Making it a summer to remember: MixTape Tour at Rupp rewinds the Eighties

It’s easy to categorize pop music by decades.

Psychedelia goes into the ’60s. Disco and punk? File them in the ’70s. Synth-pop and hair metal remain trademarks of the ’80s. Grunge and post-Garth country-pop helped define the ’90s.

These, of course, are generalities. No single sound or style lasted a complete decade, much less boasted a lifespan that landed cleanly between the double-nought years.

That brings us to The MixTape Tour, which makes it way to Rupp Arena this weekend. The two-and-a-month long trek is a vehicle for the veteran boy band New Kids on the Block. It boasts a multi-act bill of guest artists and contemporaries of the Kids, all of whom are readily associated with the 1990s – Salt-N-Pepa, Rick Astley and En Vogue.

Viewing all four acts as products of the ’90s is understandable. New Kids on the Block even played Rupp at the dawn of that decade – January 1990, to be exact. It was a time when New Kids were at the height of their popularity, meaning the group was still, well, new. The pop/rap/soul duo Salt-N-Pepa has also played Rupp. That came as recently as 2017, as part of multi-act nostalgia outing titled —what else — “I Love the ’90s.”

But put the hit-making dossiers of these groups under a microscope and you quickly discover (or for those of advanced age, you are quickly reminded) the height of their popularity played out mostly in the late ’80s – an era where videos and MTV ruled, hits churned to a synth-shiny beat and hip-hop was just beginning to become ingrained into the mainstream pop consciousness. Sure, all four had hits that spilled over into the ’90s. But an apt subtitle for The MixTape Tour might be “I Love the End of the ’80s.”

New Kids on the Block run this rodeo. At the time of the group’s 1990 Rupp show, its members were all in their early 20s, save for then-still teenager Joey McIntyre. That means today, they are ... well, you do the math. The group already chalked up a pair of No. 1 hits in 1989, “I’ll Be Loving You Forever” and “Hangin’ Tough.” A third, “Step By Step,” would follow in 1990 before the hit tide subsided. Disbandment came in 1994.

The group – who, aside from McIntyre, includes Jordan Knight, older sibling Jonathan Knight, Donnie Wahlberg and Danny Wood – served as a template for a boy-band boom that would overrun the pop charts by the mid ’90s and make stars out of N Sync, 98 Degrees and Backstreet Boys.

After several stalled attempts at a reunion, all six members regrouped in 2008 and have remained active ever since, despite some high-profile moonlighting. Wahlberg, who began a successful acting career during the split (he was in “The Sixth Sense” and five of the six “Saw” movies) would appear before TV audiences on a weekly basis beginning in 2010 as Det. Danny Regan in the police drama “Blue Bloods.” The show will return for its 13th season this fall.

That didn’t keep the reunited New Kids out of action. The group teamed with Backstreet Boys (which have their own Rupp show coming up Sept. 6) for a Top 10 compilation album, “NKOTBSB” and a successful arena and stadium tour that stretched into June 2012.

So where do the other acts from The MixTape Tour fit into the timeline? Well, nearly all of their hitmaking sagas reached their peak in the late ’80s. British born Astley scored his biggest, synth-savvy singles, “Never Gonna Give You Up” and “Together Forever” in 1986 and 1987, respectively, while Queens’ hip-hop savvy Salt-N-Pepa (Cheryl James and Sandra Denton) scored big with “Shake Your Thang” and “Expression” (from 1988 and 1989.) Stardom came to California-bred En Vogue (with two of its four original members, Terry Ellis and Cindy Herron, still on board), in fact, in the early ’90s with five No. 1 R&B hits topped off by a 1993 pop crossover smash with Salt-N-Pepa titled “Whatta Man.”

Now that we know their hit lineage, how will the music of all four acts play out at Rupp? This is where the mixtape mindset of The MixTape Tour comes into play. New Kids have already employed this tour strategy on similarly structured concert runs in recent years. The Rupp appearance won’t be a series of successive performances. In other words, don’t expect a New Kids show with three popular opening acts. It will, however, be very much a New Kids concert.

Basically, what you’re going to get is a revolving door set of performances. New Kids will open and serve at gatekeepers of sorts for the show. Each of the other three acts will then enter and exit several times, singing one to five songs during each turn. Performances given since the tour began in mid-May have been featuring a cumulative set list of nearly 40 songs.

Will be there be anything new, you ask? Will this stable of artists revisiting a pop era from another generation dare offer anything not rooted in the past? It just so happens that New Kids released a new single this summer that features all of their current touring mates. Just don’t count on a new sound.

The song, “Bring Back the Time,” is purposely constructed to bring the merry, synth-dominant, high harmony sound of the acts’ heyday back into focus. To that purpose, the crew has constructed a hysterical music video for the song, one that pays respectful homage to the videos of MTV past. You can see Wahlberg playing A Flock of Seagulls’ Mike Score, McIntyre as Robert Palmer and Astley stealing the show as Talking Heads’ David Byrne.

“Inside we’re still the same kids we were back in ’89,” the song goes. “So bring back the time.”

“This video, as fun and as silly as it is, it really is a celebration of the music and the look and the videos of that era,” Wahlberg said in a March interview with Robbie Daw of “Billboard.” “For us and our fans, that’s when we met. That’s when we would count the stars in the sky. We made a promise for life back then that we would always be their band and they would always be our fans and we would always have this relationship. It sounds sappy, but it’s really true.”

MixTape Tour

Who: New Kids on the Block, Salt-N-Pepa, Rick Astley and En Vogue

When: 7:30 p.m. June 26

Where: Rupp Arena, 430 W. Vine

Tickets: $22.50-$132.95 through ticketmaster.com