A kung fu fighter in a disco

But there wasn't anything between 'child' and 'grownup' when Frank started. He's pre-teenager, historically. Perhaps more pertinently to poptimists, he was one of the first, and maybe the actual first pop star... Before the era of the pop standard there was big band, where the band leaders were the important ones but seen as managers rather than icons. The singers were just another instrument at their disposal until Frank and Ella Fitzgerald stole the show with charisma and style.

Does poptimism only begin with rock'n'roll, then?

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

My first "Poptimist" column for Pitchfork started with MacDermott's War Song, from 1878.

The theme song for "Freaky Trigger And The Lollards Of Pop" is Saltarello, which Dante Alighieri may have danced to (it wz written around his time anyway).

Sinatra is 100% fair game, in theory at least.

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Good, because separate to any historical facts Sinatra sounds like pop to me. In fact, I reckon the sounds and construction of Umbrella have much more in common with Sinatra than, say, ABBA.

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

Not very much pop these days has anything to do with ABBA, sadly.

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"L'homme armé" ("The Armed Man") should also be mentioned, this tune was such a huge hit as to be used as theme for a MYRIAD of 15th century Masses!

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koganbot

Well, yeah, but before the big band era there were stars (Al Jolsen and Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker etc.), and I'd think that in the midst of the big band era the Andrews Sisters (and before them the Boswells) and Bing Crosby were all stars. Maybe what you're saying is that Frank (et al.) made the transition from big band era to big singer era, but the tension between band and star is probably one of those eternal conflicts.

Scene from My So-Called Life; high-school class is at the museum. The teacher is trying to keep all the kids together and saying repeatedly "Stay with the group."

Angela (to her friends): Why stay with the group? What if Amelia Earhart had stayed with the group!
Ricky: Or Diana Ross!

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To be honest, I wasn't really thinking pre-war, but you're right. I suppose you could even put someone like Mario Lanza in there too, since his records were selling off his name alone.

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John Savage would disagree with you, he found Frank Sinatra to be the least interesting aspect of adolsecent culture, and he starts it about 50 yrs earlier then that thesis.

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My point is that Sinatra wasn't part of adolescent culture because there was no adolescent market to sell to in the forties. But I don't think adolescent culture defines the boundaries of pop.

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depending on how you define adolsecent, but there was war cash in the forties

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sinatra was totally a bobbysoxers scream idol in the early 40s -- he had to reinvent himself as an adult concern, via films and the capitol sleeves and so on, and the fact that he was able to was a very big deal in fashioning a conception of "adult" sophisto-pop in the early 50s

(swing -- esp.white swing, like benny goodman -- had its first big success among students and fairly young adults)

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he was also considered both louche and dangerous in the 40s, not doing his duty and stealing the girls from boys who did.

then his adult sophisto pop was not a reboot or a newness, but turning a bug into virtue...

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more than this -- it was about key elements of a generation seeing themselves as kids-no-more but rather adults, so it was also a kind of "coming of age" music, rooted in the earlier style but more mature in content and manner (LPs were new and aimed at non-kids; 45s were new and aimed at kids; teens -- who obviously already existed -- were now targeted as a specific market)

i'm fairly sure this idea of a generation aware of itself maturing was new, as a marketing thing and as a point of social discussion (pop sociology as a thing that got into the papers was also a new and widespread thing in the early 50s)

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i dont think the pop soc thing is nessc accurate, cant almost all yr claims also cover the 20s?

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i can't think of a development in film or music which manifests this, can you? age-distinct tastes obviously predated the 20s, and the jazz age was a manifestation of a generation defining themselves by taste-choice, but i can't think of the arrival (in the music; in movies) of a realisation that "look we jazz agers are older now and this is what we've moved on to liking" (if there is one, what is it?) (conscious niche-marketing really didn't begin to evolve until the 30s, and it was still broadly regional and cultural)

i think the idea of pop culture having a historical sense of its own movement is a 50s things

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Niche Marketing is what happened w. the entire career of Clara Bow....

and in europe esp, when swing moved from an american import of pleasure into something more radical with the rise of nazis, wouldnt that be similar:

In the Rhine-Ruhr area, resisters from the Socialist Worker Youth, the Red Falcons, the Bunde, and Catholic Youth Groups got together in large, ad hoc delinquent groups called the ... Kittlesback pirates. With size and local knowledge on their side, they openly defied the Hitler Youth, the the extent that the organization became "virtually defunct" in some areas. The most consistent irritant for the Nazis, were the Catholic youth org., which refused to integrate with the Hitler Youth even after they had expressly ordered to do so...
John Savage Teenage, pg 272

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ok, i think you're right about the notion that particular stars were favoured by particular audiences and age groups maybe -- and that that's the first manifestation of niche marketing -- but there wasn't a general sense of a "youth market", so much as a sense of a "clara bow market" who happened to be young? the specific analog to what i'm talking about would be more like, who did the clara bow audience move onto AFTER her (and did these latter films contain consciousness of the having been crala bow fans at an earlier time)

(jon may say difft, i haven't read his book yet, but isn't it largely about teens rather than ppl who were formerly teens but now aren't?)

swing in germany: no, that's not the same thing at all (adoption of a music or a look or whatever as badge of political difference long predates the 20th century -- besides, what yr describing doesn't contain a sense of the fact of change over time as part of its content, at least as you've stated it)

obviously generations have aged and their tastes changed since time immemorial -- what i'm saying is that the marketing towards that generation didn't (prior to the 50s) depend in any significant degree on their knowing that they were collectively aware of what their tastes had been and had now become

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i dont know the answer to the clara bow question, the hayes code was constructed to avoid youth from enjoying the sex and death--explotation and b movies were made and marketed to youth, post hayes, and there was some interlocking b/w those and war films during wwii...but that isnt music...

you are right about swing, i think

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what about pulp sf and fandom?

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