January 7, 2015 • 46 mins
Long before Beatlemania, 19th-century women threw themselves on stage to touch pianist Franz Liszt. Ever since, emotional teenyboppers have been misunderstood and ridiculed for their musical tastes. Cristen and Caroline spotlight the history of pop music fandom and why fangirls are considered the very worst kind of followers.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you From how Supports
dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline. And our semi theme for this week
on the show has been teen queens because in the
last podcast we talked about Taylor Swift. Who is I mean,
(00:24):
she's the teen queen. She is crushing the music industry
in a good way. Yeah, I guess more raising it
up anyway. I like Kristen talk, although she's not a
teenager anymore, so she's more the queen of teens. Sure,
but now I'm getting into semantics. But today we're going
to talk about teeny boppers and fangirls, specifically younger female
(00:45):
fans of pop music, because this really segways from Taylor
Swift because she's often marginalized by her haters because she's
most adored by young girls. And the attitude is is, obviously,
if young girls like you, you can't be that great. Yeah,
because young girls don't have any real music taste at all.
(01:09):
So and we're not saying that that's not our opinion, right,
delivering the opinion of often I don't know, music snobs.
Could we call them some critics? Um? So we want, though,
to kick off with an early history of music fandom,
which doesn't begin with Frank Sinatra and Bobby Socks is
(01:31):
going crazy for him. This was really fascinating. Um, it
goes all the way back to the nineteenth century when
public music performances and the development of musical stars really emerged.
And this is coming from an indispensable paper that we
found by Daniel Cavici called Loving Music, Listeners, Entertainers and
(01:54):
the Origins of Music Fandom in nineteenth century America. Yeah,
this used some fascinating perspective because I I honestly really well,
not that I think about fans and fan girls and
teeny boppers all that much, but I totally just thought, yeah, Beatles, Yeah,
that's where Elvis, That's where it goes back to. But yeah,
(02:15):
all the way back to the early to mid nineteenth
century we get music snobs. So one early music lover
talking about the influence that music can have on you
was twenty four year old opera fan Lucy Lowell of
the Massachusetts Lowells, who wrote in eighty four, I suppose
(02:38):
it can't be good for a person to go to
things that excite her so that she can't fix her
mind on anything for days afterwards, which sounds similar to
the kind of adoring fan girling bestowed upon Taylor Swift,
one Direction, etcetera. Although I have a feeling that people
probably weren't tearing their hair out and crying hysterically at
(03:00):
the opera, but it's a similar kind of thing of
just being fixated on these musical performances. Yeah, so in
the eighteen twenties, this is when we first get the
slang word star, which emerges in the theater talking about
the well, you know stars, stars with stars of the theater.
The stars were born in the eighteen twenties, Caroline, that's right.
(03:23):
And then we see the evolution of music consumption in
the mid to late nineteenth century because there were more
and more public spaces actually built just for music that
facilitated the commercial growth of this kind of entertainment. You
get more concert halls, pleasure gardens, museum stages, and taverns
(03:44):
and taverns people have always played in bars. Can we
bring back pleasure gardens though, because those are places I
would like to go as often as possible to have
a little quartet playing. Yeah, where is where is my
local pleasure garden? I don't know, but don't google that.
It sounds like that could get you some bad results.
It's just a David Busters these days. But in the fifties, though,
(04:06):
this is when professional virtuosos began touring nationally, which really
helped transform public musical performances into more commercial entertainment and
also made it more of a social ritual. You go
out and you see the star who's coming through town.
You go to the pleasure garden to see the utuoso.
(04:26):
And this is when we really get our early music lovers.
So maybe not as fanatic to use that important term
as a beatlemaniac, or as a Taylor Swift or One
Direction fan, but people who are still forming because of
these new technologies, because of these new social rituals, they're
able to form connections with these entertainers, and they really
(04:50):
do their best to not only consume the new musical
culture as much as possible, but to also make it
their own, for instance, doing things like studying where the
best place to sit in a theater or a concert
hall is. And I mean that just strikes me so
much as like this must just be human nature, because
you know, you have music nerds, you know, and I'm
(05:13):
not disparaging music nerds, but you have music nerds basically
who will do just that, who will learn all they
can about a band or a group or an artist
and do everything they can not only to connect with
that artist, but also to find the best way to
consume that product. Yeah. And with that background, in the
early eighteen fifties, the first big music stars were born,
(05:36):
and most notably we have in the US, at least
Swedish opera singer Jenny Lynn, whose US tour was a phenomenon.
I mean this was partially due to P. T. Barnum's
marketing prowess, because I mean long before she set foot
in the United States to do this tour, he you know,
(05:57):
basically did all of this pr campaign being like, Jenny
Lynde is coming and it will change your life. And
people went bananas for her. Yeah, and what's funny, I
mean to show you how bananas they went. Um. I
knew the name Jenny Lynde, but I didn't know why.
And so when Kristen and I were talking about this,
I looked up, like, Okay, why do I know Jenny
(06:19):
Lynn from being a furniture company, And I googled it No,
Jenny Lyne was not a furniture company. There is a
very specific style of bed called the Jenny Lind bed.
It's one of those school beds. If you have any
antiques or no, anyone with antiques, you've probably seen the
style of bed. My family has them. She was so
popular that she was one of the first entertainers of
(06:39):
that caliber to have things named for her, like a bed.
But also, I mean there were Jenny Lynde gloves, there
were There was all sorts of consumer products around at
the time that were named after her or dedicated to her,
because that's how much people loved, adored and wanted a
piece of her. Yeah. Wasn't there even a Jenny lind tobacco? Oh? Yeah,
(06:59):
you know you've made it when you got your own tobacco.
It's kind of like how you know, every pop star
has her own perfume, right, But fans were so wild
for her that they called it Lindmania. And fans went
so wild for her that they even called this Lyndmania.
And there was one excerpt from a newspaper I forget
(07:21):
which one it was, of the journalist essentially being like,
sell all of your possessions if you have to, you
have to get a ticket to go see Jenny Lynde,
and descriptions of these concerts where people would I mean
it was almost like a mob, a crazed mob, just
clamoring to see her. You could get injured at a
Jenny Lynde concert in the eighteen fifties because I mean,
(07:45):
if people want to see her, they will trample you
to get a better look at her. Victorians be tripping,
that's right, well, and that's happening in the United States. Meanwhile,
in Europe we have pianists and composer Fran's List, who
incites list of mania, which if sounds familiar, it's probably
because of that Phoenix song Lista mania, which is now
going to be in my head for the rest of
(08:06):
the day. But List was the first performer to walk
out on stage, fee to take his seat at the
piano bench to do kind of the dramatic entrance, and
he also positioned the piano to allow the audience to
see his face, so you know, the piano has turned
to its side rather than him sitting behind the piano.
(08:26):
And boy did the ladies go wild for List. I know,
I love this. Stephen Huff who's a world renowned concert pianist,
said that we hear about women throwing their clothes onto
the stage and taking his cigar butts and placing them
in their cleavages, which sounds a little dangerous. First of all,
that's plural, and I love that cleavages. Watch out for cleavages.
Burns from cigar butts discarded. Also, I wonder where these
(08:51):
cigar boats are coming from, because now I'm just imagining
lists playing while smoking a cigar without any hands, frantically smoke, yeah,
just puffing on it. Um. So clearly, this kind of
I mean clearly, this kind of fanaticism long predates Beatlemania. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
so we have to then talk about not friends list
(09:14):
specific mania or landmania, but music omania in general, which
was first described as such in the eighteen thirties and
eventually fell out of use by the twentieth century. The
physicians had known since medieval times that music could end
up having a really profound effect on you physically and psychologically.
It can make you feel happy, you're sad, or whatever, melancholy.
(09:36):
But during this period in the nineteenth century, there was
an actual doctor diagnosis to find as a variety of
monomania in which the passion for music is carried to
such an extent as to derange the intellectual faculties, which
sounds a lot like how fan girls are described one
direction urs crying at the side of Harry's styles. It
(09:58):
sounds a lot like these early descriptions of music a mania,
which really was not gendered at all at the time,
although there was certainly a backlash to music a mania,
which is reminiscent of the modern day marginalization of teeny
boppers and fan girls, because apparently there were calls for
(10:20):
more classical appreciation of music, because fans were quote too
invested in the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons,
and so music snobs of the day would differentiate between
the ordinary fan who lacked appropriate education and taste. Who
I mean, it sounds a lot like, you know, the
record store clerk stereotype of like, even if you like
(10:42):
a certain album, they'll still give you the staining guy,
because you probably just don't know enough about how it
was made or how to appropriately listen to it. Um.
