The Great Teen Pop Redemption
When I started writing about pop culture in the mid to late 1990s teen pop was widely seen as a cultural blight, an insidious cancer that, unless contained, would infect the entirety of pop culture.
Then again, music that appealed to teenaged girls has more or less ALWAYS been seen that way, even when the teenybopper idols that girls were screaming over were giants like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and The Beatles.
The boy bands of the 1980s, 1990s and beyond were seen as unconscionably artificial and ersatz. They were derided as crass vulgarians pandering to the lowest common denominator, as hopeless hacks.
How good could they possibly be if they did not write their own songs or play own instruments? And if they were credited as writers or musicians, skeptics remained skeptical. Did they really play instruments or write songs, or was the label just trying to make them look good?
The sheer level of hatred directed towards Britney Spears in the Clinton era is astonishing. She was a literal child of sixteen years old when she began releasing albums yet she was crucified in the press because the parasitic ghouls who controlled her image and life promoted an incoherent, violently contradictory persona for her as a devout Christian good girl virgin who was also an underage sex bomb vixen with a famously raunchy stage show.
The contempt for teen pop was rooted, unsurprisingly, in sexism. How could anything teen girls like possibly have any value?
Real music was made by sad white men with addiction issues and electric guitars, the conventional wisdom went, not by Europeans or Jews with synthesizers, drum machines and voice distorters.
ROCK was real music. Pop was mere entertainment for babies.
I’m pleased to report that we see things differently now. It took DECADES but Britney Spears is finally being seen as a human being with dignity and emotions and not a cheap punchline or the personification of all that is tacky and artificial in pop culture.
In Turning Red, the heroine’s obsession with a dreamy boy band is depicted as a normal, even healthy rite of passage. And the music in the film is damn good, downright Oscar-worthy.
We’ve finally come around to the idea that good music can be made by people who are not dreary straight white men with guitars. The world is changing and so are our conceptions of authenticity and value.
Bob Rafaelson recently died at 89. If he had died in the 1990s, I suspect that obituaries would have focussed, understandably, on his pioneering work as the director of Five Easy Pieces and a guiding force behind one of the most important production companies in the history of American film.
If Rafaelson’s fairly central role in the creation of The Monkees or direction of Head, the Pre-Fab Four’s only vehicle, were mentioned, it would be in passing, as the semi-embarrassing roots of a cinematic revolution.
Much has changed since then, thankfully. Rafaelson is rightly being mourned as one of the geniuses behind The Monkees as well as someone who helped kick-start New Hollywood.
There’s no shame in being involved with a boy band as enduring and beloved as The Monkees. There’s no shame in loving music whose audience is primarily teenaged girls. There’s no shame in making music whose audience is primarily teenaged girls. There’s no shame in being a teenaged girl in love with pop music.
We’ve finally entered a shame-free stage in boy band appreciation where we can enjoy, without guilt, teen pop for what it is—fun, shiny, catchy and irresistible when done well—and not for what it is not.
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