey, who knows about mortgage foreclosures and bypass surgery at age 13? These kids get soft from time to time ("Yearbook," "Weird," the achingly tender "Lucy"), but they know what they want to do first and foremost here and that's rock, which they do with a joy that can't be faked. Sure this is slick product and the little darlings are being marketed as some sort of new Monkees, and Lord knows what the Enquirer will ultimately dig up, but this music powers past all the questions for now. To be a teen-ager and a teen idol ... this used to be a big part of what rock was about. And it sounds good, doesn't it? In Hanson's case, it sounds great.