But then they also had the musician and the refined fan,
the fan who really understood the music to a degree
to which they could appropriately and with the love ahead
listen to it right, And I mean, I'm sure those
(11:03):
are the people who are picking the right seat in
the concert hall to hear the music best. And they're
not going wild over They're probably not too emotive. It's like, no,
it's the wonderful June. Wonderful June. Yeah. I mean. There
were even music snobs who looked down on music fans,
which honestly wasn't a term until a little bit later,
(11:23):
like in the early twentieth century, but look down on
fans who would listen to the record or the performance
too much and then get sick of it. They were like, obviously,
you're not a good enough consumer of this classical, beautiful
music if you're going to listen to it all the
time until you get sick of it. I am just
going to listen to it the once or the twice
(11:44):
and really appreciate it. And of course, this development of
music fandom, particularly as we move into the early twentieth century,
is also facilitated by technological advances that allows you to
not only consume music in live venues, to go to
the pleasure garden and see the virtuoso of your choice,
but also listen to recordings of the Virtuoso or of
(12:07):
Jenny Lynde at home, And there's also sheet music being produced,
and also you do have more of the performances being
turned into this kind of entertainment industry. And then in
the nineteen twenties and thirties, this is when the first
fan clubs emerged. So we're really getting serious about our
fandom post World War One. Yeah, we're coming together. I mean,
(12:28):
I mean, imagine how different it would have been to
be in a fan club in the nineteen thirties as
opposed to fifteen, when you have the Internet. Back then
you have to be really freaking committed to communicating with
your fellow fans and consuming all of these you know, products,
whether it's cheat music or the records themselves or whatever. Yeah,
and you probably don't even need fan clubs today because
(12:51):
Tumbler is pretty much just a giant fan club. Right,
different things. But once you get into mid century in
the nineteen fifties, you have the even more monetization of music,
particularly with the development of pop music. And when we
have pop music and bubblegum pop in particular come of about,
(13:13):
and these record labels really getting savvy about targeting their fans.
This is when fandom, though and criticism of music fandom,
becomes less generalized and more gendered. Yeah, well, I mean,
you know, Kristen mentioned earlier that the whole music a
mania thing was really not not gender did it honestly
(13:37):
seemed to be more about class, about and not even
necessarily financial stuff, but just you were on a higher
plane of existence if you consumed and enjoyed music in
a certain way versus the people that you look down upon.
You know, people who had music a mania were obviously
not to be trusted. We don't like those people, but
it was all sort of equal opportunity snobbery. There were
(13:58):
women who wrote in their diet Ari's sniffing it like,
look at these riding masses of people, how disgusting, same
as you did with men. And they were writing about
people of either gender. And so it is interesting to
see that evolution in the mid twentieth century about fan
girls and teeny boppers specifically consuming music that honestly, as
(14:22):
we'll get into here in a second, I mean, it
was made for them. Yeah, and we'll get into all
of that and talk more about teeny bopper's past and
present when we come right back from a quick break
and now back to the show. So in the first
half of the podcast, we talked about the history of
(14:43):
music fandom that I know I wasn't familiar with. But
now it's time to pick up with a name that
really launched the whole teeny bopper thing, which is Frank Sinatra. Yeah.
I mean this was in the nineties and Sona tra
was he was a younger gentleman, is kind of handsome.
(15:04):
I mean, he had kind of a pointy face. Yeah,
We're gonna be honest. She was kind of the original.
Can we say the original justin Bieber. I don't want
to disparage Frank Sinatra in that way, but I mean
he really incited, though, the first modern fan girling of
girls crying and loving him and just wanting I mean
(15:24):
they just wanted Frankie. Yeah. But I mean I think
that goes, you know, not to go too deep into
Frank Sinatra, but I mean I think the whole issue
with getting the teeny bopper love and tears and emoting
over Frank Sinatra goes back to what we talked about
with Taylor Swift in our last episode. Because Taylor Swift
is herself a very young woman, very successful, knows how
(15:48):
to connect with fans who are also very young, much
younger than even she is. And I think that Frank
Sinatra was one of the first, early, very young performers
who was able to connect with young women who were
all of a sudden part of this rising consumer culture,
part of this new teenage group of people that had
(16:09):
never really been recognized before. That's such a great point.
And also with Sinatra, he I'm sure he was not
the first to do this, but he also was available
in so many different ways to his fans because not
only could they see him in appearances or see him
singing live, he was also in movies as well, so
(16:30):
you could watch him act, you could watch him fall
in love. I mean there, you know, it's definitely a
multi dimensional star. Um. But then in the nineteen fifties
we have the emergence of bubblegum pop that, according to
the book Girlhood in America quote set the precedent of
style over substance in the musical consumption of teenage girls
(16:50):
because it was really manufactured for them. Yeah, it was.
You definitely had a lot of of record industry executives
coming together and saying, Okay, so we're we're in the
postwar period. I don't know if anybody was actually saying
that in the fifties, but they're in the postwar period.
We have this new group of people were recognizing called teenagers,
(17:11):
and they have consumer power somewhat a little bit now
and and there they have a little bit more agency
than children of their age group fifty years prior. Let's
package something for them. And so this sort of came
along with the whole advent of top forty radio, which
relied on a specific teen appealing formula to turn a profit. Yeah,
(17:33):
because teams were spending time by themselves in ways that
they never had before. They're also dating, they also had cars, um,
and they also had magazines being created specifically for them.
Sixteen Magazine in particular, was one of the earliest and
most widely circulated teen magazines that totally fed early fandom. Um.
(17:56):
This is coming again from girlhood in America, saying quote
teeny bopper and is essentially a subculture of consumption. Yeah,
and I sort of this is something that if you
really think about it, it makes total sense. But that
I still hated reading because it made me sad for
young girls who apparently can't win. Um. So this is
also coming from girlhood in America, and he writes that
(18:17):
the genre is primarily a commodity to be marketed and
sold to teenage girls. It uses a specific formula to
turn a profit, leaving many to believe that the fans
who consume the product are cultural dupes. So basically, girls
are being blamed for consuming the very things that they
are meant to consume according to record industry executives or
(18:42):
radio DJs or what have you. Yeah, I mean, and
sure there is a lot of it that is very formulaic.
I mean, go back and listen to our episode a
while back on boy bands. I mean, these things are
specifically built and made for this specific audience. And so
from then though until now, when you read media descriptions
(19:06):
of this um of this demographic, of the tunny popper demographic,
which is which makes it sound like such fogies. Also,
I just use the word fogy. I'm but to call
them teeny poppers. Um but even today they're described as
just having really no taste whatsoever. It's all emotion and
(19:26):
hormones and no discriminating taste whatsoever. We're just looking for
the Frank Sinatra essentially, But because you've got people who
are saying, if you are consuming and rapidly consuming um,
something that is prepackaged and bubblegum popish, then yeah, then
(19:47):
you must not have any discriminating taste. You're just as
as people talk about a lot of people just dismiss
girls who like pop music as just this writhing mass
of unbridled girlhood sexuality. Yeah, and a lot of pop
music scholars mark this point in the emergence in the
(20:08):
development of the music industry in the United States as
this sort of dichotomy between male pop and rock fans
seen as active consumers. They're choosing what they like. They're
smarter and more discriminating in whatever goes in their record player,
versus passive fan girls who were just sort of we're
spoon fed our tastes. Yeah, just tell us who the
(20:30):
new pop star off the conveyor belt is, and we'll
just consume this music and buy the posters and buy
the tickets. Except who should I have a crush on?
And I do remember that in my own experience when
I first heard about Hansen, because friends of mine had
crushes on them, and there was the whole thing of
you know, which one did you like? Of course it
(20:52):
was the middle one. Obviously he was the hottest, and
so I would pre anticipated liking up and wanting to
have a crush on him. So there is, I mean,
there is that aspect to it as well. I have
something to confess what I think you and I in
our lives in n we're acting out the dichotomy of
(21:13):
which we are currently speaking. Really because I remember being
in six or seventh grade whenever Buck came out. But
for us, I don't mean whatever have rolled everybody else was,
but looking at it and being like, hmm, well, Caroline,
you gotta remember too. I was homeschooled, so I I
will play that card. And I was edgy urban youth.
(21:38):
I certainly wasn't an edgy urban home but I don't know,
like where my snobber even came from. It's not like
I was actively consuming any type of music other than
what I heard on the radio, but just looking down
my nose at at this pop music, I think it
was less than music though for me, and just the
fact that I was primed for crushing. Heck, yeah, I
(21:59):
loved crush. So I was sorry, Sorry, I was really
busy crushing on Gavin Rossdale, so I didn't have time
for tailor hands. Oh yeah, I jumped on that train
a little bit later. I was just just that was
probably just a late bloomer. But anyway, Um, also at
this time, though, it's not just male pop stars who
are being developed and groomed for the bubblegum audience, but
(22:21):
also you do have girl groups like their Aunts and
the Cherrell's who are also being pitched directly to girls,
sort of like uh proto Taylor Swift kind of. Yeah,
in honor of this episode, last night, I was listening
to my um, marvel Lett's Pandora station and it's all
of these wonderful, wonderful girl groups. And it's interesting, though
(22:44):
to listen to that station and here all of these
bubblegum pop totally manufactured groups girls who marry me not
have you even known each other? Being dragged together by
record executives to make money. But the whole thing of
out those girl groups is, even if they weren't doing
their own songwriting, which they weren't, you had people like
(23:05):
Carol King, for instance, writing a lot of the lyrics
for these girl groups to sing the songs were still
providing a window into the emotional world of young women.
