"I Want It That Way": Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands
From Driscollwiki
Wald, Gayle. (2002) ""I Want It That Way": Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands." Genders 35.
Contents |
Typical 1990s Pop Narrative
Death of Cobain/grunge (+ Pac/BIG!) begat teenybopper:
- Britney
- Backstreet Boys
- 'N Sync
Teenybopper
- Adolescent female fan
- inquiry into reveals "cultural imagination of girls as consumers, citizens, subjects" (4)
- aesthetic discrimination of filtered throguh "racialized concepts of gender and sexuality ... contested in popular culture" (4)
- term serves to enable, discipline girls
- affords visibility
- constraining their use of that visibility, power
Criticism of teenybopper music
Condescencion toward young girls' preferred pop:
- "gendered heirarchy of "high" and "low" popular culture" (1)
- fickle, subject to novelty, fashion
- superficiality
- aesthetic bankruptcy
- conflates performers and artifacts with their consumers, audiences, fans
- Britney isn't just teenybopper, she is a teenybopper herself
- 'N Sync aren't just consumed by teenyboppers, they are teenyboppers (and thus feminized)
Pareles crit reflects on-going fear of young women in the marketplace:
- "kiddie-pop brigades" == "high-pitched squeal"
- instead of "applause" (2)
- squealing is a femme behavior
- young women defined through their relationship to commodities
- powerful enough to "toy" with, direct the course of the pop industries
Conventional understanding of youth culture essentially masculine:
- Troublesome, violent, angsty, rebellious
Resistant, expanded understanding of youth culture:
- Femme expressions of crisis
- Agency expressed through pop consumption, fandom, participation
"Girlish" masculinity
- Used by fans to negotiation their own "fluid gender and sexual desires" (3)
- Not intended to exclude other examples of gender play in pop
- e.g. Cobain's resistance to conventional rock masculinity
- Intentionally addressing girl audience
- Constructs male fandom as homoerotic
- Serving erotic desires of straight girl fans
Authenticity
Authenticating space
- Credentials the authenticity of the performer (4)
- Opposition to domestic spaces
- Rock: garage
- Hip hop: street
- Teenybopper: _____
Teenybopper Authenticity
- No authenticating space
- Embracing artifice, elevation of style
- Point of origin is within the industry
- "Pop spectacle", not musical expression (5)
Feminist embrace of female performers
"Control" over displaces of gender, sexuality (7)
- revise assumptions about relations between girls' safety and sexual agency
- play with expression of sexual desire in ways that acknowledge but do not privilege male hetero desire
- Resistance, liberation is "messy"
- normative femininity simult displayed, disrupted, recuperated, transgressed (Maglin and Perry, Alfonso and Trigilio)
- Fan agency not in necessary opposition to commidity culture
- Popular music culture is where desire is tested out, negotiated, inculcated, disciplined (Hall)
- Girls may use boy bands in "intensely personal, individually empowering, and occasionally unsanctioned ways." (8)
- Including recasting suggested hetero relation as homosocial, queer, etc.
Music Video
Video is the willing submission to the erotic possession of female fans
- Illusion of proximity
- Enjoy their "embodied spectacle"
- Visual pleasure, erotics of observation, voyeurism
- Consumed in living rooms, bedrooms
- Centrality of dance
- Encouraging mimetic relation
- Fans memorize dance moves
- Consummable male figures
- Undermines convention self-possessed, self-control of male presentation (9)
Heterosexual anxiety
Hetero male fandom:
- Can one be a heterosexual male teenybopper?
