Drinking Hanson’s beer, Mmmhops, with Hanson
Austin Ray totally nailed this article for Creative Loafing. I took some photos. We drank beer with Hanson. It was a lot of fun.
I mentioned this on Twitter already—I’m not sure what would have seem crazier to 11-year-old Me: That one day she’d have a dude pal (that would be Austin, mentioned above) who “got” Hanson, or that Hanson would make a beer. But now that I think about it, actually, the beer maybe would have seemed more likely.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about this for a while and haven’t quite cracked it, but in short: back when I was someone who would have identified in any real capacity as “a Hanson fan,” people in general and boys in particular were, to put it quite elegantly, basically like total megadicks to me about it! Liking this band was probably the thing I got teased about the most in middle school. It probably wasn’t that much, actually, just amplified times a million by the general OMG OMG UGHHHH EVERYTHING IS AWFULNESS of being an adolescent human/female, but it still hurt and made me feel weird and bad about myself in a way nothing else quite could. This was true even on into high school, when Hanson was quickly becoming more of a personal relic than an active~*~*~love~*~*~; I think I was a sophomore when a friend of mine, a senior, in a very convoluted and roundabout and deeply personally stabby way, mocked me for it in front of our entire creative writing class.
MEANWHILE, one of the greatest things ever, when I was a wee fan and an even wee-er Person Thinking About Becoming A Writer One Day, was when people wrote things that seemed to really “get” the band, which is actually not super hard to do but does requires a certain amount of taking-them-seriously, which is a tough prospect when the subjects are widely beloved by teenaged girls. Two pieces I remember in particular: This Rob Sheffield review, and this Spin feature (well, except that subhed, but eh). They took the band seriously, and by extension I felt like I was being taken seriously, and that was huge.
Anyway, can’t wait to drink some of this stuff. I will probably giggle a lot.