And this is something that Andy Zeisler wrote about in
feminism and pop culture, that that's sure, they're manufactured. Sure
it's pop, it's not like the Highest Denominator or whatever,
(23:28):
but it's still great music and it's still for girls,
and it's just like Taylor Swift is today. It's giving
girls of that era something that they can look at
and relate to. Yeah. Absolutely, and in the late nineteen
forties and definitely in the nineteen fifties, sort of this
groundwork has been laid, so that also in the nineteen
fifties and sixties, once Elvis comes around and then the Beatles,
(23:54):
all hell kind of breaks loose fan wise, but that
also sort of cements this styeo type as well, of
the fawning, crying, hysterical. That work comes up a lot
and it's important that it does come up a lot.
Um And the perception hasn't improved since then, Yeah, it
certainly hasn't. Um. I do think it is interesting though,
(24:17):
that there is so much literature out there about young
girl fans, whether they're the teeny boppers of the fifties
or the swifties of today. But um Jacqueline Edmondson edited
this book Music and American Life that did talk about
the whole pop versus rock, feminine versus masculine, active versus
passive thing and said that although girls and women became
(24:41):
an integral part of the popular music industry, they were
constantly devalued and objectified. I mean it goes back to
that whole thing of rock being serious, rap and hip
hop being hyper masculine, and pop is just this thing
that gets shoved aside as valueless because it is consumed
by girls and women. And there was a note as
well in the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music in the
(25:04):
World talking about how popular music scholars have really gone
back and quote challenge negative and stereotyped conceptualizations of female
fans who have regularly been presented in news reports and
popular literature as passive consumers. There's that word again, passive
uncritically supporting mass produced music, or as swooning teenagers idolizing
(25:29):
male pop stars. Yeah, and the thing you get a
lot too the more you read about this is the
recognition that a lot of it has to do with
the idea of the feminine and the female being considered
the other um. Asia Romano, who wrote an article in
The Kernel called the teens on Tumbler Are all Right,
(25:52):
talks about how teenage girls continue to be one of
the world's prime targets for being held up as a
social example of something a in foreign and overtly sexualized,
arriving primordial, massive or orgiastic emotions waiting to be tapped
by adult men who treat their identities as a bizarre spectacle.
Because when you think about it, especially when you read
(26:13):
and we'll talk about this article a little later, when
you read like the g Q piece about One Direction
and talking about their fans, and I mean the way
they describe these young girls is a hormone bomb, I
believe was the way they described him. Well, there was
just a lot of horrifying, like a dark pink mass
of blah blah blah. It's just it got old, too
(26:34):
old to sexual especially since the girls are talking about
are like eleven um. But it's strange that nobody seems
to be able to step back and say, wait, okay,
this is just this is just another half of the
population doing something like they want to do. Maybe we
should question why the other half of the population does
(26:54):
things like they do. For instance, you know, men going
nuts over sports or sports teammes or whatever are going
nuts over music as well, but just in a different
kind of way. And at this point, I think it's
worth noting that this conversation really is not an argument
on behalf of like the fine musical quality of all
(27:15):
pop music. It's not about the music. It's more about
this persistent pattern of like marginalizing this very specific demographic,
and you throw pop music under the bus along with
it as well. But what's fascinating to see is just
how how the media even approaches fangirls. It's like, we
(27:38):
still don't know how to wrap our minds around these
young girls. There was even an article about this in
the Wall Street Journal of all places, called Inside the
Brains of Justin Bieber Fans, which interviewed these neurologists being like,
what's happening inside their brains? I mean, what what would
compel a twelve year old to cry at the site
(28:01):
of one direction? And answering this very serious and hard
hitting question, uh, neuroscientists and neurologists were basically saying that
this experience of listening to Taylor swift or watching one
direction releases dopamine, which is of course a neurotransmitter involved
(28:24):
in pleasure and addiction. It provides the same rush as
eating chocolate or winning for a compulsive gambler. Yeah, so
we like it, in other words, and we just really
like it and it makes us feel good. We like
it now. It was noteworthy though that and this is
nothing against Dr Daniel Leviton conducting this research at all, um,
(28:44):
but I didn't think it was interesting how he said
that these musical chase are really formed and wired in
our brains in the teen years and really become part
of our brains internal wiring. So that, for instance, in
my case, when I hear Bob, I am taken back
to when I was eleven or twelve years old listening
(29:05):
to being like, oh man, their homeschooled too. I know,
well it's I didn't mean to totally skip over. You
just said, sorry, but my tween dreams, your tween dream,
homeschool romance with the middle, with the middle, handsome brother. Yeah,
I mean this this I feel like dude. Roommate has
said similar things to me, although his his brain stunting
(29:26):
came a little bit later. I guess he's still obsessed
with the Atari's so he formed that emotional obsessive bond
with a pop punk band. Yeah, it's just it's just
nostalgia careless. But there's also too Almost every anytime this
conversation comes up of like why beatlemaniacs? Why one direction?
Or is why justin Bieber fans. There's also this talk
(29:47):
of safe sexuality, and we talked about this a lot
too in our episode on boy bands. Um, it's like,
calm down, parents, It's just these are just kind of
like practice boyfriends, which is also highly hedter noormative, and
we don't even have time to get into uh, sexual
orientation and race when it comes to fandom the portrayal
of fandom as well, because it is very white and
(30:08):
very straight. Um, but there's this it's almost like, Okay,
we can calm down because this is a safe way
for girls to express their sexualities. We we should actually
be glad that they're kissing posters and not actually making
out with real boys. Yeah. Well, I mean it's when
you think about yourself being in sixth grade or whatever,
(30:33):
is it really so hard to understand this and to
imagine it because you're you're hitting puberty, You've got these
hormones rushing through you for the first time. You're looking
around going like for the first time, your Tina Belcher.
Basically you're looking around and being like, butts awesome, and
so just like it's no surprise that girls of the
(30:55):
fifties consumed the music that was packaged and presented too
and four of them. Is it really any surprise that
a girl of thirteen would, who's suddenly awakening to the
idea that hey, I really like but boys, but would
look at somebody like one direction and start fantasizing or
(31:16):
almost obsessing over them. Yeah, and not almost. I mean
plenty of girls do outright obsessed over these things. I
mean I outright obsessed over Prince William truth. He told
when I was young, I thought I would be Kate
Middleton per chance. Um. But and this is also too
all in the context of living in a society where
(31:37):
expressing outright that kind of sexuality, the sexual desires Tina
belterering um, is not okay for girls. So it's not
only a thing of and I think that that's often
left out these conversations of like, well, no wonder they're
freaking out because in a lot of ways were kind
of pent up um. But one quote though from that
(31:58):
Wall Street Journal article that jumped out was boys also
developed musical tastes in this phase of life, but adolescent
girls are far more likely to become infatuated with pop stars,
experts say, because they are awakening to romantic and sexual
feelings that are both intoxicating and scary. And it's like,
but what about the boys though, So they're doing all
(32:20):
of this, they're developing these kinds of things, they are
also you know, having experiencing sexual feelings that are probably
both intoxicating and scary. But we aren't as weirded out
by that, right. It's almost like a coming of age, uh,
an expected and accepted phase that a boy will, like,
you know, tape up pictures of Megan Fox or whoever
(32:43):
in his bedroom, and you know, we were all like, oh,
that's just a pervy little thirteen year old bullets what
they go through. Whereas there's not that same acceptance and
a pass is not given to young girls. Instead, it's like,
it's icky and scary that you're also obsessed with these
pop stars. Yeah, how strange, and also too, this is
(33:03):
around the time there were every now and then you'll
have comparisons to boys and men's obsessions with sports teams
to the point that they are also yelling and screaming
and crying. But there but that doesn't seem strange at all.
There's never any like, oh, well, what's going on inside
those fans brains? But coming back to the girls, the
(33:28):
teeny the girl teeny boppers emotions aside, and perhaps unrealistic
obsessions with boy bands aside, it's still unanniable that this
is such an influential group. I mean, these girls prop
up in a lot of ways the music industry. I
mean we talked about in the Taylor Swift episode. How
(33:50):
I mean her sales accounted for of all records sales
in the United States the week that it came out. Yeah,
I mean, this is just part of a wave that
has been waving since the eighteen fifties. There is nothing
new about consumer culture when it comes to music and
(34:10):
the fact that these fans who are so disparaged so often,
they really are giving these artists quite the fat paycheck.
