I must admit, when I first saw the adorable, but impossibly young, faces of the band Push Play staring back at me from their debut album Deserted. I felt extraordinarily old as when I was in my late twenties and was too old for *NSync or The Backstreet Boys.
Although I must tragically admit to a childhood appreciation for The New Kids on the Block, I always plead a youthful version of the fifth in that it was one of the many sins of the late 80s and early 90s-- right up there with the Hypercolor line of t-shirts that let your sweat act like a mood ring, men who wore Zubaz, and one foot high hair-sprayed bangs. Now just a few years away from turning thirty, did I really want to check out another boy band? I wasn’t sure.
Yet, being game for anything, which as a film critic is especially important when we’re faced with stuff like Mamma Mia!—I let the music do my thinking for me. And it turns out that, while they’re often lumped together with the Jonas Brothers (which has annoyingly prompted many to start mispronouncing my last name) and also Miley Cyrus, whose manager they just signed with, Push Play is like a youthful but far more fashionable version of Blink 182, The Killers, and Franz Ferdinand. While they began locally as the Long Island, New York version of the fab-four, as reported by Newsday, the previously unsigned band skyrocketed to levels of unprecedented fame thanks to a loyal fan-base of young screaming and swooning girls who saw them (following a debut at the basement of Manhattan’s Knitting Factory) in their breakthrough performance last autumn opening for Disney Records’ all-girl band Everlife. And as lead vocalist CJ Baran said, “all the fans wanted to meet us after our set. Nobody was going in to watch them play.”
Frequently bombarded with fan mail and more than a million hits on their ever-popular MySpace page, CJ’s mother Sue Baran who “had been responsible for at least some of the promotion,” took charge as “the momager.” Launching the charitable “Push Play for a Purpose,” Sue Baran and the talented foursome raised money for worthy causes at concerts and even give a portion of the proceeds from Deserted to the Education and Assistance Corp. (EAC), which as the CD describes is “a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting children and seniors.”
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