NEWS RELEASE
September 14 2001
Teen
beat gives girls power
Critics, parents
and academics might denigrate "teenybopper" music, but young
girls are savvy consumers who take "lightweight" pop music very
seriously, according to PhD research at UniSA.
Sarah Baker, a
PhD student in the Centre of Professional and Public Communication, has
conducted an intensive ethnographic study of seven girls aged eight to
eleven years old, with a focus on their involvement with pop music.
She says the
girls in her study were far from naïve consumers of mass-marketed pop
groups.
Rather, they
were well aware of the manufactured nature of pop music and conscious of
the marketing-driven moulding of their favourite groups' images.
"They
understand the workings of the industry," Baker says.
"They've
seen the TV series Popstars - they understand the music is being
mass produced but that's not important to them.
What is important is what the music gives them - as a way of
expressing and defining their identities."
The girls,
studied in 2000 at an Adelaide after-school care centre; all used pop
music as a way of defining themselves and, in some cases, differentiating
themselves from their peers.
“Some of the
girls used pop music as a way to establish an identity apart from their
parents, whose music choices were often very different, Baker says.
“Lyrics
weren't important to the girls in the study - the "groove" or
the danceability of the music was the key.”
Baker says
cultural theorists have argued that dancing is an important part of the
growing identifies of young girls. Not
only is dancing creative and physically satisfying, but it also enables
girls to momentarily express an otherwise hidden sensuality.
While
pop music was the dominant genre, some girls had "hidden"
musical tastes, which they kept from their peers, for example Italian folk
music.
The girls were
intensely interested in the individuals who make up boy-bands, and were
very aware of the images presented by the pop stars.
For example, one member of 5ive fell from popularity when he
cropped his hair - but the girls understood that this was part of the
inevitable process of reinvention required of pop stars.
On the other
hand, the girls expressed dismay at the reinvention of the individual
members of the Spice Girls. Baker
says this could be linked to the fact that the Spice Girls have
moved away from their girl-next-door, "girl power" image to one
of increasing maturity and glamour.
Baker will
complete her thesis next year. She
says teenybopper music deserves to be taken more seriously as a cultural
force in the lives of its primary consumers - young girls.
She presented a
well-received paper to the 11th International Conference of the
International Association for the Study of Popular Music held in Finland
in July this year. A longer
form of her conference paper will be published in November in
Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.
Further
Information: Sarah Baker, 041
970 8724;
Michèle Nardelli, 8302 0966, 0418823673
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