And and you know, so for that their disparaged, They're
they're buying something it's prepackaged, They're listening to something that
is that is super hyper produced. Um, and everybody says
(34:32):
that that's just not good enough. But as Asia Romano
over The Colonel pointed out in August, it's not like
we have to worry so much about the future of
our country based on the fact that kids like pop music.
I mean, they've always liked pop music. If anything, these
kids might be better off than we were, she argues,
(34:52):
because they're so social media and real world savvy and
much more so than we give them credit for, and
they happened to be much more likely to engage in actual,
real life activism. For instance, Yeah, there Wash there's a
mom who wrote a column I think it came out
in The Guardian who talking about her daughter, who is
a die hard one direction fan. She's a one direction
(35:15):
of and she said, yeah, you can disparage her all
you want, but she is demonstrated and learned all sorts
of real world skills, such as navigating her way to
a concert, like getting on the subway with her friends,
figuring out how to budget and then buy a ticket,
and also meeting all of these other girls, these other
(35:37):
one direction ers as well. And she was like, I
think it's actually been rather valuable for her. I mean,
that's a that's a really glass half full kind of perspective.
But I think that it's worth opening up our our
perception of who these girls are, because a lot of
times we just kind of distilled them down into just
(35:58):
a writhing pink horr mown bomb waiting to go off,
rather than oh, no, these are individuals and they probably
do all have different tastes in certain ways. I mean
they you know, we all they have to at least
choose which one direction band member they like the most.
That's right. Well, I thought an interesting perspective on it,
kind of jumping off from the whole using social media
(36:21):
to connect, using social media to participate in activism. They're
sort of echoes of that from the fandom around girl
groups of the nineteen sixties. And this is coming from
that book Feminism and Pop Culture by Andy Zeisler, and
she was quoting Susan Douglas who was talking about how
back in the sixties, yes, you have commercialism and all
(36:43):
of this pop music, but the girls who were listening
to it got this sense of euphoria. She was saying,
it wasn't just the the happiness of listening to this
music or purchasing it and participating in this culture. But
she said that for tens of millions of young girls
who started feeling at the same time that day as
(37:03):
a generation would not be trapped, and there was plan
of the tiniest seat of a social movement. And again
that might seem like a glass half full, kind of
a pie in the sky idea, but you know, we
did mention earlier that those girl groups of the fifties
and sixties it was really the first time that female
singers were singing lyrics about female emotions. Yeah. Well, and
(37:27):
even when it comes to the beatle Maniacs, there have
also been uh feminists who have said, hey, well, this
is also to the first time we really saw the
female gaze and mass. Maybe we're also a little uncomfortable
with this, just because the tables have turned in that
way of you have thousands and thousands of girls actively
(37:50):
lusting after a group of men, and hey, we probably
just hadn't seen that very much anymore, and we still
to this day are uncomfortable with seeing that guy of
um sexuality perhaps on display, right, because it's the whole
heteronormative male culture being the default. That's why no one
questions crazy male sports fandom. It's why it's cool for
(38:12):
my former dude roommate to scream at the television or
lose his mind at a U g. A game, But
it's looked down upon if a girl loses her mind
screaming over Taylor Swift. Well, I think this two circles
back not only to our episode on boy bands, but
also to our bitch episode because we kicked it off
talking about basic bitches, and the hallmark of a basic
(38:33):
bitch is also a die hard love of Taylor Swift,
which I think to reflects this kind of you know,
eschewing any sign of just unabashed femininity. Because, as writer
and editor Rachel Adiden said two Time Magazine talking about
this issue of fan girls, and this was more of
(38:54):
fangirls in geek culture being disparaged. She said, quote, feminization
is all universally seen as appreciation of value. And it's
not only that depreciation of value. It is also a
giant pushing together of really different groups of people. It's
assuming that all of these young girls and can we
(39:16):
not forget the young boys to who we like this music? Yes,
I mean talk about like heteronormative culture. It is very heteronormative,
and it honestly wasn't until recently that popular music studies
have really highlighted that diversity. And this is coming again
from the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music in the World,
which cited by a pop music scholar, which found that
(39:40):
female Elvis fans had their own particular personal and also
political uses for the performer rather than simply worshiping Elvis
because they should worship Elvis and the same thing. There
was another study that they decided um talking about how
being a fan is quote more of a celebration of
(40:01):
girl culture and a process through which female sexuality and
identity are produced as it is about the male performers involved.
That makes a lot of sense, totally. Yeah, I mean,
if you have, I don't want to keep going back
to the sports example, because I realized that things are
not always black and white with clear lines. There's plenty
of overlap here and women love sports. Women love sports too. Yeah,
(40:22):
but I mean, just to kind of pick on an example,
I mean, there's a lot of social acceptance for boys
from a young age learning to love sports and using
it as a way to bond with other men in
their lives. Whether those are friends or dads or brothers
or whoever, And why should girls fandom or girls love
(40:44):
of whether it's a pop princess or a boy band
or whoever, why should that be less valued? Well, and
a lot of it's probably for that reason though, that
a lot of UH analysts and scholars have noted how
in a lot of ways die hard fandom is transgressive
(41:06):
of the appropriate feminine roles, both then and still today.
And we see that just kind of reflected in the
kind of brush off that they often get. Now, can
fan girls get obsessive and go wild and also say
horrible things on social media if you disagree with their taste. Yes,
(41:27):
fans are not perfect. No fan is perfect. But I
think it's just worth considering why teeny boppers, in particular
the female teeny bopper, is just so universally maligned. It
will be interesting, Kristen, when you and I are podcasters
in our eighties to look back and see how this
(41:50):
particular point in time where we have the intersection of
pop music and fandom and all of that stuff and
social media, how that will affected things. Because you and
I in the beginning of the podcast kept mentioning changing
technology changing methods for consuming music and all of that
stuff in the way that it fostered that music lover culture.
(42:11):
It will be interesting to see how all of these
young girls who now feel like they have a voice
on social media and can connect with each other over
their fandom, but can also say, hey, screw you g
Q writers for portraying me as a terrible person and
portraying Harry Styles as a terrible person. It will just
be interesting to see how and whether that changes the
culture and whether it gives young women more of a
(42:32):
voice as they get older. And you can tune into
that episode in on Stuff Grandma never told you that.
But now we want to hear from teeny bopper's fangirls listening.
What do you think about all of this? Mom stuff
at how stuff works dot com is our email address.
(42:52):
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or
messages on Facebook. We definitely want to hear from fans.
Have you been dismissed simply for being a fan who
also happens to be a girl or a woman. Let
us know mom stuff at how stuffworks dot com and
we've got a couple of messages to share with you
right now. So I've got a couple of letters here
(43:19):
about our episode on ankles and cankles, and this one
is coming from Wendy, who writes, my husband related to
me the story of a teammate on his high school
football team. Hey, guys in sports call back. This individual
was a linebacker with a stocky build and was overall
very athletic, but was very aware of his lack of ankles.
You mentioned that there were no exercises to slim the ankle,
(43:42):
but the approach he took was to perform tons of
calf raises to make his calves more prominent, giving the
illusion of a smaller ankle. One day, he burst into
the weight room exclaiming I have ankles, showing them off
to his fellow teammates. He was so enthusiastic. He was
also totally open about his excitement the other guys, which
I love. And also it shows that men do talk
(44:03):
to each other about more than sports and babes in
the locker room. I thought it would be interesting to
share that this was not just a lady centric issue.
Love the podcast and keep up the good work. Well,
thanks Wendy. Well, I have a letter here from Diana,
who starts off the email with three thank you's and
so you're welcome. She says, I have cankles. It is genetic.
(44:27):
My grandmother on my dad's side never wore dresses, and
now I am in the same boat. It is a
painful thing to see people staring at my ankles are
making comments. Don't even think about skinny jeans, which you
didn't mention. But it is a problem for people like me.
I know what they're saying. As you said, there is
nothing I can do about it. I have large risks too,
and although it helped me as an athlete, it will
(44:48):
never be the definition of the Gibson girl. We women
are still held out to be. Even finding skew boots
is impossible at times. Oprah once mentioned cankles years ago
and laughed at the term. I cried. Even Oprah, who
acts as though she is the defender of all people
who are different, didn't get me. I hope this message
(45:08):
reaches those who don't or can't understand my position. In
the hope it will help alleviate the judgment. So thank you, Dianna,
and I'm sorry Oprah doesn't support you. Yeah, Oprah maybe
so blind to cankles. Even Oprah is not perfect, though,
it's a good reminder. So if you have letters to
send to us, No Mom Stuff and how Stuff Works
(45:29):
dot com is our email address and we'd love to
hear from you. But if you'd like to give us
a shout out on social media, you can find links
to all of those places as well. It's all of
our blogs, videos, and podcast including this one with our
sources so you can read along with us if you like.
