[Genders]
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. Operating through a discourse of
degraded women's consumption dating back to the eighteenth century, it
collapses producers and markets, symbolically feminizing male vocal
groups that have had special appeal for young female consumers. The
power of this hierarchy, however, is not limited to the organization of
notions of good and bad art. Rather, as in the Pulse example, it makes
it possible to render an aesthetic critique in the form of a patronizing
depiction of the teenybopper herself.
[3] "When Pop Becomes the Toy of Teenyboppers," an article by New York
Times music writer Jon Pareles, offers one example of such a depiction.
In Pareles' portrayal, the mass of girl-fans poses a threat to the
authority of the male rock critic, the traditional arbiter of popular
music value. Referring to these fans' enthusiasm for teenybopper acts,
Pareles writes:
This season belongs to the kiddie-pop brigades. Applause is passé; the
reaction most eagerly sought by pop culture right now ... is a
high-pitched squeal from a mob of young girls. When it's directed at
males, that squeal signifies romantic fantasy while it tests out some
newly active hormonal responses. Directed at females, it's a squeal of
sisterly solidarity and fashion approval. And for the last few years,
its volume has been steadily rising until it threatens to drown out
anything with more mature audiences in mind. (1)
[4] As in earlier diatribes against the excessive influence of women
in the marketplace, Pareles' article depicts contemporary pop music in a
contradictory fashion. In it, girls are both consummate consumers,
defined through their relationship to commodities, and powerful cultural
purveyors, able to "toy" with the music industry. At the same time,
their consumption practices conform to a predictable pattern of (same
sex) identification and (other sex) desire, preempting possibilities
that blur the binaries of gender and sexuality. Yet it is in its
conclusion that "When Pop Becomes the Toy of Teenyboppers" speaks most
revealingly to the issues of girls' social agency and cultural
authority. For as Pareles finally assures readers (presumably those
"mature" audiences struggling to be heard above the din of
girl-screams), the cultural dominance of "kiddie pop" is, like
adolescence, a temporary annoyance: "an intermission between crises ...
less troublesome than genuine rejuvenation could ever be" (32).
[5] This essay takes issue with such characterization of teenybopper
pop as a hiatus between cultural moments of obvious social and political
import, finding instead that it articulates multiple and overlapping
crises. Indeed, I suggest that in order to critically analyze
teenybopper pop, we must first shift our thinking about youth culture
and crisis, resisting and recasting the assumption that the latter can
only be expressed in the form of "troublesome" (i.e., implicitly
masculine) expressions of angst or rebellion (Frith, McRobbie). Instead,
following a trail blazed by recent feminist scholars who establish the
centrality of women in postwar rock music cultures (O'Brien, McDonnell
and Powers, Raphael, Whitely), this essay inquires into the cultural
logic of musical practices seen to cater to, and generate desire among,
girl audiences, interrogating the deeper structuring by gender of the
music, its producers, and its consumers. How, I ask, is the pleasure of
girl-consumers elicited and negotiated in music deemed so formulaic or
inauthentic that even pop's habitual defenders rush to distance
themselves from it? How do boy band performers represent themselves as
cultural icons to be consumed, visually as well as aurally? Why and how
do they inspire such noisy, ecstatic response? Is the consumption of
teenybopper music as clearly governed by the "rules" of heterosexual
division as Pareles's article suggests, where girl-fans want boys and
want to be like other girls? What kind of agency do girls enact in their
passionate embrace of "teenybopper" music? This last question is not to
restrict the field of cultural producers to men; indeed, it is precisely
to the fraught terms of the visibility of women or girl performers,
especially as sexualized objects, that I return at the end.
[6] My primary example here is the Backstreet Boys, the most
iconic--and arguably, the "original" (admittedly a tricky word in this
context)--of the various boy bands that rose to international fame in
the late '90s, inspiring a degree and intensity of fan adulation often
compared to Beatlemania. Like the Beatles, especially in their early
incarnation as four long-haired "lads from Liverpool," the Backstreet
Boys perform a "girlish" masculinity mediated through their
appropriation and adaptation of black performance styles--in this case,
styles associated with black male vocal-harmony groups of the 1980s and
early '90s. Such "girlish" masculinity is, in turn, an important source
of their success with fans, who use it, singly and collectively, to
negotiate their own fluid gender and sexual desires. Not surprisingly,
this girlishness has also provoked considerable anxiety (typically
expressed as disdain for the music), raising questions of what the
Backstreet Boys "really" are--girls or men? black or white? gay or
straight?--and of what it means to be a consumer of "girl" music. For
answers to these questions I turn primarily to the evidence of music
video, not to scant the music itself but to emphasize the importance of
visual spectacle to the communicative "pacts" between boy-band
performers and their audiences.
[7] Although I coin the phrase "girlish" masculinity to describe the
fluid (if not necessarily any more liberating) gender identity of the
Backstreet Boys, I do not mean to suggest that such performance of
gender is unprecedented. Indeed, both of the performers I began with,
Britney Spears and Kurt Cobain, have attracted attention for their
flouting of social norms of gender and sexuality - Spears for flaunting
her sex appeal despite her youth, Cobain for self-consciously blurring
the lines between hetero/homo, male/female, and girl/boy. From his
famous appearance in a yellow prom dress on the MTV show "Headbanger's
Ball," to his often quoted claim that "everyone is gay," to his band's
derivation of the title of its most famous song, "Smells Like Teen
Spirit," from the name of a deodorant (Teen Spirit) specifically
marketed to teenage girls, Cobain drew attention to the constructedness
of rock masculinities, offering an image of the male rock star as gender
and sexual changeling. Similarly, many of Cobain's alt-rock
contemporaries, following the example of established performers such as
David Bowie and Prince, were noteworthy in the 1990s for performing
versions of abject, submissive, or sexually ambiguous masculinity. In
this way, bands such as Sebadoh and performers such as Beck and Billy
Corgan (of the band Smashing Pumpkins) experimented with male (rock)
guises and tropes. What separates these performances of non-normative
masculinity from the "girlishness" of more recent boy bands, however, is
the latter's specific and intentional address to girls. For even as many
of these male musicians performed non-normative gender and sexual
identities, their masculinity ultimately remained secure and (or to the
degree that) retained broad public appeal among straight male consumers.
