Hanson’s Middle Of Nowhere turns 20 this weekend

On May 6, 1997, Hanson released its major-label debut Middle Of Nowhere, which went on to sell 10 million copies and, if you were under the age of 15 at the time, be something you either despised or adored, with probably no middle ground.
While the album had a couple of singles, it is best known for “MMMBop,” which is, with the hindsight of age, obviously a remarkably tight pop song. But it’s also one of those songs that sounds inimitably of its time. A lot of the credit and blame for this goes to producers The Dust Brothers, fresh off the success of Beck’s 1996 Odelay! The duo was able to give the scrappy young three-piece band the glossy finish of post-Jagged Little Pill pop, giving the drums a metronomic kick and turning the guitar lines into immaculately clean Glen Ballard-style flourishes. There’s even some ornamental scratching on the hook, because it was the late ’90s and that’s what people did.
Still, we remember the song for its hook, which has lead to a whole lot of cover versions over the years. The brothers themselves actually originally recorded the track a year before Middle Of Nowhere, albeit in a slower moving, more somber version. In an interview last year to celebrate the 20th anniversary of that version, the band said that there has never been a good cover of the song.
Have you heard any good covers of it over the years?
Taylor Hanson: I gotta be honest: No.
Isaac Hanson: You know why? People can’t sing the chorus right. Most of the time they syncopate it wrong.
Zac Hanson: I think “MMMBop” probably needs a really good cover …
T.H.: Someone needs to either make it totally their own in a genuinely unique way, or it needs to be a band that has a sensibility for old R&B. Fitz and the Tantrums could maybe do it …