All of that's over. It's stuff Mom Never told You
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(45:53):
Does it How Stuff Works dot com six
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you From how Supports
dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline. And our semi theme for this week
on the show has been teen queens because in the
last podcast we talked about Taylor Swift. Who is I mean,
(00:24):
she's the teen queen. She is crushing the music industry
in a good way. Yeah, I guess more raising it
up anyway. I like Kristen talk, although she's not a
teenager anymore, so she's more the queen of teens. Sure,
but now I'm getting into semantics. But today we're going
to talk about teeny boppers and fangirls, specifically younger female
(00:45):
fans of pop music, because this really segways from Taylor
Swift because she's often marginalized by her haters because she's
most adored by young girls. And the attitude is is, obviously,
if young girls like you, you can't be that great. Yeah,
because young girls don't have any real music taste at all.
(01:09):
So and we're not saying that that's not our opinion, right,
delivering the opinion of often I don't know, music snobs.
Could we call them some critics? Um? So we want, though,
to kick off with an early history of music fandom,
which doesn't begin with Frank Sinatra and Bobby Socks is
(01:31):
going crazy for him. This was really fascinating. Um, it
goes all the way back to the nineteenth century when
public music performances and the development of musical stars really emerged.
And this is coming from an indispensable paper that we
found by Daniel Cavici called Loving Music, Listeners, Entertainers and
(01:54):
the Origins of Music Fandom in nineteenth century America. Yeah,
this used some fascinating perspective because I I honestly really well,
not that I think about fans and fan girls and
teeny boppers all that much, but I totally just thought, yeah, Beatles, Yeah,
that's where Elvis, That's where it goes back to. But yeah,
(02:15):
all the way back to the early to mid nineteenth
century we get music snobs. So one early music lover
talking about the influence that music can have on you
was twenty four year old opera fan Lucy Lowell of
the Massachusetts Lowells, who wrote in eighty four, I suppose
(02:38):
it can't be good for a person to go to
things that excite her so that she can't fix her
mind on anything for days afterwards, which sounds similar to
the kind of adoring fan girling bestowed upon Taylor Swift,
one Direction, etcetera. Although I have a feeling that people
probably weren't tearing their hair out and crying hysterically at
(03:00):
the opera, but it's a similar kind of thing of
just being fixated on these musical performances. Yeah, so in
the eighteen twenties, this is when we first get the
slang word star, which emerges in the theater talking about
the well, you know stars, stars with stars of the theater.
The stars were born in the eighteen twenties, Caroline, that's right.
(03:23):
And then we see the evolution of music consumption in
the mid to late nineteenth century because there were more
and more public spaces actually built just for music that
facilitated the commercial growth of this kind of entertainment. You
get more concert halls, pleasure gardens, museum stages, and taverns
(03:44):
and taverns people have always played in bars. Can we
bring back pleasure gardens though, because those are places I
would like to go as often as possible to have
a little quartet playing. Yeah, where is where is my
local pleasure garden? I don't know, but don't google that.
It sounds like that could get you some bad results.
It's just a David Busters these days. But in the fifties, though,
(04:06):
this is when professional virtuosos began touring nationally, which really
helped transform public musical performances into more commercial entertainment and
also made it more of a social ritual. You go
out and you see the star who's coming through town.
You go to the pleasure garden to see the utuoso.
(04:26):
And this is when we really get our early music lovers.
So maybe not as fanatic to use that important term
as a beatlemaniac, or as a Taylor Swift or One
Direction fan, but people who are still forming because of
these new technologies, because of these new social rituals, they're
able to form connections with these entertainers, and they really
(04:50):
do their best to not only consume the new musical
culture as much as possible, but to also make it
their own, for instance, doing things like studying where the
best place to sit in a theater or a concert
hall is. And I mean that just strikes me so
much as like this must just be human nature, because
you know, you have music nerds, you know, and I'm
(05:13):
not disparaging music nerds, but you have music nerds basically
who will do just that, who will learn all they
can about a band or a group or an artist
and do everything they can not only to connect with
that artist, but also to find the best way to
consume that product. Yeah. And with that background, in the
early eighteen fifties, the first big music stars were born,
(05:36):
and most notably we have in the US, at least
Swedish opera singer Jenny Lynn, whose US tour was a phenomenon.
I mean this was partially due to P. T. Barnum's
marketing prowess, because I mean long before she set foot
in the United States to do this tour, he you know,
(05:57):
basically did all of this pr campaign being like, Jenny
Lynde is coming and it will change your life. And
people went bananas for her. Yeah, and what's funny, I
mean to show you how bananas they went. Um. I
knew the name Jenny Lynde, but I didn't know why.
And so when Kristen and I were talking about this,
I looked up, like, Okay, why do I know Jenny
(06:19):
Lynn from being a furniture company, And I googled it No,
Jenny Lyne was not a furniture company. There is a
very specific style of bed called the Jenny Lind bed.
It's one of those school beds. If you have any
antiques or no, anyone with antiques, you've probably seen the
style of bed. My family has them. She was so
popular that she was one of the first entertainers of
(06:39):
that caliber to have things named for her, like a bed.
But also, I mean there were Jenny Lynde gloves, there
were There was all sorts of consumer products around at
the time that were named after her or dedicated to her,
because that's how much people loved, adored and wanted a
piece of her. Yeah. Wasn't there even a Jenny lind tobacco? Oh? Yeah,
(06:59):
you know you've made it when you got your own tobacco.
It's kind of like how you know, every pop star
has her own perfume, right, But fans were so wild
for her that they called it Lindmania. And fans went
so wild for her that they even called this Lyndmania.
And there was one excerpt from a newspaper I forget
(07:21):
which one it was, of the journalist essentially being like,
sell all of your possessions if you have to, you
have to get a ticket to go see Jenny Lynde,
and descriptions of these concerts where people would I mean
it was almost like a mob, a crazed mob, just
clamoring to see her. You could get injured at a
Jenny Lynde concert in the eighteen fifties because I mean,
(07:45):
if people want to see her, they will trample you
to get a better look at her. Victorians be tripping,
that's right, well, and that's happening in the United States. Meanwhile,
in Europe we have pianists and composer Fran's List, who
incites list of mania, which if sounds familiar, it's probably
because of that Phoenix song Lista mania, which is now
going to be in my head for the rest of
(08:06):
the day. But List was the first performer to walk
out on stage, fee to take his seat at the
piano bench to do kind of the dramatic entrance, and
he also positioned the piano to allow the audience to
see his face, so you know, the piano has turned
to its side rather than him sitting behind the piano.
(08:26):
And boy did the ladies go wild for List. I know,
I love this. Stephen Huff who's a world renowned concert pianist,
said that we hear about women throwing their clothes onto
the stage and taking his cigar butts and placing them
in their cleavages, which sounds a little dangerous. First of all,
that's plural, and I love that cleavages. Watch out for cleavages.
Burns from cigar butts discarded. Also, I wonder where these
(08:51):
cigar boats are coming from, because now I'm just imagining
lists playing while smoking a cigar without any hands, frantically smoke, yeah,
just puffing on it. Um. So clearly, this kind of
I mean clearly, this kind of fanaticism long predates Beatlemania. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
so we have to then talk about not friends list
(09:14):
specific mania or landmania, but music omania in general, which
was first described as such in the eighteen thirties and
eventually fell out of use by the twentieth century. The
physicians had known since medieval times that music could end
up having a really profound effect on you physically and psychologically.
It can make you feel happy, you're sad, or whatever, melancholy.
(09:36):
But during this period in the nineteenth century, there was
an actual doctor diagnosis to find as a variety of
monomania in which the passion for music is carried to
such an extent as to derange the intellectual faculties, which
sounds a lot like how fan girls are described one
direction urs crying at the side of Harry's styles. It
(09:58):
sounds a lot like these early descriptions of music a mania,
which really was not gendered at all at the time,
although there was certainly a backlash to music a mania,
which is reminiscent of the modern day marginalization of teeny
boppers and fan girls, because apparently there were calls for
(10:20):
more classical appreciation of music, because fans were quote too
invested in the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons,
and so music snobs of the day would differentiate between
the ordinary fan who lacked appropriate education and taste. Who
I mean, it sounds a lot like, you know, the
record store clerk stereotype of like, even if you like
(10:42):
a certain album, they'll still give you the staining guy,
because you probably just don't know enough about how it
was made or how to appropriately listen to it. Um.