In contrast, male teenybopper performers display a feminized masculinity
that constructs male fan desire as homoerotic even as it both shapes and
serves the erotic desires of straight girl fans. As my reading of boy
band performance reveals, playing with the codes of masculinity is thus
related to, and yet distinct from, playing specifically to and for
girls' pleasure.
[8] It almost goes without saying here that I treat teenybopper pop as
replete with social and cultural significance, although detractors
almost universally characterize it in terms of its disposability,
evanescence, and aesthetic inconsequence. In fact, such
characterizations afford a useful place to begin an inquiry into how
teenybopper music, and in particular the discourse of boy bands, sheds
light on the cultural imagination of girls as consumers, citizens, and
subjects. Disparagement of teenybopper music as inauthentic or simply
"bad" is not merely a function of its being formulaic or mass-produced.
Rather, the terms of such aesthetic discrimination are filtered through
racialized concepts of gender and sexuality that are themselves
negotiated, conceptualized, and contested in popular culture. It follows
that the term "teenybopper" is not only descriptive, either of a type of
music or of a girl of a certain age and disposition; instead, the term
serves a simultaneously enabling and disciplinary function,
affording/assigning girls a means of cultural visibility and shaping the
ways they are encouraged to live out their social identities as gendered
subjects.
A lot of people want to discount us. Because unlike a rock band or a
garage band, they don't think we paid our dues. A lot of people don't
know we've been together seven years. We weren't playing bars, but we
played high schools all over the United States. High schools aren't
bars, but teenagers are tough crowds, man.
- Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson (Wild, 45)
[9] Most contemporary popular music genres, from rock to country to
hip hop, incorporate within their popular mythologies a notion of
authenticating space, or a place that credentials the authenticity of a
performer, especially one who later makes it big. In rock this
authenticating space varies, although it is most often imagined as a
garage or a series of clubs (the seedier the better, in keeping with the
presumed authenticity of male working-class identity); in hip hop it is
the proverbial "street," a metaphor that calls to mind the social and
economic forces that shape the urban locales most often associated with
the music. What these disparate authenticating spaces share is an
opposition to the domestic, or to spaces perceived as having a
domesticating influence on musical creativity and genius. They are
therefore highly gendered places, although female popular music
performers have long found ways to make use of them or to envision
alternative sites of musical authenticity.
[10] In contrast, contemporary teenybopper pop has no such
authenticating space written into its popular mythology, in part because
it is not assumed to have the same organic genesis as these other
genres. Rather, consistent with its self-conscious embrace of
artifice--its elevation, as Simon Frith and others have argued, of style
as a sign of authenticity--the point of origin of teenybopper pop is
more often located within the music industry itself, underscoring the
necessity of a cast of "supporting professionals" (Attali, 79),
especially the producer, in translating the music into pop spectacle.
This is the case with the Backstreet Boys, formed as the result of a
1993 open audition sponsored by Louis Pearlman, a Florida entrepreneur
searching for young talent to follow up on the success of earlier male
vocal acts such as Menudo and New Kids on the Block. Held in Orlando, a
city famous for its dedication to spectacle, that audition turned up
four of the group's members--Howie Dorough, A.J. McLean, Nick Carter,
and Kevin Richardson--aspiring young performers drawn to the TV and film
opportunities generated there by Disney and MGM studios. (Before he was
"discovered," Richardson, for example, had been earning money singing in
a Disney World show.) A fifth was found when Richardson recruited his
cousin Brian Littrell, who quit his junior year of high school in
Kentucky to join the group.
[11] Under Pearlman's sponsorship, the Backstreet Boys honed their
skills playing gigs at such distinctly inauthentic spaces as area high
schools and local tourist spots like Sea World, eventually releasing
Backstreet Boys, their eponymous debut album, on the independent Jive
label in 1995. Yet it was not until 1997, two years after the group had
garnered a rapturous following among teenage girls in Europe, Australia,
and Asia, that the Backstreet Boys earned any significant commercial
success in the United States. Once they did, a constant stream of hits
followed, first with singles from the re-released U.S. version of
Backstreet Boys, then with the follow-up Millennium, which entered the
Billboard Top 200 Album chart at No. 1 in June 1999, breaking country
singer Garth Brooks's previous record for most copies of an album sold
in its first week of release. (Black and Blue, released in 2000, would
not fare as well, its sales figures lagging behind industry
expectations). As is so often the pattern, such success led to a highly
publicized lawsuit in which the group sued Pearlman and his company
Trans-Continental, alleging the misappropriation of profits. (The suit,
which the group eventually won, was further complicated by the fact that
Pearlman, in the interim between Backstreet Boys albums, had gone on to
create the rival boy band 'N Sync.) The ensuing break from the manager
they alternately dubbed "Poppa Lou" or "Big Poppa" enabled the
Backstreet Boys to rewrite their history: on the one hand, to
disassociate themselves from an implicitly homosexualizing "Daddy"
figure while on the other, to cast off the "baggage" of aggressive
industry sponsorship more readily associated with the Motown "girl"
groups of the 1960s. Eschewing these signs of unstable masculinity,
official web sites (e.g., >)
emphasize a narrative of male artistic auto-genesis, highlighting
rituals of male bonding and group chemistry, and recasting the band's
early touring days in high schools across the nation as a form of
"paying dues." Although fans remain well aware of Pearlman's roles as a
patron and mentor, mention of the fateful Orlando audition has thus, in
the course of the group's development, given way to a more
"appropriately" gendered narrative of origins.
[12] Trivial as these details may seem, they bring to light a rather
obvious, if often ignored, notion in discussions of popular music:
namely, that even the most patently commodified cultural formations are
replete with cultural - not merely sociological or anthropological -
interest and value. In the case of the Backstreet Boys, such qualities
are intimately bound up with the group's self-conscious, if not
necessarily self-critical, emulation of contemporary African American
male vocal groups as a source of musical authenticity. Music writer Rob
Sheffield has memorably dubbed the Backstreet Boys "princes among
thieves" in mocking homage to their singular talent among contemporary
boy-band plunderers of black musical legacies, especially of the hip-hop
flavored New Jack acts (such as Boyz II Men and New Edition) of the late
1980s and early '90s ("1999 Pazz and Jop"). Although Sheffield doesn't
make the connection, such cross-racial theft/emulation cannot be
separated, analytically speaking, from the Backstreet Boys' performance
of boyish charm and innocence. In fact, their appeal to young girls -
not to mention the many adults that deem the Backstreet Boys safe for
girls' consumption - depends on a certain concerted distancing from the
more sexually frank and staunchly heterosexual lyrics, dance moves, and
vocalization of the very black vocal groups they tout as models. For
example, while they appropriate the harmonic singing style and melodic
hooks of such groups, lyrically the Backstreet Boys avoid overt sexual
reference, instead imbuing mild sexual come-on with ambiguity (e.g., "I
want it that way") or voicing fantasies of fidelity and devotion ("I'll
be the one") that mirror fans' own expressions of loyalty (Christgau).
