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

[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!