But then they also had the musician and the refined fan,
the fan who really understood the music to a degree
to which they could appropriately and with the love ahead
listen to it right, And I mean, I'm sure those
(11:03):
are the people who are picking the right seat in
the concert hall to hear the music best. And they're
not going wild over They're probably not too emotive. It's like, no,
it's the wonderful June. Wonderful June. Yeah. I mean. There
were even music snobs who looked down on music fans,
which honestly wasn't a term until a little bit later,
(11:23):
like in the early twentieth century, but look down on
fans who would listen to the record or the performance
too much and then get sick of it. They were like, obviously,
you're not a good enough consumer of this classical, beautiful
music if you're going to listen to it all the
time until you get sick of it. I am just
going to listen to it the once or the twice
(11:44):
and really appreciate it. And of course, this development of
music fandom, particularly as we move into the early twentieth century,
is also facilitated by technological advances that allows you to
not only consume music in live venues, to go to
the pleasure garden and see the virtuoso of your choice,
but also listen to recordings of the Virtuoso or of
(12:07):
Jenny Lynde at home, And there's also sheet music being produced,
and also you do have more of the performances being
turned into this kind of entertainment industry. And then in
the nineteen twenties and thirties, this is when the first
fan clubs emerged. So we're really getting serious about our
fandom post World War One. Yeah, we're coming together. I mean,
(12:28):
I mean, imagine how different it would have been to
be in a fan club in the nineteen thirties as
opposed to fifteen, when you have the Internet. Back then
you have to be really freaking committed to communicating with
your fellow fans and consuming all of these you know, products,
whether it's cheat music or the records themselves or whatever. Yeah,
and you probably don't even need fan clubs today because
(12:51):
Tumbler is pretty much just a giant fan club. Right,
different things. But once you get into mid century in
the nineteen fifties, you have the even more monetization of music,
particularly with the development of pop music. And when we
have pop music and bubblegum pop in particular come of about,
(13:13):
and these record labels really getting savvy about targeting their fans.
This is when fandom, though and criticism of music fandom,
becomes less generalized and more gendered. Yeah, well, I mean,
you know, Kristen mentioned earlier that the whole music a
mania thing was really not not gender did it honestly
(13:37):
seemed to be more about class, about and not even
necessarily financial stuff, but just you were on a higher
plane of existence if you consumed and enjoyed music in
a certain way versus the people that you look down upon.
You know, people who had music a mania were obviously
not to be trusted. We don't like those people, but
it was all sort of equal opportunity snobbery. There were
(13:58):
women who wrote in their diet Ari's sniffing it like,
look at these riding masses of people, how disgusting, same
as you did with men. And they were writing about
people of either gender. And so it is interesting to
see that evolution in the mid twentieth century about fan
girls and teeny boppers specifically consuming music that honestly, as
(14:22):
we'll get into here in a second, I mean, it
was made for them. Yeah, and we'll get into all
of that and talk more about teeny bopper's past and
present when we come right back from a quick break
and now back to the show. So in the first
half of the podcast, we talked about the history of
(14:43):
music fandom that I know I wasn't familiar with. But
now it's time to pick up with a name that
really launched the whole teeny bopper thing, which is Frank Sinatra. Yeah.
I mean this was in the nineties and Sona tra
was he was a younger gentleman, is kind of handsome.
(15:04):
I mean, he had kind of a pointy face. Yeah,
We're gonna be honest. She was kind of the original.
Can we say the original justin Bieber. I don't want
to disparage Frank Sinatra in that way, but I mean
he really incited, though, the first modern fan girling of
girls crying and loving him and just wanting I mean
(15:24):
they just wanted Frankie. Yeah. But I mean I think
that goes, you know, not to go too deep into
Frank Sinatra, but I mean I think the whole issue
with getting the teeny bopper love and tears and emoting
over Frank Sinatra goes back to what we talked about
with Taylor Swift in our last episode. Because Taylor Swift
is herself a very young woman, very successful, knows how
(15:48):
to connect with fans who are also very young, much
younger than even she is. And I think that Frank
Sinatra was one of the first, early, very young performers
who was able to connect with young women who were
all of a sudden part of this rising consumer culture,
part of this new teenage group of people that had
(16:09):
never really been recognized before. That's such a great point.
And also with Sinatra, he I'm sure he was not
the first to do this, but he also was available
in so many different ways to his fans because not
only could they see him in appearances or see him
singing live, he was also in movies as well, so
(16:30):
you could watch him act, you could watch him fall
in love. I mean there, you know, it's definitely a
multi dimensional star. Um. But then in the nineteen fifties
we have the emergence of bubblegum pop that, according to
the book Girlhood in America quote set the precedent of
style over substance in the musical consumption of teenage girls
(16:50):
because it was really manufactured for them. Yeah, it was.
You definitely had a lot of of record industry executives
coming together and saying, Okay, so we're we're in the
postwar period. I don't know if anybody was actually saying
that in the fifties, but they're in the postwar period.
We have this new group of people were recognizing called teenagers,
(17:11):
and they have consumer power somewhat a little bit now
and and there they have a little bit more agency
than children of their age group fifty years prior. Let's
package something for them. And so this sort of came
along with the whole advent of top forty radio, which
relied on a specific teen appealing formula to turn a profit. Yeah,
(17:33):
because teams were spending time by themselves in ways that
they never had before. They're also dating, they also had cars, um,
and they also had magazines being created specifically for them.
Sixteen Magazine in particular, was one of the earliest and
most widely circulated teen magazines that totally fed early fandom. Um.
(17:56):
This is coming again from girlhood in America, saying quote
teeny bopper and is essentially a subculture of consumption. Yeah,
and I sort of this is something that if you
really think about it, it makes total sense. But that
I still hated reading because it made me sad for
young girls who apparently can't win. Um. So this is
also coming from girlhood in America, and he writes that
(18:17):
the genre is primarily a commodity to be marketed and
sold to teenage girls. It uses a specific formula to
turn a profit, leaving many to believe that the fans
who consume the product are cultural dupes. So basically, girls
are being blamed for consuming the very things that they
are meant to consume according to record industry executives or
(18:42):
radio DJs or what have you. Yeah, I mean, and
sure there is a lot of it that is very formulaic.
I mean, go back and listen to our episode a
while back on boy bands. I mean, these things are
specifically built and made for this specific audience. And so
from then though until now, when you read media descriptions
(19:06):
of this um of this demographic, of the tunny popper demographic,
which is which makes it sound like such fogies. Also,
I just use the word fogy. I'm but to call
them teeny poppers. Um but even today they're described as
just having really no taste whatsoever. It's all emotion and
(19:26):
hormones and no discriminating taste whatsoever. We're just looking for
the Frank Sinatra essentially, But because you've got people who
are saying, if you are consuming and rapidly consuming um,
something that is prepackaged and bubblegum popish, then yeah, then
(19:47):
you must not have any discriminating taste. You're just as
as people talk about a lot of people just dismiss
girls who like pop music as just this writhing mass
of unbridled girlhood sexuality. Yeah, and a lot of pop
music scholars mark this point in the emergence in the
(20:08):
development of the music industry in the United States as
this sort of dichotomy between male pop and rock fans
seen as active consumers. They're choosing what they like. They're
smarter and more discriminating in whatever goes in their record player,
versus passive fan girls who were just sort of we're
spoon fed our tastes. Yeah, just tell us who the
(20:30):
new pop star off the conveyor belt is, and we'll
just consume this music and buy the posters and buy
the tickets. Except who should I have a crush on?
And I do remember that in my own experience when
I first heard about Hansen, because friends of mine had
crushes on them, and there was the whole thing of
you know, which one did you like? Of course it
(20:52):
was the middle one. Obviously he was the hottest, and
so I would pre anticipated liking up and wanting to
have a crush on him. So there is, I mean,
there is that aspect to it as well. I have
something to confess what I think you and I in
our lives in n we're acting out the dichotomy of
(21:13):
which we are currently speaking. Really because I remember being
in six or seventh grade whenever Buck came out. But
for us, I don't mean whatever have rolled everybody else was,
but looking at it and being like, hmm, well, Caroline,
you gotta remember too. I was homeschooled, so I I
will play that card. And I was edgy urban youth.
(21:38):
I certainly wasn't an edgy urban home but I don't know,
like where my snobber even came from. It's not like
I was actively consuming any type of music other than
what I heard on the radio, but just looking down
my nose at at this pop music, I think it
was less than music though for me, and just the
fact that I was primed for crushing. Heck, yeah, I
(21:59):
loved crush. So I was sorry, Sorry, I was really
busy crushing on Gavin Rossdale, so I didn't have time
for tailor hands. Oh yeah, I jumped on that train
a little bit later. I was just just that was
probably just a late bloomer. But anyway, Um, also at
this time, though, it's not just male pop stars who
are being developed and groomed for the bubblegum audience, but
(22:21):
also you do have girl groups like their Aunts and
the Cherrell's who are also being pitched directly to girls,
sort of like uh proto Taylor Swift kind of. Yeah,
in honor of this episode, last night, I was listening
to my um, marvel Lett's Pandora station and it's all
of these wonderful, wonderful girl groups. And it's interesting, though
(22:44):
to listen to that station and here all of these
bubblegum pop totally manufactured groups girls who marry me not
have you even known each other? Being dragged together by
record executives to make money. But the whole thing of
out those girl groups is, even if they weren't doing
their own songwriting, which they weren't, you had people like
(23:05):
Carol King, for instance, writing a lot of the lyrics
for these girl groups to sing the songs were still
providing a window into the emotional world of young women.
