poptimists | (no subject)

Interesting article, but I'm also concerned that this is what happens when you focus intensely on a presumed audience -- there are a lot of (possibly reasonable) projections onto general audience here that seem weirdly precise given how wildly speculative they are, and make want some kind of evidence to support it, aside from a reading of the songs and concerts and some pretty unconvincing "reports" of behavior (many coming from Dream Street themselves).

"That was, of course, the ultimate goal of all teenipoppers: the sexual conquest of that popstar. While maintaining a childlike physical look and purity of outward spirit—what Janelle Brown calls the “lollipop aesthetic”, the turning of a group of tween girls into “a passel of virginal sluts”—teenipoppers reacted strongly towards the sexualization of their equally young teen idols. Dream Street was the most overtly sexual of the teenipop performers."

It's probably easy to find sexualization of the male and female popstars, especially by searching fansites etc., but I don't think it really captures how NOT SEXUAL the whole enterprise really was and continues to be (at least at Radio Disney), even given how sexualized the stars could be in their marketing etc. Creatively-worded but stupid "passel of sluts" quote aside, what's interesting about the teenpop from early 00's to present -- especially as it gained steam in the Disney bubble (which Dream Street were only tangentially connected to, i.e. weren't produced or controlled by Disney) -- is its fundamentally ambiguous (and flexible and contradictory) definitions of sexuality and sex, and I think you can't understand the attraction to the music of the audience in any less ambiguous and contradictory of a way.

Anyway, I don't really understand her basic timeline here in a way that makes Dream Street seem significant -- 2001 was probably the ebb of what she's calling "teenipop," not its peak, and it didn't really rise back up again, this time pretty much exclusively in the Disney bubble (and not by male stars), until after confessional rock a la Avril (and early Hilary Duff at Disney) had kind of set a new paradigm outside, and to a lesser extent inside, that bubble.

Dream Street were probably the most obvious post-boyband boom cash-in attempt (by the same guy who tried to sell Huckapoo, equally obviously, a year or two too late) and Play (as

poptasticuk has pointed out, IIRC) were shameless in swiping from Europop that ultimately got them, er, play on Radio Disney. (P.Y.T. and Nobody's Angel and Huckapoo and other tween girl groups from 2002-~2004(?) were for the most part nonstarters -- and I'm pretty sure No Secrets, more successful than any of them, were earlier than Dream Street [but still don't earn much more than footnote status].) And anyway Europop itself wasn't foreign to Disney at all, in fact constituted a major component of its early (esp. pre-2000) programming -- you could just as easily, maybe more easily, track the music as novelty (Hampton the Hampster, RIP, was more enduring than Dream Street at Radio Disney!).

And anyway, even if you can't as precisely/accurately track the tween-geared stuff through Disney alone, likely that the exact same demographic was buying the bulk of early Britney, Backstreet Boys, *NSync, B*Witched...which is to say nothing of Spice Girls and Hanson -- I think you could make an argument that there's a significant audience shift at Spice Girls, but not at Dream Street.

Posted less dashed-off version of this at Popmatters.

Yeah. The above is why I posted it here, because I have nothing approaching your knowledge on this, Dave. Plus, the article seems heavily influenced by the author's personal experience of Dream Street (who I had no idea existed).

Did Dream Street ever cross over into the mainstream? Canada lacks Radio Disney or an equivalent, so while we got exposure to a lot of random British pop like S Club and B*witched and All Saints and 5ive and so forth through children's television like YTV (whose music programs oddly resembled a tamer Pop World), I can't recall having heard much of the rest as a kid unless it crossed-over to frequent radio play. Although, this seems to have changed at some point since, as my youngest sister and her friends are all about Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, etc.

Tangentially, at some point I keep meaning to scroll back through old music charts and try to figure out what ostensibly ubiquitous pop music from the 90s was actually specific to Canada, because there seems to have been a fair bit of that as well.

