FEATURE:
Behind the Barricades
IN THIS PHOTO: Young fans of The Beatles show their excitement and appreciation during a gig in New York City on 14th August, 1965 (when Beatlemania was still strong)/PHOTO CREDIT: John Peodincuk/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
The Teenage Girls That Make the Bands
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THIS is another feature that takes inspiration…
IN THIS PHOTO: Caitlin Moran/PHOTO CREDIT: Levon Biss for The New York Times
from BBC Radio 6 Music! On Wednesday (9th), Caitlin Moran spoke with Lauren Laverne on her breakfast show to discuss her acclaimed and must-read new book, More Than a Woman. It is an amazing book that everyone should get a copy of:
“A decade ago, Caitlin Moran thought she had it all figured out. Her instant bestseller How to Be a Woman was a game-changing take on feminism, the patriarchy, and the general 'hoo-ha' of becoming a woman. Back then, she firmly believed 'the difficult bit' was over, and her forties were going to be a doddle.
If only she had known: when middle age arrives, a whole new bunch of tough questions need answering. Why isn't there such a thing as a 'Mum Bod'? How did sex get boring? What are men really thinking? Where did all that stuff in the kitchen drawers come from? Can feminists have Botox? Why has wine turned against you? How can you tell the difference between a Teenage Micro-Breakdown, and The Real Thing? Has feminism gone too far? And, as always, WHO'S LOOKING AFTER THE CHILDREN?
Now with ageing parents, teenage daughters, a bigger bum and a To-Do list without end, Caitlin Moran is back with More Than A Woman: a guide to growing older, a manifesto for change, and a celebration of all those middle-aged women who keep the world turning”.
Moran was saying how, before her book came out, the publisher were asking whether men would buy a book about the experiences of a middle-aged woman. She responded – and told Lauren Laverne – that the book is like an instruction manual and actually provides a great sense of insight (into the middle-aged woman and, as Moran looks back on her life, the younger woman) that men might not be able to receive anywhere else.
Another point that was raised during that BBC Radio 6 Music interview concerned teenage girls and bands. I am going to bring in some articles that explore this point, but there has been this impression that screaming teenage girls are not as important to an artist as men and young boys. I know bands can feed off of the fandom and energy of their male audience, but consider the sheer energy and commitment that girls offer. Rather than it being about attraction and these fans lusting after their idols, this is love and passion at its most visceral, honest, and extreme. Rather than it being too full-on and obsessive, these young female fans are responsible for bands being launched and getting into the public consciousness. There is the more unsettling side of that fandom where, historically and even now, male musicians take advantage of their young fans and they cross that line. Decades ago, the concept of the groupie existed, and it is a rather unsettling and seedy side of music that, thankfully, has all but died. Accentuating the positives, and I was struck by Caitlin Moran’s words – and what she writes in More Than a Woman – regarding girls and the effect they have on bands’ success. Back at school, I think me and my friends thought it was a bit lame that girls were going crazy over bands like Take That, Spice Girls and whoever was storming the charts at that time.
That feeling that they were crushing on the bands or it wasn’t about the music was a prevalent and ignorant attitude. Whilst there was a degree of idolisation and desire, the sheer volume and dedication of their support unsettled us because it was so committed and strong. I am not sure about boys at school now, but we did not really get that excited over bands in the 1990s. Even when big-time groups like Oasis were storming the charts, the response and fandom was often muted or timid. We loved the music and were excited, but maybe it was seen as a bit uncool to be that expressive, vulnerable, and open. Even with the Rock bands and ‘cooler’ acts of that time, it was girls at school who threw out the most love and, at gigs, were making the most noise. Look back at the 1960s when The Beatles exploded, and look at clips of their gigs! I guess The Beatles stopped touring because they could not hear themselves play through the screams, but it was those girls – many of them are our mothers or grandmothers – who were snapping up the records, making that noise at gigs and turning them into the legends they would become! Not that girl fans were the biggest influence, but I think their continued love was a major factor. I think The Beatles are a rare occasion of a band appreciating their young female fans and, whilst they did stop touring because of the intensity, they understood the importance of this sector in their success! This is the same with so many bands and artists through the years, through to groups of now like BTS and Little Mix. Again, it is not just Pop bands that one can attribute a lot of their success to their young female fans – this adulation and admiration extends across multiple genres.
