"Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture," by Jon Savage

Reviewed by Camille Paglia (ugh!) in the New York Times.

Bobby-soxers, the female swing fans with their sporty outfits and dance-ready saddle shoes, screamed en masse for Frank Sinatra and laid the groundwork for gyrating rock ’n’ roll fandom. Swing helped end segregation: not only were swing crowds racially mixed, but large jazz orchestras “integrated a decade before sport or military organizations.”

Savage heralds the arrival, in 1944, of Seventeen, a fashion and pop magazine targeted to high school girls, as a landmark crystalization of teenage identity. Now “teenagers were neither adolescents nor juvenile delinquents,” who had been a social worry for decades. American consumerism, whose expansion Savage disapprovingly follows, had found its perfect partner in the protected, self-absorbed middle-class teenager.

Savage abruptly ends his book in the mid-1940s, alas, with no overview of the teenage fantasia to come...

"Japan cracking US pop culture hegemony"

To be read in conjunction with Ian Condry's book on Japanese hip-hop. From the Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 15, 2008, by Amelia Newcomb. Excerpts follow:

Today, Japan sets the trends in what's cool. Sarah Palin's famous glasses came from a Japanese designer. [Palin, cool???!!! T.S.] Tokyo has the most Michelin-starred restaurants in the world, with eight of them earning three stars. Even America's favorite food show, "Iron Chef," is a Japanese import. Japanese women are pushing the limits of literary pop culture with blogs and cellphone novels. Japanese comics occupy ever-greater shelf space in bookstores, and animé-influenced movies like the "The Dark Knight" and "Spider-Man 3" find huge audiences in the West.

What all these media share is a nuanced Japanese aesthetic that has infiltrated global sensibilities – a sort of new "soft power" for Japan. In the process, they're challenging delineations of good and evil from the world's main purveyor of pop culture, Hollywood, as well as American ideals of the lone action-hero."The American 20th-century ideal of the individual superhero is wearing thin," says Roland Kelts, professor at the University of Tokyo and author of "Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S."

Ann Powers, "Authenticity takes a holiday"

The ever-incisive Ann Powers, writing in the Los Angeles Times. "Pop music notes on the decade: Authenticity takes a holiday."

Of all the aspects of pop that went into fatal mutation mode in recent years, the cult of authenticity was hit perhaps the hardest...

One major one has to do with what we think is most real, most able to embody sincere and powerful emotions...

The most fascinating personalities of this new era would never present themselves as unwashed or genuinely unplugged. They're show people who are able to dance, crack jokes and work all the knobs that power their multimedia extravaganzas. Eminem and Britney Spears, will.i.am and Kanye West, M.I.A. and OutKast, Rihanna and Lil Wayne: In nearly every niche, millennial artists have shown a marked preference for artifice over raw expression, costume and theatrics over plain presentation and foregrounding the tools they use to make music over pretending that it all comes "naturally"...

As the decade ends, pop grows ever more bent on making inauthenticity ring true... There are obvious reasons for this abandonment of solid-feeling values -- not just "authenticity" but also "purity" and "rawness." Novelty and sonic shine are primary values in a music business powered by catchy ringtones and downloads instead of albums. Technology also has profoundly changed the way music is made; kids are learning how to play synthesizers before they bother with guitars, and tools like Auto-Tune and Pro Tools have made "natural" sounds passé.

But even as the dire economics of music-making (and, by the way, music journalism) call for a lament, I celebrate the return of glitter and weirdness and fakery in pop. It's opening up the doors to those who didn't fit more constrictive paradigms of authenticity: more women, more gay and lesbian faces, more multiracial and international voices. In general, it's making for a fuller reflection of life in our fragmented, hyper-accelerated time of struggle...

We've finally all learned the lesson of the disco prophet Sylvester: only by admitting that nothing is straightforward can we feel Mighty Real.

Disney targets boys, $50 billion at stake

"Disney Expert Uses Science to Draw Boy Viewers," by Brookes Barnes, New York Times, April 13, 2009, pp. A1, A 14. Some experts.

Ms. [Kelly] Peña and her team of anthropologists have spent 18 months peering inside the heads of incommunicative boys in search of just that kind of psychological nugget. Disney is relying on her insights to create new entertainment for boys 6 to 14, a group that Disney used to own way back in the days of “Davy Crockett” but that has wandered in the age of more girl-friendly Disney fare like “Hannah Montana”...

Fearful of coming off as too manipulative, youth-centric media companies rarely discuss this kind of field research. Disney is so proud of its new “headquarters for boys,” however, that it has made an exception, offering a rare window onto the emotional hooks that are carefully embedded in children’s entertainment. The effort is as outsize as the potential payoff: boys 6 to 14 account for $50 billion in spending worldwide, according to market researchers...

media companies over all have struggled to figure out the boys’ entertainment market...The guys are trickier to pin down for a host of reasons. They hop more quickly than their female counterparts from sporting activities to television to video games during leisure time. They can also be harder to understand: the cliché that girls are more willing to chitchat about their feelings is often true...

In Ms. Peña’s research boys across markets and cultures described the television aimed at them as “purposeless fun” but expressed a strong desire for a new channel that was “fun with a purpose...

Creating a need or bringing a real need into public view? The Bodygroom

"Buzz Marketing" by Rob Walker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 5, 2007. Excerpts follow:

About a year ago, Philips Norelco began the push to sell a device called the Bodygroom as a product to help men shave areas of the body other than the face. At the time, according to Jim Olstrom, director of the home division of the retail-data collection firm NPD Group, the idea of a product specifically made for below-the-neck shaving barely existed. Today, the Bodygroom is one of at least four products in what’s seen as a distinct and fast-growing category; nearly 250,000 body-hair trimmers have been bought in the United States in the last year...

All of this suggests a problem that no one was aware of before its solution went on sale. But Michelle Schwartz, a Philips Norelco brand manager, maintains that this is not so. She says the company, in the course of research into what was missing from the “grooming portfolio” of the typical male consumer, concluded that “over half the guys we were talking to between the ages of 20 and 50 were doing some body-hair maintenance.” Moreover, they were not happy with their options...

How to puncture this conspiracy of silence? Marketing. Specifically, Philips Norelco’s online campaign involving a video at a Web site called ShaveEverywhere.com. his site, started in May of last year, features a young man in a bathrobe who explains the benefits of using the Bodygroom on the back, underarms and other body parts that are bleeped out...it’s extremely hard to imagine a staid public company like Philips putting a message like this on television. On the Internet, however, it was a huge hit...

Philips Norelco claims that 60 percent of Bodygroom buyers say they learned about the product via ShaveEverywhere.com...Novelty and boundary-pushing aside, the strategy has done one of marketing’s traditional jobs, clearly linking a product to a particular use.

Nerds

Excerpts from, "Who's a Nerd, Anyway?" by Benjamin Nugent, New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 29, 2007.

Nerdiness, [Mary Bucholz] has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior...Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English...“hyperwhite” works as a description for nearly everything we intuitively associate with nerds, which is why Hollywood has long traded in jokes that try to capitalize on the emotional dissonance of nerds acting black...Bucholtz sees something to admire here. In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.”...On the other hand, the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.” This is especially disturbing at a time when African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school. Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students”.... If nerdiness, as Bucholtz suggests, can be a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture, it’s a rebellion with a limited membership.