Notably, too, such lyrics are sometimes evacuated of specific gender
reference, making them amenable to a variety of erotic interpretations
and appropriations, including those of gay and lesbian fans.
[13] The Backstreet Boys thus take their place in a familiar and
ongoing historical trajectory of "white" male interpreters of "black"
sounds for (overwhelmingly though by no means exclusively white) "girl"
audiences. More specifically, they construct an appealing and marketable
"girlish" masculinity by simultaneously evoking and distinguishing
themselves from the very groups they take as models. Backstreet Boy
Kevin Richardson unwittingly explicated this gender/race dynamic in an
interview with Rolling Stone in January 2000, when the group seemed
commercially invincible. Asked about the Backstreet Boys' potential to
break away from their "teenybopper" reputation, as boy groups like the
Beatles eventually did through self-consciously experimental albums such
as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, he observed, "We'd like people
to look at us like Boyz II Men or New Edition, only we're white" (Wild,
44). In a similar vein, in noting his group's uneasiness with the "boy
band" label, and thus implicitly with girl-audiences, Jeff Timmons, a
member of the group 98 Degrees, is quoted as observing, "It's curious to
me that people see Backstreet Boys when they look at us, and not Boyz II
Men or BLACKstreet or Dru Hill" (Taylor, 73). Offered with a certain
naive and no doubt self-serving bewilderment, such comments cloak what
might be called white racial ambition in the guise of "props" (respect)
for black musical peers. In particular, the phrase "only we're white"
seems disingenuous on at least two counts: first, because it downplays
the structuring by race of male performers' cultural visibility and
commercial viability; and second, because it naturalizes the whiteness
of the Backstreet Boys, although at least two of the group's members are
of Puerto Rican heritage. (In fact, Howie Dorough narrowly missed out -
to no less than "Latin" sensation Ricky Martin - on a coveted spot in
the boy band Menudo, a group that would have publicly conferred "Latino"
identity on him.)
[14] Similarly, the sexual and racial "innocence" of the Backstreet
Boys, although seemingly less objectifying of female sexuality than the
performance of groups who make such objectification explicit, tenders a
form of romantic instruction that has the potential to be a powerful
source of the domestication of female sexual desire. For example, in
addressing themselves to conventionally feminized fantasies of romantic
intimacy, songs bearing titles such as "As Long as You Love Me" and
"Anywhere For You" envision women's and girl's social agency primarily
in terms of their ability to break boys' hearts--a dubious power that
hinges on their ongoing definition as objects of male desire. Much the
same could be said of the performance of "girl" singer-dancers such as
Spears, who treads a notoriously slender tightrope between female sexual
self-assertion and self-objectification. The ambiguousness of Spears's
self-representation is brilliantly referenced, if further complicated,
in the title track of her second album, "Oops ... I Did It Again," a
phrase that simultaneously describes Spears's persona's "innocent"
seduction of boys and (girl) consumers alike. In short, although "adult"
voices more often fault contemporary rock for their misogyny and their
objectifying portrayals of women, it bears remembering that conceptions
of what is culturally "safe" for girls may be no less deeply invested in
patriarchal notions of female sexuality and subjectivity, including
notions of female domestic virtue. Seen in this light, what seems
protective--for example, encouraging girls' interest in the Backstreet
Boys over the more "sexy" Britney Spears--actively reinscribes both the
heterosexism of the dominant culture and its anxious policing of girls'
sexual expression.
[15] Here I am borrowing a page from third wave feminist discourses,
which in their embrace of female musicians who evince "control" over the
display of gender and sexuality (from superstars Janet Jackson and
Madonna to lesser known figures such as Ani DiFranco), significantly
revise assumptions about relations between girls' safety and their
sexual agency. Within a culture (not least the specific culture of the
music industry) that continues to pressure women to conform to
patriarchal scripts of femininity, third wave feminism envisions sexual
"liberation" for women and girls in terms of a prerogative to play with
the expression of sexual desire, and to do so in ways that acknowledge,
but do not privilege, male heterosexual desire. What seems especially
relevant here is third wave feminism's articulation of feminist
resistance as a messy process, one inevitably tethered to the very
expectations, conventions, and policing mechanisms it sets out to
disturb. Hence the radical potential of modes of women's popular
performance in which normative femininity is simultaneously displayed
and disrupted, recuperated and transgressed (Maglin and Perry, Alfonso
and Trigilio).
[16] Such insights of third wave feminism point to the pitfalls,
especially within a discussion of teenybopper pop, of pitting fan agency
in opposition to the directives of commodity culture. For one, such an
opposition assumes that fans merely project their desire on to the
figure of the pop star, failing to recognize that popular music culture
is where desire is tested out and negotiated, inculcated and disciplined
(Hall, 474). Indeed, girl-consumers also use boy bands, among the most
slickly produced and marketed youth/music industry products of recent
memory, in intensely personal, individually empowering, and occasionally
unsanctioned ways. This includes recasting the industry imperative to
consume boy bands according to a straightforwardly heterosexual model of
desire - a model materialized through the fashioning of different
personas for each member of a boy band (one's the shy one, one's the
prankster, one's the romantic, one's the rebel, and so on) - and instead
using boy-band fan practices to mediate intimate relationships between
and among girls.
[17] The more general point here concerns the futility of analyses of
youth music culture that force a choice between the artificiality of the
market and the authenticity of pleasure, rather than insisting on the
instability of both. Along these lines, here is what an informant tells
the authors of the 1986 volume Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex
about the meaning of her Beatlemania: "Looking back, it seems so
commercial to me, and so degrading that millions of us would just scream
on cue for these four guys the media dangled out in front of us. But at
the time it was something intensely personal for me and, I guess, a
million other girls. The Beatles seemed to be speaking directly to us
and, in a funny way, for us" (Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs, 31). More
than forty years later, the obvious and unabashed commercialization of
boy bands likewise does not mitigate the ability of fans to experience
agency in and through their identities as fans. Indeed, the very
commercial address of boy bands - their construction of cultural
consumption according to preordained choices as a "proper" exercise of
girls' agency - turns out also to be a key source of their appeal in
this regard.