I think it is time to dispel the myth that it is the boys who are the serious fans who make the bands, and the girls are just screaming and are not interested in the music or know much about it. In 2016, Alexandra Pollard wrote a fascinating piece for The Guardian where she explained how certain bands and sectors feel that girls do not have much interest in the music and, sadly, they are seen as a lowest-common denominator when it comes to the success of these artists. Pollard drew in the example of 5 Seconds of Summer:
“Speaking to Rolling Stone at the end of last year, 5 Seconds of Summer estimated that “75% of our lives is [spent] proving we’re a real band. We’re getting good at it now. We don’t want to just be, like, for girls.” In order to prove themselves as a “real band” (apparently for the time being, they’re merely a figment of teenage girls’ imagination) they must gain the approval of men. Already, they explained proudly, they’re “seeing a few male fans start to pop up”. What an incredible moment that must be for them – to glimpse a man among a sea of female frivolity, each Y chromosome taking them one step closer to credibility. Never mind that they wouldn’t have been doing this interview if it wasn’t, like, for the girls that bought their records.
As a reviews editor, I’ve lost count of the number of times writers have – while bemoaning a gig’s drawbacks – referred derisively to the amount of “teenage girls” in the crowd. It’s as if that phrase itself is a code that needs no further explanation, no elaboration as to why a young woman’s fully paid-up presence at the gig is, unquestionably, a bad thing. It isn’t. Their judgments are just as legitimate, their enthusiasm just as credible, even if their screams are a little louder. And if you think their taste is indiscriminate, you’d be wise to remember that for every One Direction, there’s a thousand other bands who tried and failed to gain even a fraction of their success”.
Is it the case that male bands are genuinely unsettled by receiving so much love and connection?! Are they being too closed-off, or are they labouring under the misconception that girls are just there because they are fangirling and it is not about the songs and how they connect?! I want to nod to a feature from The Times from last year, where Caitlin Moran (again) explained how one should not be embarrassed by their teenage selves.
“There have already been a thousand hot takes over this piece, most of them about the predictability of men with “impeccable” record collections passing judgment on other people’s taste; a few of the most overheated telling the writer to get a divorce immediately.
For me, the interesting thing is how willing women – and usually it is women – are to renounce their younger selves. To act as if they are an embarrassment to them now.
But think, for a minute, how heroic your tiny teenage self was. However old you are now, your teenage self was amazing. Maybe she came of age during the war, before teenagers were even invented. Perhaps she was a Sixties girl, when eating disorders weren’t eating disorders, just grapefruit diets, willpower and osteoporosis. In the Seventies, she would have been trying to absorb second-wave feminism, the Cold War, clogs and Donny Osmond – a difficult balancing act for anyone, let alone someone tackling O levels at the same time”.
I am quite jealous looking back at my younger years in regards my bond with various bands. I was a massive fan of the great 1990s bands during the Britpop days such as Blur and Pulp, and I was getting into Radiohead and Nirvana at that time – Nirvana slightly earlier, as they broke through in their late-1980s/early-1990s. Me and other boys I know would chat about these bands and have posters on our walls, but we never really gave as much electricity and love to bands as girls; maybe because we were inhibited and wary that being so unencumbered was a betrayal or masculinity or it was a bit lame. In hindsight, I can recognise that so many bands that gained popularity then and resonate still do so because of the girls’ support.
IN THIS PHOTO: The Spice Girls gave voice and a sense of identity and empowerment to a generation of girls and young women in the 1990s (and to this day)
Before moving on, I want to source from another Caitlin Moran article - as I think her experiences and insights, both when she was a teenage girl and as a mother to teenagers, are eye-opening and really relevant to today. In this feature from The Stylist last year, Moran wrote about continuing sexism and how, when she was younger and now, male bands would find it shaming that the most enfevered and in awe demographic of their fanbase was occupied by young/teenage girls. There still seems to be this divide where boys think that girls are attracted to men in bands and they know nothing about the music and they should really leave things to the boys – almost a 1950s-esque perception of gender roles!
“My 15-year-ol came home from school and recounted how a classmate, previously a big fan of K-pop boyband BTS, had turned up in a Kurt Cobain T-shirt that she’d bought from Topshop (£28).