And this is something that Andy Zeisler wrote about in
feminism and pop culture, that that's sure, they're manufactured. Sure
it's pop, it's not like the Highest Denominator or whatever,
(23:28):
but it's still great music and it's still for girls,
and it's just like Taylor Swift is today. It's giving
girls of that era something that they can look at
and relate to. Yeah. Absolutely, and in the late nineteen
forties and definitely in the nineteen fifties, sort of this
groundwork has been laid, so that also in the nineteen
fifties and sixties, once Elvis comes around and then the Beatles,
(23:54):
all hell kind of breaks loose fan wise, but that
also sort of cements this styeo type as well, of
the fawning, crying, hysterical. That work comes up a lot
and it's important that it does come up a lot.
Um And the perception hasn't improved since then, Yeah, it
certainly hasn't. Um. I do think it is interesting though,
(24:17):
that there is so much literature out there about young
girl fans, whether they're the teeny boppers of the fifties
or the swifties of today. But um Jacqueline Edmondson edited
this book Music and American Life that did talk about
the whole pop versus rock, feminine versus masculine, active versus
passive thing and said that although girls and women became
(24:41):
an integral part of the popular music industry, they were
constantly devalued and objectified. I mean it goes back to
that whole thing of rock being serious, rap and hip
hop being hyper masculine, and pop is just this thing
that gets shoved aside as valueless because it is consumed
by girls and women. And there was a note as
well in the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music in the
(25:04):
World talking about how popular music scholars have really gone
back and quote challenge negative and stereotyped conceptualizations of female
fans who have regularly been presented in news reports and
popular literature as passive consumers. There's that word again, passive
uncritically supporting mass produced music, or as swooning teenagers idolizing
(25:29):
male pop stars. Yeah, and the thing you get a
lot too the more you read about this is the
recognition that a lot of it has to do with
the idea of the feminine and the female being considered
the other um. Asia Romano, who wrote an article in
The Kernel called the teens on Tumbler Are all Right,
(25:52):
talks about how teenage girls continue to be one of
the world's prime targets for being held up as a
social example of something a in foreign and overtly sexualized,
arriving primordial, massive or orgiastic emotions waiting to be tapped
by adult men who treat their identities as a bizarre spectacle.
Because when you think about it, especially when you read
(26:13):
and we'll talk about this article a little later, when
you read like the g Q piece about One Direction
and talking about their fans, and I mean the way
they describe these young girls is a hormone bomb, I
believe was the way they described him. Well, there was
just a lot of horrifying, like a dark pink mass
of blah blah blah. It's just it got old, too
(26:34):
old to sexual especially since the girls are talking about
are like eleven um. But it's strange that nobody seems
to be able to step back and say, wait, okay,
this is just this is just another half of the
population doing something like they want to do. Maybe we
should question why the other half of the population does
(26:54):
things like they do. For instance, you know, men going
nuts over sports or sports teammes or whatever are going
nuts over music as well, but just in a different
kind of way. And at this point, I think it's
worth noting that this conversation really is not an argument
on behalf of like the fine musical quality of all
(27:15):
pop music. It's not about the music. It's more about
this persistent pattern of like marginalizing this very specific demographic,
and you throw pop music under the bus along with
it as well. But what's fascinating to see is just
how how the media even approaches fangirls. It's like, we
(27:38):
still don't know how to wrap our minds around these
young girls. There was even an article about this in
the Wall Street Journal of all places, called Inside the
Brains of Justin Bieber Fans, which interviewed these neurologists being like,
what's happening inside their brains? I mean, what what would
compel a twelve year old to cry at the site
(28:01):
of one direction? And answering this very serious and hard
hitting question, uh, neuroscientists and neurologists were basically saying that
this experience of listening to Taylor swift or watching one
direction releases dopamine, which is of course a neurotransmitter involved
(28:24):
in pleasure and addiction. It provides the same rush as
eating chocolate or winning for a compulsive gambler. Yeah, so
we like it, in other words, and we just really
like it and it makes us feel good. We like
it now. It was noteworthy though that and this is
nothing against Dr Daniel Leviton conducting this research at all, um,
(28:44):
but I didn't think it was interesting how he said
that these musical chase are really formed and wired in
our brains in the teen years and really become part
of our brains internal wiring. So that, for instance, in
my case, when I hear Bob, I am taken back
to when I was eleven or twelve years old listening
(29:05):
to being like, oh man, their homeschooled too. I know,
well it's I didn't mean to totally skip over. You
just said, sorry, but my tween dreams, your tween dream,
homeschool romance with the middle, with the middle, handsome brother. Yeah,
I mean this this I feel like dude. Roommate has
said similar things to me, although his his brain stunting
(29:26):
came a little bit later. I guess he's still obsessed
with the Atari's so he formed that emotional obsessive bond
with a pop punk band. Yeah, it's just it's just
nostalgia careless. But there's also too Almost every anytime this
conversation comes up of like why beatlemaniacs? Why one direction?
Or is why justin Bieber fans. There's also this talk
(29:47):
of safe sexuality, and we talked about this a lot
too in our episode on boy bands. Um, it's like,
calm down, parents, It's just these are just kind of
like practice boyfriends, which is also highly hedter noormative, and
we don't even have time to get into uh, sexual
orientation and race when it comes to fandom the portrayal
of fandom as well, because it is very white and
(30:08):
very straight. Um, but there's this it's almost like, Okay,
we can calm down because this is a safe way
for girls to express their sexualities. We we should actually
be glad that they're kissing posters and not actually making
out with real boys. Yeah. Well, I mean it's when
you think about yourself being in sixth grade or whatever,
(30:33):
is it really so hard to understand this and to
imagine it because you're you're hitting puberty, You've got these
hormones rushing through you for the first time. You're looking
around going like for the first time, your Tina Belcher.
Basically you're looking around and being like, butts awesome, and
so just like it's no surprise that girls of the
(30:55):
fifties consumed the music that was packaged and presented too
and four of them. Is it really any surprise that
a girl of thirteen would, who's suddenly awakening to the
idea that hey, I really like but boys, but would
look at somebody like one direction and start fantasizing or
(31:16):
almost obsessing over them. Yeah, and not almost. I mean
plenty of girls do outright obsessed over these things. I
mean I outright obsessed over Prince William truth. He told
when I was young, I thought I would be Kate
Middleton per chance. Um. But and this is also too
all in the context of living in a society where
(31:37):
expressing outright that kind of sexuality, the sexual desires Tina
belterering um, is not okay for girls. So it's not
only a thing of and I think that that's often
left out these conversations of like, well, no wonder they're
freaking out because in a lot of ways were kind
of pent up um. But one quote though from that
(31:58):
Wall Street Journal article that jumped out was boys also
developed musical tastes in this phase of life, but adolescent
girls are far more likely to become infatuated with pop stars,
experts say, because they are awakening to romantic and sexual
feelings that are both intoxicating and scary. And it's like,
but what about the boys though, So they're doing all
(32:20):
of this, they're developing these kinds of things, they are
also you know, having experiencing sexual feelings that are probably
both intoxicating and scary. But we aren't as weirded out
by that, right. It's almost like a coming of age, uh,
an expected and accepted phase that a boy will, like,
you know, tape up pictures of Megan Fox or whoever
(32:43):
in his bedroom, and you know, we were all like, oh,
that's just a pervy little thirteen year old bullets what
they go through. Whereas there's not that same acceptance and
a pass is not given to young girls. Instead, it's like,
it's icky and scary that you're also obsessed with these
pop stars. Yeah, how strange, and also too, this is
(33:03):
around the time there were every now and then you'll
have comparisons to boys and men's obsessions with sports teams
to the point that they are also yelling and screaming
and crying. But there but that doesn't seem strange at all.
There's never any like, oh, well, what's going on inside
those fans brains? But coming back to the girls, the
(33:28):
teeny the girl teeny boppers emotions aside, and perhaps unrealistic
obsessions with boy bands aside, it's still unanniable that this
is such an influential group. I mean, these girls prop
up in a lot of ways the music industry. I
mean we talked about in the Taylor Swift episode. How
(33:50):
I mean her sales accounted for of all records sales
in the United States the week that it came out. Yeah,
I mean, this is just part of a wave that
has been waving since the eighteen fifties. There is nothing
new about consumer culture when it comes to music and
(34:10):
the fact that these fans who are so disparaged so often,
they really are giving these artists quite the fat paycheck.