[18] Here the importance of music video as a means of the visual
representation of a boy band such as the Backstreet Boys cannot be
overstated, since it's predominantly through video that they perform
their willingness to submit to the erotic possession of fans. Such
videos offer millions of viewer-listeners (including those do not have
access to increasingly costly live concerts) an illusion of physical
proximity to otherwise remote performers, complementing the illusion of
intimacy fostered through pop vocal techniques and technologies of
amplification. They also make the stars available to audiences as
embodied spectacle, ceding to us an authority to enjoy them as objects
of visual pleasure. As anyone who has ever danced to MTV, BET, or VH-1
knows, the fact that music videos are typically consumed privately, in
living rooms and bedrooms, complements this fantasy of ownership and
makes possible distinct varieties of fan practice and pleasure not
encouraged by recorded sounds alone. Such effects are heightened in the
context of pop videos, where the focus on dance implores viewers to
construct a mimetic relation to the body of the performer--a dynamic
illustrated by the practice in which fans carefully memorize dance moves
performed for the camera.
[19] The spectacularization of the body in music video performance
renders it a particularly charged arena for the cultural representation
and articulation of gender--especially, in this case, of masculinity and
male sexuality. In making this claim, I don't mean to understate the
enormous implications of music video for the mediation of women's and
girls' social, sexual, and cultural agency. As Lisa Lewis and others
have shown, the advent of music video created new opportunities for
women's cultural authorship of female gender and sexuality, even as it
multiplied avenues for the cultural subjectification and exploitation of
women and girls as sexualized objects. In particular, video fostered the
ability of female performers to construct modes of visual address that,
in appealing specifically to (young) female audiences, also offered
critical commentary on women's and girls' relation to publicity itself.
Yet whereas female gender traditionally has been defined in relation to
women's perceived availability to a sexualizing and objectifying (male)
"gaze" (one reason it has been such a powerful vehicle for female
performers, from Madonna to the rappers Eve and Missy "Misdemeanor"
Elliott), the spectacle of the eroticized male body poses a direct
threat to normative constructions of male gender and subjectivity.
However much music video has "routinised" (in Paul McDonald's words) the
spectacle of the male body, heterosexual masculinity still depends on a
certain control over looking and being seen that is seemingly undermined
by the positioning of male performers as consumable objects of visual
pleasure (McDonald, 280). On the other hand, this threat to stable
masculinity must be understood within a larger social context of gender
inequality, in which male subjects in general enjoy an ability to
negotiate bodily display on their own terms. Examples of such male
authority to negotiate visibility in the context of the perils of
cultural performance are readily available: in male rock performance,
for example, the mediating status of the guitar as a prophylactic
appendage (or "strap-on") of phallic masculinity is well documented,
whereas in male rap video performance displays of the pleasures of male
homosociality are often "balanced out" by the presence of scantily clad
women or objects (such as cars) that specify an end-point of
heterosexual desire (Walser, Waksman). As these examples suggest,
moreover, although they are articulated through the conventions of
musical genre, such strategies of negotiating male gender and sexuality
are profoundly raced, consistent with the long history of the
spectacularization of African American men (and to different degrees
Latino and Asian American men) as bodies inscribed by racial difference,
and thereby subject both to sexual fetishization and heightened state
(police) scrutiny.
[20] The Backstreet Boys occupy a complex position in this discussion,
insofar as their cultural self-fashioning as white male teenybopper
idols (i.e., as cute and accessible "boys") requires forms of erotic
address that threaten their ability to hold on to normative masculinity.
For one thing, as a vocal group (the "band" moniker notwithstanding),
the Backstreet Boys cannot fall back on rock tropes of instrumental
virtuosity as a means of securing heterosexual masculinity despite their
"girlish" looks, as the Beatles once did. Nor does their boy band image
- the product of a complex series of racial negotiations of gender -
allow for the sort of open representation of heterosexual eroticism that
would assuage such anxieties. Such exigencies requiring the Backstreet
Boys to be primarily visible as spectacularized bodies are at the root
of what I am calling their performance of a "girlish" masculinity.
[21] To illustrate how this girlish masculinity is both enacted and
interpreted, by various communities of audiences, I want to turn to the
example of "I Want It That Way," the Backstreet Boys' debut single from
their Millennium album, and a song that received heavy radio and music
television airplay throughout the summer and into the fall of 1999.
(Less noticed but just as significant, it spent an impressive fifty-two
weeks on the Billboard Adult Contemporary Chart, which tracks music
played on radio stations targeting middle-aged audiences). A mid-tempo
love ballad, "I Want It That Way" is sung in voices full of ardent
longing--although for what or for whom, beyond a generic and
non-gender-specific "you," the lyrics, coy to the point of
incomprehensibility, never specify. While it's clear that the song
concerns a perilously endangered relationship, the yearning it conveys
is indefinite, compelling listeners to supply their own interpretations
of such equivocal phrases as, "I never wanna hear you say/ I want it
that way." Such lyrical banality is arguably a source of the quality of
universal appeal of "I Want It That Way," its platitudes aptly and even
touchingly communicating the very difficulty of giving language to
desire. "The music sweeps forward, delicate and soulful; the words might
have been computer-generated," observed New York Times music critic Ann
Powers, one of the few professional music writers sympathetic to the
appeal of teenybopper pop. Yet like the very best pop songs, she added,
it has the power to transport listeners beyond the immediate moment,
into a realm of "pure pleasure" (B5).
[22] Set at an airport, the music video for "I Want It That Way"
translates this pleasure into visual form, re-imagining the song as a
paean to the mutual "romance" between the Backstreet Boys and their
female audience (lyrical reference to the imminent break-up of this love
affair thus conveniently excised from the video's representation).