“All the cool boys immediately got really sneery,” she told me. “They were like, ‘You don’t know anything about grunge. You don’t even know who Kurt Cobain was. Go on, who was he?’”
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She just looked at them like they were stupid children and said, ‘Yeah, I do know who he was: he was dead fit’,” she replied. “Everyone went quiet, and then the girls were like, ‘Yeah, he was dead fit. He’s got dreamy eyes. We love him’.”
IN THIS PHOTO: Kurt Cobain/PHOTO CREDIT: Frank Micelotta/Getty Images
“What did the boys do?” I asked. “The boys shut up,” she said. This reply made my heart sing.
I try and explain to my teenage girls just how much sexism there was, how it was everywhere but we hadn’t yet invented the words to describe it.
This was a time before women could tweet and blog and share their experiences, before women had come up with terms like ‘Bechdel Test’ or ‘gaslighting’ or ‘inappropriate behaviour’. There was no #MeToo or #IBelieveHer.
As Britpop gathered pace and underground British indie bands gathered girl-fans, this new influx was seen as shaming for the bands. “What’s 40ft-long, screams and has no pubes?” the music industry joke of the time went. “The front row of a Blur gig.”
The implication was that bands were better off with their previous audience: indie boys in their mid-20s who did, admittedly, have an impressive and useful array of pubes. Twenty cool boys was the right audience. A million screaming girls was wrong.
My god. How much do you have to hate women to reject their joyful – and lucrative – love? To argue against the very thing that defined an era?
For it was this sudden influx of girls, bringing all the energy and joy of murmurating starlings, that made Britpop SO BIG. Of course it was. Without them buying the records, Blur versus Oasis would never have been on the news. Noel Gallagher would never have gone to Downing Street. Britpop would have been just another indie movement of the 90s that we barely remember now, like shoegazing, the new wave of new wave, or room”.
It is sad that these sort of attitudes and struggles did not die in the 1980s and 1990s, when some of the biggest bands of the time would find their audiences rammed with young female fans who were giving their heart and soul to the music. It is because of these fans, as has been said, that the records sold and the bands were such a success. I don’t think it is fair to suggest – as some have – that bands like The Beatles became more serious and experimental is because they felt that appealing largely to teenage girls was doing a disservice and there was a lack of genuine appreciation and knowledge of them and their music - it has been suggested that women/girls have been written out of The Beatles’ success story. This ages-old idea that when music starts being devoured by teenage girls, then it loses its cool and worth. Teenage girls are seen less as authentic fans and more mindless and hysterical - again, an attitude that was pervasive during the rise of The Beatles. Who knows how far some of the biggest bands ever would have gone were it not for the devoted (and oft-written off) following of teenage girls?! Today’s industry relies so much on teenage girls and their fandom - from blogs and forums to their attendance at gigs. In 2015, Pitchfork wrote an article that explained how some bands of the moment such as The 1975 almost have to distance themselves from young female fans, and how there is still a massive issue with sexism and snobbish attitudes:
“But their power has an expiration date, because pop artists earn respect only when they stop appealing to a teen demographic. Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé are two of the most prominent faces of this, prancing proof of the idea that there’s a legitimacy and longevity awaiting pop artists when they trade their Teen Choice Awards for Grammys. It's an idea that is now so prevalent that we’ve begun predicting who, in new pop groups, will be the one to "pull a Timberlake" and leave the group behind for respectable success.
The boy bands and girl groups—not to mention their passionate supporters—that made these artists famous are seemingly only of value when they act as stepping stones to the next, better group of appreciative listeners. Drop the chaste pop songs about unrequited love and hand-holding, they’re taught, and they’ll move on to the right kind of fans: adults, men. That is how one becomes an artist, right?
“Despite the passion and dedication of his band’s supporters, the 1975 frontman Matthew Healy treads carefully when addressing the matter of their mercurial rise, and just who it is that made them. "What qualifies a boy band, though? If it’s hysteria and a female-led population of fans and being surrounded in hotels by those fans and doing sell-out shows, then we’re a boy band," he said last year. He’s since distanced his band from that designation; female fans are seen as less legitimate, so their adoration is an instant credibility-killer.
