Rules Of The Game #5: What's Wrong With Pretty Girls

[koganbot]

Latest column. Comments welcome here.

What's Wrong With Pretty Girls?

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

Re: Why mainstream girls are suckers

[cis.livejournal.com]

I went violently anti-boybands when I was... er, about thirteen (having been very into Take That from about age eight to ten), and only came out of that by eighteen or so. Among the girls I was friends with it was a very accepted way to denigrate any rock group we didn't approve of by accusing them of being a 'boy band' (oddly it seems to be rock groups rather than indie groups - the examples i can think of off the top of my head are linkin park and lostprophets). In fact boybands were considered 'childish things' by just about everyone at my school: there was one girl in my year of a hundred or so who everyone took the p1ss out of for still liking Boyzone when she was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen even; when we went on a German exchange we thought the German girls weiiiiird for loving BSB. This probably had a lot to to with Britpop, as katstevens says above: Blur and Oasis were basically our boybands, poster pages in Smash Hits and Just Seventeen and all, and anyone who still liked the old form of boyband was behind the times -- plus there was that new discourse of authenticity going on.

The boybands of our childhood/teenhood are now acceptable nostalgia, as well: whatever you're into now, saying 'oh i really loved take that when i was little (subtext: but now I know better)' is accepted, even expected, the way everyone's supposed to remember Thundercats or He-Man (this is one sense in which 'popism' has 'won').

Re: Why mainstream girls are suckers

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Everything was better when you were twelve.

Re: Why mainstream girls are suckers

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

There might be a slight UK/US discrepancy here, because most girls I know were into boybands into their teens, and BSBs, for instance, had a significant teen audience (though probably not extending TOO far into the teens, maybe 14-16 or so). E.g., girls at my high school liked boybands, though not in the same way they might have when they were 11, and recent nostalgia kick was in full effect even before boybands were totally out of popular favor (c. 2001-2002).

Re: Why mainstream girls are suckers

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Cf. the massive popularity of "Pop" by *NSync, which all girls at my high school that were into pop absolutely adored even in 2001 or 2002, whenever it came out.

Re: Why mainstream girls are suckers

[koganbot]

So what did the people who considered themselves in opposition to the mainstream at your school listen to (if there were any such people, and there must have been)?

Re: Why mainstream girls are suckers

[cis.livejournal.com]

My friends were the ones considering themselves in opp to the mainstream, and they listened largely to rock and metal (sometimes a bit of indie but I was rather on my own there for a while). It started with the smashing pumpkins, bit of skatepunk, moved into nu-metal when that came along.

(I don't think I made it clear that the mainstream girls still listened to pop - it was just the mechanism of the boyband that they considered themselves too old for.)

Re: Why mainstream girls are suckers

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Same here - it was my group of friends (between, say, ages of 13-15) that liked metal (none of them liked Elastica though, so no-one would form a band with me) and continued to be very vocal indeed about their love of metal (Metallica, Korn, Sepultura) and 90s American-ish rock (Green Day, S.Pumpkins, Wildhearts). There was a heavy emphasis on the 'guitar' aspect - could we play along on our newly acquired semi-acoustics that we'd finally saved up for after hanging around the guitar shop in Harrow for three months hoping the fit shop assistant would notice us whilst 'testing them out'?
Another group of friends entirely whose taste I definitely didn't share was the US RnB 'bling' crew who were also very vocal about their love for Mary J Blige, TLC, Puff Daddy & co (then later Aaliyah, Destinys Child etc).

Bizarrely I was probably the only girl in my year who was really into Elastica and Radiohead (both declared 'wussy' by the metallers). I was mocked for liking Skunk Anansie even then!

I say these two groups were 'vocal' about their love for music (of whichever type) as the 'popular kids*' at school didn't seem to care much what was playing on the stereo (mainly UK garage, two-step and Ibiza house/trance). I didn't get on with that crowd very well at all but for non-musical reasons. The fact that they didn't take music seriously didn't help their case, though.

*No-one was really that 'unpopular' as all the groups were big enough that no-one was really left out, but our group was decidedly 'leftovers' where everyone was accepted no matter how 'weird', even if they liked Steps. How egalitarian of us!

Re: Why mainstream girls are suckers

[poptasticuk.livejournal.com]

The pattern was the same for my age group (I just checked your user-info and I am 4 yrs younger than you, so not much but music changes a lot in 4 yrs) - from the age of about 13 it was uncool to like pop music, and everyone moved towards rock or rap. The music was more aggressive and masculine, and I think it shows how the power balance changes in those years. In primary school even the boys liked pop music (eg. Spice Girls), then in the early years of secondary school the boys started liking rock or rap (it was basically a choice of Limp Bizkit or Eminem at the time) and made the girls feel silly and uncool for liking pop, so we were pressurised into liking their music.

During this time I basically pretended to have no interest in music at all, despite actually being obsessed with Will Young and Savage Garden (very mumsy music actually) and starting to get into foreign pop, and it wasn't until age 15 or 16 that gradually we were allowed to like what we wanted again, as people became mature enough to realise that it was pointless to lie just to impress people, and really Limp Bizkit were never any good. Nowadays none of my friends like commercial rock or rap music (although many like more obscure rock, as is natural for middle class kids I think), although I think this is due to the group I hang around with - of course there are still loads of 19 year olds who do like those genres, but those are often the ones who aren't really into music in an active way.