Although the video effects such translation in the form of a rudimentary
narrative that concerns the band's departure for an unspecified
location, such a "plot" is, in fact, little more than a contrivance used
to stage images of the Backstreet Boys performing, first in a sunlit
aircraft hangar (before a gleaming plane later revealed to be a private
"Backstreet Boys" jet, a winking reference to Lou Pearlman's business
interests in the air charter company Trans-Continental, which provided
him the capital to invest in the Backstreet Boys), and subsequently in
an airport terminal, where band members' white-attired figures float
against a backdrop of bustling humanity. In these performance scenes,
desire is elicited and manifested in suave costumes, private jets, and
sparkling surroundings that exude an air of wealth and excitement. More
important, it is physically and visibly articulated in the Backstreet
Boys' own looks, which are trained directly at the camera, creating an
impression of nearness to the viewer at home. Indeed, except for
occasional overt technical obtrusions (for example, in obvious edits or
shifts between medium-shots and close-ups), there is little in this
first part of "I Want It That Way" to mediate between the viewer's gaze
and the bodies and faces of the performers, which are displayed in a
manner that nurtures fantasies of authenticity and spontaneity, despite
their obvious stylization and visual framing. The band further develops
these impressions of immediacy and sincerity through hand and facial
gestures that illustrate and embody the lyrics, such that a finger
pointing at the camera indicates "you," while a hand pressed over the
heart translates "want" or "desire."
[23] As the song builds to its climatic bridge and final chorus,
however, the scene at the airplane hangar shifts to include a group of
waving and cheering girl fans, who presumably have arrived at the
airport to wish the Backstreet Boys bon voyage. This triangulation of
the "look" previously shared between the members of the band and the
television viewer serves a series of interrelated purposes. For one, it
represents the erotically charged relationship between the Backstreet
Boys and the female "mass," interspersing shots of the crowd bearing
homemade signs and flowers with close-ups that depict individual fan
desire in terms of the "ecstatic" looks worn by various girls. Such
depiction of the mass not only represents fandom as a privileged mode of
consumption, creating a space for home viewers to imagine themselves as
members of this desiring body, but it also establishes heterosexual
"looking relations" as the proper mode in which to view the
performance--a point underscored by the absence of fans who might be
seen as inappropriate objects of the Backstreet Boys' own desire (i.e.,
boys and very young girls). Yet paradoxically, the image of the crowd is
also a prelude to the video's acknowledgment of the "real" distance that
must inevitably intercede between the Backstreet Boys and their
audience. This necessity--already latent in lyrics addressed to "my one
desire," even while spoken to an audience of millions--ultimately
manifests itself in the video's final image of the Backstreet Boys,
backs turned to the crowd and the camera, as they approach the airplane
that will carry them to parts unknown. Here the gleaming "Backstreet
Boys" jet that awaits them signifies the transnational appeal of U.S.
teenybopper pop, the market for which propels the group (or so the video
would lead us to imagine) to new sets of adoring fans in far-away locations.
[24] Back in the United States, meanwhile, fans catapulted the "I Want
It That Way" video to a position of undisputed popularity, in a public
exercise of their gendered agency as consumers. They were abetted in
their efforts by "Total Request Live" ("TRL"), the enormously popular
MTV after-school video countdown show that has succeeded in translating
a staple of radio marketing--the listener request--to a visual medium.
In the "TRL" version of on-air radio requests, email and studio-audience
"shout-outs," in which fans explain why they cast their vote for a
particular video, periodically air while the video is playing. Through
this practice of giving viewers a platform to broadcast their
preferences before a live television audience of their peers, "TRL"
capitalizes on the popularity of a select number of videos while
elevating and spotlighting the figure of the female fan, making her an
object of viewer identification/desire and, arguably, the show's real
"star." Through her, in particular, otherwise atomized viewers imagine
themselves as part of a virtual "community" of fans joined in the
collective project of voting in the day's favorites, a fantasy
underscored by the posting of voter tallies for the day's top videos.
[25] Where "I Want It That Way" was concerned, this fan community
mirrored the enthusiasm and loyalty modeled by the figure of the female
mass in the video itself. Not only did fans rally to ensure the
months-long dominance of "I Want It That Way" on the "TRL" chart (until
the video was forcibly "retired" from the countdown by executive
decision of the show's producers), but they came to constitute a
significant presence in the studio audience and in the crowds that daily
gathered in Times Square, outside of MTV's New York studios where "TRL"
is broadcast, vying for a chance to appear on camera. And much like the
fans depicted in "I Want It That Way," the girls who lined the streets
of Times Square to support the Backstreet Boys frequently appeared
bearing signs addressed to the their favorite band members. This was
not, however, a case of real life imitating a commercial, of fans simply
playing out the roles that the video had preordained for them. Rather,
it exemplified the ability of fans to use music video to render their
own practices more visible and more "popular." Indeed, for the
overwhelmingly female audience that voted for it, the appeal "I Want It
That Way" lay in its respectful representation of fans and fan pleasure,
not merely its depiction of the Backstreet Boys as objects of visual
desire. At the same time, the democratic rituals of "TRL" tend to
re-affirm a gendered hierarchy that imagines consumption as a privileged
and proper mode of girls' social visibility and cultural agency. Once
again, the question looms of the overlaps and intersections among girls'
pleasure, their cultural agency, and capitalist rites of "choosing."
[26] A rather different interpretation of "I Want It That Way" was
offered in September 1999 by the all-male neo-punk band Blink-182, whose
video for their breakout single "All The Small Things" (off of the album
Enema of the State) comically spoofed "I Want It That Way" as well as
videos by 'N Sync, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears, and Ricky Martin. Framed
by scenes that specifically parody the opening and closing scenarios of
"I Want It That Way," "All the Small Things" alternates between images
of Blink-182 playing "themselves" and images of the trio playing a dorky
and feminized boy band or, in the case of Spears, to play an equally
dorky girl. In each instance, the video's debunking of the image of
familiar teenybopper stars centers on the failure or inversion of an
erotically charged moment, such that a scene meant to be seductive
instead comes off as hopelessly foolish or downright embarrassing. For
example, in Blink-182's take-off of the Backstreet Boys "All I Have to
Give" video, band members ruin the illusion of sexy suavity by smiling
to reveal missing teeth. A romp on the beach with a buxom, bikini-clad
model (from 98 Degrees's "I Do") becomes a messy, awkward affair, and a
contemplative seaside walk with a canine friend (from a Britney Spears
video) mutates into a girl singer's frantic attempt to resist a dog's
stubborn efforts to expose her behind. Qualities of teenybopper pop
sincerity are upbraided in scatalogical fashion when a doe-eyed male
singer, his face knitted with concentration, is revealed to be sitting
on a toilet; and in a parody of Martin's "(Livin') La Vida Loca," a
scene of sexual titillation involving hot candle wax turns more painful
than pleasurable. Finally, in a concluding riff on the scene
representing the female mass from "I Want It That Way," we see the boys
from Blink-182--Tom, Mark, and Travis--surrounded by a group of
screaming and crying fans, only this time the crowd includes the
bikini-clad model waving a placard announcing "Travis, I'm Pregnant" as
well as a naked male fan holding aloft a sign that reads, "I Want You
That Way."
[27] The relentlessly sexualizing manner in which "All the Small
Things" caricatures teenybopper pop, especially the music and
performance of boy bands, stands out in these examples. The salient
issue here is not the video's mockery of teenybopper music per se or
even its parody of pop as sexual spectacle, but its representation of
the superficiality and banality of the music through a satire of the
masculinity of its male performers. In particular, in devaluing
teenybopper pop as a "feminized" form of cultural expression from which
"real" men would naturally wish to distance themselves, "All the Small
Things" elevates (punk) rock as a sphere of "healthy" masculinity and
male erotic self-display. Hence whereas the pleasure of the Blink-182
video lies in the band's affectation of the sorts of highly stylized
looks and body language with which the Backstreet Boys communicate their
sincerity and earnestness in "I Want It That Way," it can only "work" to
the degree that these signs of boy-band "effeminacy" are juxtaposed with
images of more conventionally gendered punk masculinity, as embodied in
aggressive guitar strumming, intentionally rough or jerky body
movements, and looks that either directly challenge the viewer or avert
the camera's gaze altogether. In the juxtaposition of the pregnant
swimsuit model and naked the male fan whose sign implicates the
Backstreet Boys in the cultural mediation of "queer" desires, the end of
the video crystallizes he homophobic undertones of this opposition of
punk virility and pop girlishness. Anxiety about heterosexuality also
potentially explains the video's otherwise gratuitous satire of Ricky
Martin, who has a large gay following and is himself widely rumored to
be gay.
[28] To the degree that it hinges on the stable differentiation of
"real" boy bands from those who only play at being boy bands, "All the
Small Things" belies certain inevitable tensions and ironies, however.
The most interesting of these concerns the enthusiastic reception of the
Blink-182 video by the very audience of teenage girls whose desires it
irreverently caricatures. A major hit on "TRL," where it shared a place
in the Top Ten with the Backstreet Boys's "Millennium" video (about
which more shortly), "All the Small Things" earned Blink-182 a level of
cultural visibility and commercial success more associated with
teenybopper performers. Whereas the band initially had set out to
lampoon boy bands, it thus effectively became one through its popularity
among those consumers who also constitute the major marketing
demographic for teenybopper pop. Here the example of "All the Small
Things" raises once again the question of the status of the fluidity of
girls' musical consumption, the parameters of which would seem to be
able to accommodate even an "anti-boy band" such as Blink-182. Such
fluidity is surely attributable, at least in part, to the fickleness of
commodity culture, or to girls' complicity with homophobia and misogyny;
yet to read it solely in narrowly sociological terms would be to miss
the larger point of the video as a site of pleasurable negotiations,
erotic as well as aesthetic. For example, the intimate knowledge of pop
music videos necessary to correctly read and interpret the allusions in
"All the Small Things" strongly suggests that its "proper" audience is
not boy rock fans but girl fans of teenybopper music. Here it doesn't
hurt that the sound of "All the Small Things" already borrows heavily
from pop, that its lyrics are as ambiguously productive as those of "I
Want It That Way," and that its melodic chorus melts into a round of
sing-song-y "na na na nas." (Were such address overt, it could only lead
to heated speculation about the band's pandering to a "girl" audience.)
Girls are potentially responding as well to the fact that the members of
Blink-182 are so obviously relishing the opportunity to act out a
boy-band fantasy in a manner that resonates, despite its mocking
intentions, with their own fan practices. Not least, of course, are
those momentary images in "All the Small Things" that suspend Blink-182
in the ambiguous space between parody and appropriation, creating
opportunities for female viewers to consume them in much the same
eroticized fashion in which they would consume the Backstreet Boys.
[29] The success of "All the Small Things" on MTV thus points us back
to the issue of the social and cultural value imputed to cultural
products explicitly associated with girls in the public imagination. On
the one hand, in a context of male musical performance that specifically
associates "selling out" with the attraction of a significant female
audience, the popularity of "All the Small Things" among girls threatens
Blink-182's ability to hold on to punk authenticity, a quality already
significantly compromised (at least from the perspective of many a punk
aficionado) by the band's forays into pop. Acknowledging as much, Mark
Hoppus noted to a Rolling Stone reporter, "We're like Fisher-Price: My
First Punk Band" (Edwards, 34). On the other hand, although Blink-182
has enjoyed some of the success of a boy band (to the point of appearing
in photo spreads next to the Backstreet Boys in teen magazines), a
variety of factors, not least the longstanding association of punk with
rebellious, white working-class masculinity, have defrayed the sorts of
anxieties about gender that "All the Small Things" expresses in its
send-up of teenybopper idols. Seen in this light, "All the Small Things"
is a campy indulgence, not an "authentic" performance.
[30] Blink-182 are not the only ones to have raised the question of
the sexuality of either the Backstreet Boys or their male fans. Indeed,
the question of whether male fans can be straight if they derive
pleasure from a band that is so obviously "gay" has been a recurring
topic of debate on the Internet, where detractors of boy bands
vehemently deem the "Spice Boys" too "girly" for male consumption. Such
anxiety also informs the recent parody by "shock jock" Howard Stern, "If
I Go the Gay Way," a song that mines homophobic (specifically
scatological) images of anal sex, proposing that "I Want It That Way"
renders its listeners gay (that is, they become "Backdoor Boys"). Even
Robert Christgau, an influential Village Voice rock critic who has
defended the Backstreet Boys, citing the excitement of their live shows,
voices his respect in tellingly ambivalent terms, repeatedly affirming
that they "don't suck" (Christgau, 71).
[31] Such apprehensions about the sexuality of contemporary boy bands
are not "merely" homophobic, I would argue, but conflate homophobia
(expressed particularly as the fear of male homosexuality) with a
misogynist contempt for girls and girls' pleasure. Even more than this,
the binary of "ideal" versus "girlish" masculinity designates broad
categories of the desirable and the undesirable, deeming certain
subjects and cultural practices erotically appealing (at least within
hegemonic representations) while repressing others. According to this
binary, in other words, not only are boy band performers and their
(male) fans insufficiently masculine--a notion exploited in the
Blink-182 parody--but girls' desire and fan practices are nascently
"queer," that is to say, threatening to hegemonic conceptions of (male)
desirability.
[32] The contradiction here is that the sort of ecstatic fan desire
portrayed as deviant in "All the Small Things" can only be produced by
keeping at bay any signs of eroticism among boy performers. (This goes
for boy bands as well as for pop-punk rockers.) The careful regulation
of signs of male homosexuality in turn creates opportunities for girls
to engage in modes of consumption that have a markedly homoerotic
component, although they are typically characterized in terms of
(heterosexual) "puppy love." This is the case with forms of private
consumption, which are often collective despite their appearance of
being individualized (e.g., involving girls sharing sexual fantasies
about boy bands or dancing to videos together); but it is especially
evident at live performances, an important feature of which is their
mediation of collective practices of dressing up, screaming, dancing,
grabbing each other, and swooning. Indeed, one of the values of live
shows--particularly those at large stadium venues, where most of the
audience is likely to experience the performers as tiny blurs on a
far-away stage--is precisely their fostering of opportunities for girls
to engage of forms of female bonding, intimacy, and collective
self-display. At a Britney Spears concert in July 1999, for example,
young female concert-goers not only appeared dressed in the singer's
signature garb, the most popular outfit being the sexy schoolgirl
uniform worn by Spears in her "Baby One More Time" video; but just as
often they dressed in identical outfits of their own design, a practice
that advertised their affiliation with and affection for each other,
rather than their affiliation with the teenybopper star. The desire such
practices negotiate is alternately hetero-, homo-, and autoerotic; they
are also highly dynamic, liable to shift in response to the performance.
[33] The dynamism of fan practices is further illustrated by girls'
strategies of responding to the characterization of boy bands as "gay"
and therefore musically inept as well as insufficiently masculine. In
particular, in adapting the genre of the coming-out narrative to go
public about their admiration for the band, fans of the Backstreet Boys
demonstrate their ability to strategically undercut disparaging
portrayals of their desire, which have in turn been used to denigrate
boy bands. "The media has given the Backstreet Boys such a teenybopper
image, that many people don't want to like them for fear of ridicule,"
writes Oceana555@aol.com (who identifies herself as female) on
Backstreet.net, an unofficial Backstreet Boys website (the slogan of
which also happens to be "Keeping the Pride Alive," in following with a
Backstreet expression that ostensibly refers to fan self-respect, not
Gay Pride). "I was one of these people, and I kept my posters and
knowledge of them a secret, except to my closest friends." Oceana's
commentary on "secret" fan desire is echoed by J.C. Herz, a technology
writer for the New York Times, who begins her glowing review of the
Backstreet Boys "Puzzles in Motion" CD-ROM game in the following manner:
"If I were saying this on TV, I would request a wig and disguise my
voice. Because I have something to say, and it needs to be heard. But
it's deeply embarrassing, and potentially damaging to my reputation.
I've been struggling with this for a while now. And I think at this
point, it's best to be honest with myself and my readers" (E4). Some
fans, on the other hand, have simply chosen to embrace the "girliness"
of the Backstreet Boys, adopting a position that ironically reveals the
contradictions of homophobic discourse. As a teenager named Amy Dawson
recently confided to a Rolling Stone reporter, "I love the Backstreet
Boys. I don't care if they're gay"--an observation the reporter
clarifies by noting that "Amy and her friends often explain that gay
does not mean, you know, gay. It's just a generic insult" (Dunn,
November 1999, 107). Apparently, too, the Boys themselves are OK with
their gay male fans. "They're cool," affirms Backstreet member Howie,
"They know we all, you know, date girls" (Dunn, May 1999, 44).
Meanwhile, drag kings have appropriated the butch potential of the boy
band phenomenon (as well as the double entendres of phrases like "I Want
It That Way"), and issues of "closeted consumption" were addressed in a
recent cover story in The Advocate, the national gay and lesbian
newsmagazine, about boy bands' substantial following of gay male fans
(Epstein).
[34] Notwithstanding such talk of their "gayness" in the wake of the
success of "I Want It That Way," the Backstreet Boys have managed to
retain their status as teenybopper icons while bringing their
performance of masculinity more in line with the ideal modeled by
Blink-182 (when playing itself) in "All the Small Things." In part, they
have achieved this revision of their gender and sexual identity through
the strategy of claiming to have transcended their "teenybopper"
origins, with band members working to establish musical authenticity
through their assumption of diverse artistic roles as video directors,
songwriters, and even producers. The point here is not whether these
roles indeed confer greater agency over musical production, but that
their very signification in this context as more artistically complex
and demanding, requiring greater degrees of skill and expertise, is
implicitly predicated on a gendered binary of producers and performers,
where the latter is (perhaps predictably) feminized. This opposition
complicates the more familiar binary of production and consumption,
which pits (male) performers against (female) audiences, making visible
the gendered division of labor that emerges from within the category of
production itself. It also speaks to the capitalist logic that sees
performance as the less "productive" of the two terms.
[35] More immediately, this process of re-masculinization has taken
place within the realm of visual representation, specifically in the
video for "Larger Than Life," the follow-up single to "I Want It That
Way." An homage to fans ("Every time we're down/ You can make it right
/And that's why you're larger than life"), "Larger Than Life" is a
noteworthy departure from previous Backstreet Boys videos; as a
contributor to the Backstreet.net bulletin board put it, in the video
the band "breaks out of their 'pretty-boy' image." In fact, "Larger Than
Life" draws on the notion of outer space as a "frontier," a familiar
staple of both U.S. foreign policy and U.S. popular culture (especially
cinema and video games), to construct a narrative of imperial
masculinity. Set in the year 3000, "Larger Than Life" depicts the
Backstreet Boys as space explorers piloting sleek combat vessels and
wielding futuristic weapons, although against whom or what is unclear.
Indeed, the aggressive images on the screen acquire power precisely
through the vagueness of the identity of the enemy, suggesting that the
Backstreet Boys need no alibi or justification for their violence. The
staging of this violence outside of a specific context of defense or
retribution further allows for it to be fetishized as a source of visual
pleasure in and of itself. The nationalist subtext of these images is
underscored by the band's quasi-military outfits, which bear the
conspicuous imprint of pumped-up pectorals and rippling abs--in short,
costumes that are a far cry from the suave, flowing ensembles of "I Want
It That Way." Gone, too, are the illustrative gestures and facial
expressions of the earlier video, which gave the dance the appearance of
being organically rooted in the performance, to be replaced by "harder,"
robotic moves highlighted in a dance routine keyed to the song's "break"
(i.e., that part where the melody falls away to reveal an underlying
rhythmic structure).
