1/16/12 11:22 PM Genders OnLine Journal - "I Want It That Way": Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands Page 1 of 21 http://www.genders.org/g35/g35_wald.html Genders 35 2002 "I Want It That Way" Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands by GAYLE WALD You are my fire The one desire Believe when I say I want it that way. - Backstreet Boys, "I Want It That Way" [1] Among recent trends in youth music culture, perhaps none has been so widely reviled as the rise of a new generation of manufactured "teenybopper" pop acts. Since the late 1990s, the phenomenal visibility and commercial success of performers such as Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and 'N Sync has inspired anxious public hand-wringing about the shallowness of youth culture, the triumph of commerce over art, and the sacrifice of "depth" to surface and image. By May 2000, so ubiquitous were the jeremiads against teenybopper pop performers and their fans that Pulse , the glossy in-house magazine of Tower Records, would see fit to mock the popularity of Spears and 'N Sync even as it dutifully promoted their newest releases. Featuring a cover photo of a trio of differently outfitted "Britney" dolls alongside a headline reading "Sells Like Teen Spirit"--a pun on the title of the breakthrough megahit ("Smells Like Teen Spirit") by the defunct rock band Nirvana--Pulse coyly plotted the trajectory of a decade's-long decrescendo in popular music: from the promise of grunge, extinguished with the 1994 suicide of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, to the ascendancy of girl and boy performers with their own look-alike action figures. [2] Yet the cover's tone of mocking condescension toward teenybopper pop music is also facilitated by a gendered hierarchy of "high" and "low" popular culture that specifically devalues the music consumed by teenage girls. In Pulse , this high/low distinction is represented through the figures of Cobain and Spears; yet its organization by gender concerns not merely biological sex (Spears as a female, and thus less legitimate, performer than Cobain) or commercial popularity (Spears as the greater "sellout") but the status of the feminized mass of consumers with which Spears, in this case, is associated and even conflated. Like the term "teenybopper," a mid-1960s coinage for an early adolescent girl "held to be devoted to perpetual stylistic novelty, as in fashion or social behavior" (according to American Heritage Dictionary ), this high/low hierarchy is based around notions of the fickleness, superficiality, and aesthetic bankruptcy of the material forms that girls' desires take in popular culture. Copyright ©2002 Ann Kibbey. Back to: