Vintage 1989 New Kids on the Block Pinback Button 🎤 "The Pose" NKOTB Button-Up Troy MI Metal Pin

Remember Taping This Exact Pose Inside Your Locker Door? 🎤 A Vintage 1989 New Kids on the Block Pinback Button, Button-Up, Troy, Michigan

Size: 1 1/2"

If you were anywhere near a junior high in 1989, you know this picture before you finish looking at it: all five of them on black, purple shirt over a white turtleneck, the white 71 jersey and the ballcap down front, and NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK in big red letters. Around the rim it reads BUTTON-UP 2011 AUSTIN TROY, MI 48083 on one side and ©1989 BIG STEP PRODUCTIONS, INC. on the other. The picture is printed on paper under a clear film over a metal shell, with a cream plastic back and a bar pin, and these have never been worn.

📅 1989, not 2011

That 2011 on the rim fools people. It's Button-Up's street number - 2011 Austin, in Troy - not a year. The date is the copyright line, ©1989, smack in the middle of Hangin' Tough mania.

🎤 Five kids from Boston

Producer Maurice Starr had just been let go by New Edition, and he and his business partner Mary Alford set out to build another group in Boston. Their first find was fifteen-year-old Donnie Wahlberg from Dorchester, who could rap; Jordan and Jonathan Knight, Joey McIntyre and Danny Wood filled out the lineup, and Donnie's little brother Mark lasted only a few months before leaving to build his own career in music and film. The 1986 debut album barely made a ripple. Then Hangin' Tough came out in 1988. Please Don't Go Girl got to No. 10, I'll Be Loving You (Forever) hit No. 1 in June 1989, the title track and Cover Girl went top five, and by the end of 1989 the album was No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

💰 Big Step and the merchandise machine

The ©1989 BIG STEP PRODUCTIONS, INC. on this rim is the band's own copyright line - the same Big Step Productions that teamed with DIC to make the New Kids Saturday morning cartoon, which ran on ABC from September to December 1990 with the guys themselves in live-action clips. One of its executive producers was the band's manager, Dick Scott, a Motown man who'd been Berry Gordy's assistant, road manager for the Temptations and the Supremes, and the first African-American manager of the Michigan State Fair. Dolls, lunchboxes, bedsheets, trading cards and buttons followed, and by 1991 the band's merchandise was estimated at $400 million and Forbes had them at the top of its highest-paid entertainers list, ahead of Michael Jackson and Madonna.

📌 Button-Up of Michigan

Button-Up made licensed band buttons all through the 1980s. Their early ones give an address on Ryan Road in Warren, Michigan - a 1984 Huey Lewis and the News button reads 22120 RYAN, WARREN, MI - and by the late 1980s they'd moved up to Troy, just north of Detroit, which is the address on this one. I've never been able to find when Button-Up started or when it closed.

🎤 What came after

Step by Step kept it rolling in 1990, Face the Music came out in 1994 to a world that had moved on to grunge, and the five of them stepped away for more than a decade. They reunited in 2008 with The Block, and from May 2011 to June 2012 they toured with the Backstreet Boys as NKOTBSB, two generations of boy-band fans in one arena. The kids who'd pinned these on in 1989 came back as grown-ups to sing along.

📌 About these

Every one I have is the same unused 1 1/2 inch button. Pin it to a denim jacket, put it in a shadow box with a ticket stub and a cassette single, or give it to the friend who still knows every word to Step by Step. The supply is finite - nobody's making 1989 Button-Up buttons again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.