I wish she was more personal about it -- I think she brings in too much half-assed "evidence" after her intro, and she never returns to the fact that she started a fansite and presumably interacted with actual fans. Did she want to sleep with them, or dig their "virginality"? If not, why would she assume that so many of their fans did? (Her allusions to other fansites are too vague -- is "sexxxxxy" about sex, or about jokingly posing on your personal page/message board? How old were the people at the fansites -- most of the teenpop message boards are usually moderated by people in their teens, not tweens, I think -- that is, the older section of the demographic -- which is who would be captioning the pics.)

"That was, of course, the ultimate goal of all teenipoppers: the sexual conquest of that popstar. While maintaining a childlike physical look and purity of outward spirit—what Janelle Brown calls the "lollipop aesthetic", the turning of a group of tween girls into "a passel of virginal sluts"

I'm skeptical about this; she takes the idea of the childlike Perky Girl and runs with it, but it doesn't at all resemble my own fandom experience.

She also really abuses that Janelle Brown quote: Brown goes on to describe the virginal sluts as "navel-exposing divas who proclaim that they are saving themselves for marriage while they shimmy across stages in second-skin white leather and spangled sports bras and the tiniest of belly chains," and the "lollipop aesthetic" refers to the candy-colored costumes, not some sort of infantilized, lollipop-sucking ideal. They're not maintaining a childlike physical look at all!

And that's more reflective of what I experienced in "teenipop" fandom: you didn't look childlike and act like a whore, you looked like a whore and acted childlike. I mean, that was the core of the movement, and the thing that had everybody so concerned. The Spice Girls were half-naked while making very middle-school-sleepover statements like "girl power" and "friendship never ends." S Club 7 were a group of hot, scantily-clad twentysomethings playing characters straight out of sixth grade. The Olsen twins bought grown-up clothes at Fred Segal and had them tailored to fit their prepubescent bodies, then scampered around the globe meeting cute chaste boys and affirming the value of sisterhood and hard work. Britney Spears was Britney Spears. Where were all these girls striving to look childlike?

Nia, you should xpost this stuff to Bedbugs, too, where the author may well respond!

Done! I should reply to your call for Kara info on the Ashlee post, too...I feel like Batman ignoring the Bat-Signal.

OK, now I'm being reductive of the article itself with the "sleep with" talk, but I do wish the topic, which is a really volatile one, was given a lot more nuance.

That's why I see Dream Street as an ebb, not anything resembling a "peak" -- they may have been more specifically targeted to tweens, but it was because people in general were already moving away from the boybands, so the audience (probably) fractured a little. That's speculation, too, but it feels consistent with the lack of crossover of these artists -- many of whom were on otherwise huge labels like Jive (No Secrets was off the top of my head) -- had after 2001.

But then again, the A*Teens were pretty huge at Radio Disney (and sold more than Dream Street, I bet) by catering to a more narrow audience range. But I still think you can chalk it up a lot more to novelty appeal than sexual appeal.

Correction: I don't worry what happens when you focus on any presumed audience, but I am with this one, where there are more direct (er, slut passel-related) consequences on how people think and talk about this stuff. Which is why I expect more from a first-person account, from someone who should be able to see through, from firsthand experience, some of the bullshit being quoted from "theorists."

"Of the 500 interviews that I did, 475 of which were with former fans, 382 mentioned specific incidents of sexual acts, enlightenments, or realizations. That alone inspired me to look towards the movement as a form of sexualization rather than strictly as an ideological music genre." !!!

I s'pose I'm not a "real fan" after all :(

Y'know, rereading this this morning (and talking to the author about it over at Bedbugs), I think I misread the piece -- still have reservations about where it goes, i.e. the paragraph I quoted initially, but the set-up is pretty good, and it illustrates a blind spot in my own little makeshift history. I like to write off Dream Street and Play etc., the boy/girlgroups that got Disney backing but weren't produced by Disney, as sort of "echos" of the more important boyband explosion to make more room for confessional stuff to come in and dominate. But it was pretty huge, I spose.

thank you!

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Dream Street: Big in Japan?

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