And and you know, so for that their disparaged, They're
they're buying something it's prepackaged, They're listening to something that
is that is super hyper produced. Um, and everybody says
(34:32):
that that's just not good enough. But as Asia Romano
over The Colonel pointed out in August, it's not like
we have to worry so much about the future of
our country based on the fact that kids like pop music.
I mean, they've always liked pop music. If anything, these
kids might be better off than we were, she argues,
(34:52):
because they're so social media and real world savvy and
much more so than we give them credit for, and
they happened to be much more likely to engage in actual,
real life activism. For instance, Yeah, there Wash there's a
mom who wrote a column I think it came out
in The Guardian who talking about her daughter, who is
a die hard one direction fan. She's a one direction
(35:15):
of and she said, yeah, you can disparage her all
you want, but she is demonstrated and learned all sorts
of real world skills, such as navigating her way to
a concert, like getting on the subway with her friends,
figuring out how to budget and then buy a ticket,
and also meeting all of these other girls, these other
(35:37):
one direction ers as well. And she was like, I
think it's actually been rather valuable for her. I mean,
that's a that's a really glass half full kind of perspective.
But I think that it's worth opening up our our
perception of who these girls are, because a lot of
times we just kind of distilled them down into just
(35:58):
a writhing pink horr mown bomb waiting to go off,
rather than oh, no, these are individuals and they probably
do all have different tastes in certain ways. I mean
they you know, we all they have to at least
choose which one direction band member they like the most.
That's right. Well, I thought an interesting perspective on it,
kind of jumping off from the whole using social media
(36:21):
to connect, using social media to participate in activism. They're
sort of echoes of that from the fandom around girl
groups of the nineteen sixties. And this is coming from
that book Feminism and Pop Culture by Andy Zeisler, and
she was quoting Susan Douglas who was talking about how
back in the sixties, yes, you have commercialism and all
(36:43):
of this pop music, but the girls who were listening
to it got this sense of euphoria. She was saying,
it wasn't just the the happiness of listening to this
music or purchasing it and participating in this culture. But
she said that for tens of millions of young girls
who started feeling at the same time that day as
(37:03):
a generation would not be trapped, and there was plan
of the tiniest seat of a social movement. And again
that might seem like a glass half full, kind of
a pie in the sky idea, but you know, we
did mention earlier that those girl groups of the fifties
and sixties it was really the first time that female
singers were singing lyrics about female emotions. Yeah. Well, and
(37:27):
even when it comes to the beatle Maniacs, there have
also been uh feminists who have said, hey, well, this
is also to the first time we really saw the
female gaze and mass. Maybe we're also a little uncomfortable
with this, just because the tables have turned in that
way of you have thousands and thousands of girls actively
(37:50):
lusting after a group of men, and hey, we probably
just hadn't seen that very much anymore, and we still
to this day are uncomfortable with seeing that guy of
um sexuality perhaps on display, right, because it's the whole
heteronormative male culture being the default. That's why no one
questions crazy male sports fandom. It's why it's cool for
(38:12):
my former dude roommate to scream at the television or
lose his mind at a U g. A game, But
it's looked down upon if a girl loses her mind
screaming over Taylor Swift. Well, I think this two circles
back not only to our episode on boy bands, but
also to our bitch episode because we kicked it off
talking about basic bitches, and the hallmark of a basic
(38:33):
bitch is also a die hard love of Taylor Swift,
which I think to reflects this kind of you know,
eschewing any sign of just unabashed femininity. Because, as writer
and editor Rachel Adiden said two Time Magazine talking about
this issue of fan girls, and this was more of
(38:54):
fangirls in geek culture being disparaged. She said, quote, feminization
is all universally seen as appreciation of value. And it's
not only that depreciation of value. It is also a
giant pushing together of really different groups of people. It's
assuming that all of these young girls and can we
(39:16):
not forget the young boys to who we like this music? Yes,
I mean talk about like heteronormative culture. It is very heteronormative,
and it honestly wasn't until recently that popular music studies
have really highlighted that diversity. And this is coming again
from the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music in the World,
which cited by a pop music scholar, which found that
(39:40):
female Elvis fans had their own particular personal and also
political uses for the performer rather than simply worshiping Elvis
because they should worship Elvis and the same thing. There
was another study that they decided um talking about how
being a fan is quote more of a celebration of
(40:01):
girl culture and a process through which female sexuality and
identity are produced as it is about the male performers involved.
That makes a lot of sense, totally. Yeah, I mean,
if you have, I don't want to keep going back
to the sports example, because I realized that things are
not always black and white with clear lines. There's plenty
of overlap here and women love sports. Women love sports too. Yeah,
(40:22):
but I mean, just to kind of pick on an example,
I mean, there's a lot of social acceptance for boys
from a young age learning to love sports and using
it as a way to bond with other men in
their lives. Whether those are friends or dads or brothers
or whoever, And why should girls fandom or girls love
(40:44):
of whether it's a pop princess or a boy band
or whoever, why should that be less valued? Well, and
a lot of it's probably for that reason though, that
a lot of UH analysts and scholars have noted how
in a lot of ways die hard fandom is transgressive
(41:06):
of the appropriate feminine roles, both then and still today.
And we see that just kind of reflected in the
kind of brush off that they often get. Now, can
fan girls get obsessive and go wild and also say
horrible things on social media if you disagree with their taste. Yes,
(41:27):
fans are not perfect. No fan is perfect. But I
think it's just worth considering why teeny boppers, in particular
the female teeny bopper, is just so universally maligned. It
will be interesting, Kristen, when you and I are podcasters
in our eighties to look back and see how this
(41:50):
particular point in time where we have the intersection of
pop music and fandom and all of that stuff and
social media, how that will affected things. Because you and
I in the beginning of the podcast kept mentioning changing
technology changing methods for consuming music and all of that
stuff in the way that it fostered that music lover culture.
(42:11):
It will be interesting to see how all of these
young girls who now feel like they have a voice
on social media and can connect with each other over
their fandom, but can also say, hey, screw you g
Q writers for portraying me as a terrible person and
portraying Harry Styles as a terrible person. It will just
be interesting to see how and whether that changes the
culture and whether it gives young women more of a
(42:32):
voice as they get older. And you can tune into
that episode in on Stuff Grandma never told you that.
But now we want to hear from teeny bopper's fangirls listening.
What do you think about all of this? Mom stuff
at how stuff works dot com is our email address.
(42:52):
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or
messages on Facebook. We definitely want to hear from fans.
Have you been dismissed simply for being a fan who
also happens to be a girl or a woman. Let
us know mom stuff at how stuffworks dot com and
we've got a couple of messages to share with you
right now. So I've got a couple of letters here
(43:19):
about our episode on ankles and cankles, and this one
is coming from Wendy, who writes, my husband related to
me the story of a teammate on his high school
football team. Hey, guys in sports call back. This individual
was a linebacker with a stocky build and was overall
very athletic, but was very aware of his lack of ankles.
You mentioned that there were no exercises to slim the ankle,
(43:42):
but the approach he took was to perform tons of
calf raises to make his calves more prominent, giving the
illusion of a smaller ankle. One day, he burst into
the weight room exclaiming I have ankles, showing them off
to his fellow teammates. He was so enthusiastic. He was
also totally open about his excitement the other guys, which
I love. And also it shows that men do talk
(44:03):
to each other about more than sports and babes in
the locker room. I thought it would be interesting to
share that this was not just a lady centric issue.
Love the podcast and keep up the good work. Well,
thanks Wendy. Well, I have a letter here from Diana,
who starts off the email with three thank you's and
so you're welcome. She says, I have cankles. It is genetic.
(44:27):
My grandmother on my dad's side never wore dresses, and
now I am in the same boat. It is a
painful thing to see people staring at my ankles are
making comments. Don't even think about skinny jeans, which you
didn't mention. But it is a problem for people like me.
I know what they're saying. As you said, there is
nothing I can do about it. I have large risks too,
and although it helped me as an athlete, it will
(44:48):
never be the definition of the Gibson girl. We women
are still held out to be. Even finding skew boots
is impossible at times. Oprah once mentioned cankles years ago
and laughed at the term. I cried. Even Oprah, who
acts as though she is the defender of all people
who are different, didn't get me. I hope this message
(45:08):
reaches those who don't or can't understand my position. In
the hope it will help alleviate the judgment. So thank you, Dianna,
and I'm sorry Oprah doesn't support you. Yeah, Oprah maybe
so blind to cankles. Even Oprah is not perfect, though,
it's a good reminder. So if you have letters to
send to us, No Mom Stuff and how Stuff Works
(45:29):
dot com is our email address and we'd love to
hear from you. But if you'd like to give us
a shout out on social media, you can find links
to all of those places as well. It's all of
our blogs, videos, and podcast including this one with our
sources so you can read along with us if you like.
All of that's over. It's stuff Mom Never told You
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(45:53):
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