Excerpt From NY Times - January 1998

"Just a Song, Luring the Listener to a Road Not Taken"

"... The ruling values of pop music might seem to be situated in the accumulation of fame and riches. They might be found in the way a song can turn your day around and then disappear.

A singer reaches you with a song. He or she has no responsibility to reach you with another one, and you have no responsibility to respond if he or she tries. Heard or overheard, a song -- on the radio, in a bar, hummed by someone standing next to you in line -- diverts you from the path your day has taken. For an instant, it changes you. But you can forget about it as surely as you may feel shadowed until you hear it again.

Or, rather, you may try to forget about it. You may not be allowed to. A hit song you don't like is an oppressive mystery. Granted that almost every female person of my acquaintance considers Jakob Dylan the cutest thing currently walking on two legs, what was he doing dully offering "One Headlight" until spring turned into fall? It was like watching someone do a jigsaw puzzle with four pieces, over and over again.

As omnipresent hit singles go, "One Headlight" was too flat to be more than a mild headache, and of course you could always change the station. It takes a great single, like Hanson's "MMMBop," the most ubiquitous record of last year, to produce a migraine. You need a piece of music so deliriously catchy, so insidiously marvelous, that you can't change the station, a song you can't stop hearing even if you turn the radio off.

That was the story in a skit built around Hanson's recent appearance on "Saturday Night Live." The three teen-age Hanson brothers enter an elevator. Suddenly two terrorists (the guest host Helen Hunt and the cast member Will Ferrell) rush in, shut the door and hold the boys at gunpoint. "MMMBop" has driven them insane, and they want nothing less for Hanson. Earplugs in place, the terrorists stop the elevator between floors, put "MMMBop" on a CD player set to "repeat," and wait.

It takes only an hour or so for the first Hanson to crack; his mouth jerks up in a horrible grin. A few hours later a second Hanson succumbs. The third just keeps on happily tapping his feet. Ferrell takes out his earplugs; a smile spreads over his face, and he too begins to move. Realizing he's gone over to the other side, Ms. Hunt has no choice but to execute him on the spot.

That's one way to settle the mystery of a hit single. But some singles, like the Wallflowers' current "Three Marlenas," are mysteries that intensify until they finally float off the airwaves and disappear into the air..."<<