[36] Unlike in "I Want It That Way," in "Larger Than Life" such dance
routines, which borrow explicitly from the moves of African American
performers, enable the Backstreet Boys to weave in and out of the racial
boundary, alternately and even simultaneously constructing themselves as
"white" and "black." This is not only because the dance sequence
features a cadre of backing dancers, including African American
performers, who lend it an air of racial-ethnic diversity and
inclusivity that mediates the terms of their appropriation. Whereas
their starring roles in the video are as the protagonists of a narrative
of militarized outer-space conquest closely associated, in historical
memory and in the broader cultural imagination, with heroic "white"
masculinity, in the dance segment of "Larger Than Life" they also invoke
"blackness" through their embodiment of rhythm, a quality closely
associated with African American music. Once again, moreover, we see how
race and gender work together, such that race can only be conceived and
represented in gendered terms. In particular, the signs of "blackness"
in "Larger Than Life" help to mediate the Backstreet Boys' revision of
the "girlish" image they previously cultivated through strategies of
self-conscious distancing from African American male vocal groups. Here
the band's performance rests on a logic of white male gender
self-fashioning that depends on a profoundly sexualizing construction of
African American music and (male) performers. Indeed, the very
continuity of this logic, which remains unchanged from "I Want It That
Way" to "Larger Than Life," contrasts with the Backstreet Boys' own
cultural agency as "white" performers to produce varying and fluid
representations of gender.
[37] The issue of the erasure of women's cultural agency becomes even
more complicated when we consider that the immediate precedent for the
dance sequence of "Larger Than Life" is Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation,"
a video that imagines Jackson as the sexy, charismatic, and "in control"
female leader of a "nation" of popping, robotic dancers. Like "Larger
Than Life," "Rhythm Nation" uses militaristic imagery to represent
Jackson's command--not merely of the "citizens" of this imagined
community, but also of the desires of her fans and of her own
self-representation (not incidentally, "Control" is the title of the
album on which "Rhythm Nation" appears.) In so doing, moreover, the
video demonstrates the plasticity of nationalist and/or militarist
discourses, which may be deployed to divergent ends. Here "Rhythm
Nation" differs markedly from "Larger Than Life," which frames its
dramatic dance sequence with images of bloodless battle to communicate
the "global supremacy" of the Backstreet Boys, who appear in it (at
least outside of the dance sequence) as action-figure heroes. Although
set a thousand years in the future, this narrative has a "real,"
present-day analog in the success of the Backstreet Boys as teenybopper
pop superstars who have symbolically conquered the "world" (in hegemonic
terms, the global marketplace) through the sales of their first two
albums. In contrast, "Rhythm Nation" centers on the synchronized moves
of a multiracial cast of hard-bodied dancers to project an image of
black female authorship of, and authority within, the "real" world.
Whereas the uniform-like costumes and the "underground,"
post-apocalyptic landscape of the video are vaguely threatening of past
and future violence, the video also conveys an image of solidarity,
uniting Jackson, her dancers, and her fans in their mutual allegiance to
the song's driving, catchy beats.
[38] Whereas "I Want It That Way" opened up a space within the video
for the representation of girls as sexual and cultural agents, in
"Larger Than Life" the centrality of the spectacle of white male
violence relegates female subjects to the status of decorative,
"background" objects devoid of agency, sexual or otherwise. Moreover,
whereas the video for "I Want It That Way" translated a song without any
lyrical reference to girl-fans into a showcase of their desire, "Larger
Than Life," a song ostensibly dedicated to the girls who made the
Backstreet Boys international teenybopper pop icons, is in contrast
devoid of any representation of fans or, for that matter, of girls at
all. When female figures do appear in the video, meanwhile, it is as
fetish objects resembling the models from Robert Palmer's well known
"Addicted to Love" video. Dressed in bondage-fantasy red vinyl bodysuits
and sporting cleavage, glossy red lips, and heavy eye make-up, they are
conspicuously silent, present as symbols of the band's desire, although
in keeping with the notion of women as "distractions" from
prototypically "masculine" concerns such as space conquest, the
Backstreet Boys never directly interact with them.
[39] My intention in thus comparing "I Want It That Way" and "Larger
Than Life" is not to establish the superiority of the earlier video;
indeed, by most measures "Larger Than Life," with its bigger budget,
greater degree of polish, convincing special effects, and energetic
dance routine, would be judged the more accomplished of the two.
Moreover, the band's subsequent video for "The One," a montage of images
from the band's 1999 world tour, re-focused attention on the dynamic
between the Backstreet Boys and the female mass, featuring as well
erotically charged images of the on-the-road "male bonding" of band
members themselves. Rather, I end with "Larger Than Life" because of its
significance in suggesting the degree of social license granted for male
sexual and gender "experimentation" even within the context of "girl
culture." Although girl-fans were overwhelmingly responsible for voting
"Larger Than Life" to the No. 1 position on "TRL" until its mandatory
retirement, it was a video that "even guys like," as a fan named Lindsay
recently commented on a Backstreet Boys message board. It is in this
sense, too, that the Backstreet Boys differ crucially both from
important female influences such as Jackson and female
"colleagues-in-kiddie-pop" such as Spears. Indeed, Jackson and Spears
are crucially important to my reading of the Backstreet Boys insofar as
their performances evoke the boundaries of race and gender routinely
crossed by boy bands as a means of furthering their cultural agency as
male performers. In short, whereas the phenomenon of "girling" may
implicate boys/men as well as girls/women, it remains a question whether
the "power" of "girl power" belongs, after all, to the boys.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I thank Carolyn Betensky, Chad Heap, Andrea Levine,
and You-me Park for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this essay.
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GAYLE WALD is associate professor of English at The George Washington
University, where she teaches African American Literature and cultural
studies. Author of Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in
Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Duke, 2000), as well as
numerous articles about popular music culture, she is currently working
on a project on Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the pre-history of "women in
rock".
Copyright <../download.html> ©2002 Ann Kibbey. All Rights Reserved
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