“Keep planting to find out which one grows.”

A Review of Hanson’s “MMMBop” by Max Rubin

Though difficult to decipher through young Taylor Hanson’s reedy timbre, the lyrics that open “MMMBop,” the 1997 über-smash by Hanson, are a sobering quatrain: “You have so many relationships in this life/Only one or two will last/You go through all the pain and strife/Then you turn your back and they’re gone so fast.” That’s some cold truth for a twelve-year-old to thrown down. The song, which was released as the debut single off Hanson’s first full-length LP, Middle of Nowhere, and which rocketed the brothers to tweenage stardom, reads less like stratospherically successful bubblegum pop than it does a dirge.

In fact, “MMMBop” was intended in that latter vein. Before superstar production team The Dust Brothers came in and saturated the song with kitsch, “MMMBop” was initially recorded as a much slower, more somber track. Hanson self-released a demo in 1996 that features the original, lesser-known incarnation of the song. On that version, there are no cowbells, no spangling fun-in-the-sun organs, no vapid turntable scratches. Taylor’s vocals come in soft and slightly mournful. The hooks are still there, but the whole thing is just a bit sadder, more appropriately reflective of the lyrical tone.

Thus is the dichotomy at the heart of “MMMBop.” On the one hand, The Dust Brothers were imperative to the song’s success. They whipped it out of the register of rangy garage tune and into Billboard shape, roughly the way Hollywood might take on an aspiring character actor, sand off his edge, and tease him up into a rom-com leading man. The Dust Brothers built into the song an irresistible effervescence, dolling it with shimmer and making it pop. They also upped the tempo to a snappier pace. The lyrical phrasing of “MMMBop” is crowded to begin with, and with Taylor—whose voice on the record is still tightly coiled in pre-pubescence—now forced to keep up with the increased BPM, the vocals are rendered unintelligible, reduced to a stream of melodic froth. Thus “MMMBop” loses its pensive essence. This all makes for more palatable pop, to be sure, but it’s also the other hand of the “MMMBop” dichotomy: The Dust Brothers’ treatment obscures the soul of the song.

Hanson gets pigeonholed as a one-hit novelty act because they rose to fame as a boy-band-of-brothers with long blond hair and a song title that wasn’t even a real word. But, as a noun, MMMBop is not arbitrary tween gibberish. It’s actually onomatopoeia. And rather inspired onomatopoeia at that. As defined by the band, an MMMBop is a span of time that’s gone before you know it. It refers to something in which you are so intensely involved that...