The crux of teen-girl illegitimacy is the assumption that they are incapable of the critical thinking their older, male counterparts display when it comes to their favourite bands. But this assumption is doing them a true disservice”.
Why are teenage girls’ choices and tastes still being dismissed, and why are they seen as almost insignificant when it comes to the success of major artists and bands?! I think now, in an age of social media, trolling and the physiological harm that can come when we go online, there is this danger for teenage girls when they tweet their love of a band like BTS, One Direction (if they are still a concern?) and McFly.
The sort of vituperative backlash they receive and the sort of bile that comes from young men and fully-grown men is undoing one of the main reasons why their passionate fandom is so important: to give them a sense of strength, belonging and safety zone in a world that is quite confusing, strange and odd. We all know what it was like to be a teenager, and boy bands/male groups provide young/teenage girls with a sense of belonging and focus. I earlier sort of set aside the assumption that many girls are so attracted to bands because of the physical side. In fact, as Cate Sevilla wrote in The New Statesman last year when explaining her musical crushes and love of bands like Hanson when she weas young, extreme fandom and dedication is a way of figuring out a very new and unusual feelings:
“But where the world looks at throngs of teenage girls screaming at a boy band concert and sees teenage hysteria – a horrifying cocktail of hormones, niche obsession and an apparent abhorrent taste in music – I see thousands of girls who are managing to find joy and delight during one of the most difficult and complicated phases of their lives.
At those concerts, usually in venues reserved for male-dominated sporting events, young women suddenly have space – we have our music, we have our thing. We have our newfound thousand-something friends who all like the same thing as us. We’re all on fire with desire, waiting for our boys to get on stage. And then the lights go off, the music swells and it’s just too much and the only reasonable way to deal with such raw emotion is to scream our fucking heads off.
PHOTO CREDIT: @almosbech/Unsplash
We lose our minds a bit because being a teenager is horrible! But this is great! And we’re inexplicably horny! And we don’t quite understand what’s happening! Or what it means! And while the world around us is confusing and our parents are breaking up and our grandparents are dying and our teachers are unfair, here, in this space, we can just let rip. We can scream, and so we do. Where else can girls and women just scream at the top of their lungs in wild abandon? (And if there is such a place, please let us know immediately.)
Because of this, some people try to separate desire or sexuality from fandoms and insist that’s not all it’s about (“I just really love their music! They’re so talented!”) – and it isn’t – but it’s also really important to acknowledge that it exists and is a big part of it, and that that’s OK. The sexual desire of women and girls of all ages and of all orientations is important and complicated, it’s a part of our identity and overall being, and for young women, fandoms give us not just a physical space to go scream at a concert, but a psychic space where we can work out elements of our own identity, and who we really are, including our sexual desires and preferences.
And like with any cocoon – you do come out differently. Some as graceful, colourful butterflies, or, as I did, an acne-ridden 15-year-old Britney Spears fan. Alas, fandoms can’t fix the pain of one’s teen years or life situations, but instead serve us throughout different phases of our lives, giving us rooms to scream in and choreographed dances to learn, distracting us from the painful ebb and flow of everyday life”.
Rather than ridicule and castigate young women and girls because they love certain bands, I think now, more than ever, we need to hear their voices and realise how influential they are. Also, what is the issue with girls screaming at gigs?! I think it adds something truly exciting and exhilarating, and it is a phenomenon that will never die! It doesn’t just apply to bands: so many male and female solo artists are where they are because of their young female demographic – from Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran through to Taylor Swift. I also think that many Rock and Indie bands – who one would normally feel is a boys’ zone and more appealing to men – have such a fervent and dedicated female fanbase, but they still have to face sexism, dismissal and these never-ending prejudices. Taking things back to the start when I mentioned Caitlin Moran speaking with Lauren Laverne and how, in More Than a Woman, Moran tackles that perception how teenage girls are about crushes and fantasising about band and it is the boys who are the proper fans. From The Beatles and The Rolling Stones through to the Pop idols of the 1980s such as Madonna, right through to the huge bands and artists of today, it is all down to girls and young women that they exploded and have such a legacy. Rather than marginalise and patronise the loyal and hugely important young female/girl voice in music, we should reappraise and respect them. Because, without their unquenchable fandom and following, so many great bands and artists…
WOULD be nothing without them.