- Is appreciation, enjoyment of Backstreet Boys inherently gay? (15)
- Homophobic as well as Gynophobic
- Establishes "girlish" masculinity as undesirable
- Girl fandom is queerishly threatening to male desirability
- In other words, teenyboppers are expressing desire for a masculinity that hetero men have rejected
Female fandom:
- Homosocial, collective
- Expressing desire for a feminized masculinity
- Undermining male-policed hetereosexual desire
Queer fandom:
- Relevant to a variety of frames, useful for various purposes
- Drag king inspiration
- Homosexual desire, in particular "closeted consumption"
Backstreet Boys, our primary subjects (3)
Boy band:
- Beatlemania, the Ur-boppers
- Four long-haired (or otherwise well-coiffed) lads
- Appropriation of black performance style (80s/90s New Jack Swing, vocal groups)
- Centrality of visual presentation
- Music video
- "Girlish" masculinity
Origin narrative
- Louis Pearlman holds open audition in 1993
- Orlando, FL (spectacular city)
- Seeking new young male talent
- Following NKOTB, Menudo
Early gigs:
- High schools
- Tourist spots (Sea World)
"Backstreet Boys", Jive, 1995
- "Rapturous" following in Europe
- Re-released in 1997 to huge success
Parting ways with Pearlman:
- Lawsuit over money
- Pearlman starts 'N Sync to compete
- Distancing from homo "Daddy" figure
- Disassociating with highly managed image reminiscent of 60s "girl groups"
- Re-framing their own history
- Male bonding
- Paying dues
White racial ambition
Note: 2 BSBoys are Latino
- Howie almost joined Menudo! (7)
- Menudo membership: Latino; BSB membership: White
Appropriation of contempo Black vocal groups
Keep:
- Harmonic singing style
- Melodic hooks
- Emphasis on love
Discard:
- Overt heterosexuality (in movement, in lyric)
- Ambiguously threatening blackness
Result:
- Ambiguous come-ons ("I want it that way") (6)
- Ambiguously gendered lyrics, open to queer interpretations
- Fantasies of fidelity, devotion
Illusions of sexual innocence
Seemingly "safe", non-threatening lyrics suggest specific, domesticated female heterosexuality
- "envision women's and girls' social agency primarily in terms of their ability to break boys' hearts" (7)
- rely on continuing objectification of girls as objects of boy desire
BSB masculinity
Teenybopper / Boy band / vocal groups under greater threat
- Cannot "fall back on rock tropes" to secure masculinity
- As did the Beatles w instrumental virtuosity
- Not permitted to express overt heterosexuality
Necessarily presented as spectacularized bodies
BSB Music
- Mid-tempo love ballad
- Ardent, yearning
- Ambiguous object "you"
- Power's NYT review: power to transport ... beyond the moment into "pure pleasure" (10)
"I want it that way" video
- Unmediated interaction between performers, audience
- Performer gaze directed outward at camera lens
- Non-verbal gestures
- Pointed finger
- Hand over heart
- Respectful representation of fans and fan pleasure
- Masses of female fans
- Shots of individual ecstasy
- Paradox of individual relationship ("my one desire") and mass consumption, fandom (11)
TRL broadcasts with pic-in-pic inset requests, testimonials
- Visualize a "virtual community" of BSB fans
- Re-affirm gendered hierarchy
- Consumption is proper mode of girls' social visibility, cultural agency
- Capitalist rite of "choosing"
"All the small things" parody video
"Relentlessly sexualizing" caricature of teenybopper music video
- Humor rests on satire of "girlish" masculinity
- Punk rockers == correct, normative, healthy masculinity
- Boy bands == feminized, superficial, artificial, banal, emasculated
- Opposition to pop girlishness
- Manifest in homophobic closing joke
- Yet evident pleasure on the part of Blink-182 in performing as a boy band
Ironic reception of the parody by teenyboppers
- Elevates Blink-182 to boy band stature
- Fluidity of girls' musical consumption can accomodate both boy bands and anti-boy bands
- But rigidity of conventional masculinity cannot similarly contain a contradiction
Recapturing conventional masculinity
- Taking on production roles
- Reveals layers of gendered labor:
- Producer, director = masculine / Performer = feminine
- Producer, performer = mascline / Fan = feminine
Larger than life video:
- Violence, militarism, weaponry
- Body builder features in costuming
- Black backup dancers, pop-locking dance sequence
- Referencing Rhythm Nation
- Few images of women
- Except for a few in bondage-inspired vinyl outfits
- A video that "even guys like" (19)
BSB able to shift into a more conventional mode of masculinity without alienating their female fans
- Blink 182 can simultaneously derive pleasure and reject its masculinity by performing as a boy band
- Could Britney do the same regarding her femininity?
- Does the "power" in "girl power" belong to the boys? (19)
