I have been so disturbed and disgusted by the lack of respect and common decency for the safety of Robert Pattinson in New York this week that I’ve been cobbling together a treatise on fandom. It’s not quite finished yet, but in its writing, I keep going back to my original study of fandom, a year ago… copied here, because I love it.
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One Bare Shoulder
Reprinted with permission from Pop Matters Online. Original publication date 28 May 2008.
The first time I saw Dream Street was on July 8, 2001. I was 14 years old, and I was watching cartoons with my sister, who was seven at the time. The average older sister that I was, I didn’t enjoy spending time with her, but I was grumpy that day, because it had been almost a month since I’d heard from my boyfriend. I sat with her and watched television. We’d been kicking each other across the sofa all through the insipid Hey Arnold! on Nickelodeon when a commercial break came on and I saw the boy in the center, singing and dancing in a shining blue camouflage T-shirt and dark, baggy shorts. He had spiky brown hair, a tan, and a blindingly white smile. He was the most perfect boy I could have imagined.
Discovering Dream Street is one of the flashbulb memories of my life. In under a week, I had begun my own fansite, an amateur non-for-profit website that functioned as a massive shrine to the band, and within a month, I had become deeply immersed in the teenipop subculture. Like other teenipoppers, I dreamed of traveling to swinging London to become a royal and find a cute musician boyfriend, like Amanda Bynes’ Daphne Reynolds in the film What a Girl Wants; of crashing a music video shoot and earning both a dancing role and a kiss beneath the mistletoe like Lizzie McGuire; of jet-setting to swank European countries and going on unlimited shopping sprees with beautiful boys to a soundtrack of my favorite music like the peppy Olsen twins. I knew immediately of the actions of Dream Street, those beautifully stylized youths who could lift themselves, and me, in my infatuation-addled mind, from humdrum normalcy.
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“There’s an endless supply of 12-year-old girls waiting for someone to sing to them,” wrote Emily White in her December 2002 New York Times article concerning the end of the band. By the end of 2002, when Dream Street’s final hurrah was earned—the honor of a feature story in the Times—the boy band scene was reviled. The music scene was changing rapidly from effervescent, pure pop (*NSync’s eponymous 1998 American debut or Britney Spears’ …Baby One More Time in 1999) to cloudier, more R&B-influenced or post-pop punk fare (Sum41’s Fat Lip in 2001, B2K’s 2002 album Pandemonium). The goals of mainstream pop had changed.
In its heyday, the ideal boy band image was best summed up by Salon.com writer Janelle Brown as “a handful of clean-cut boys next door…turned…into fuzzy, desexualized plush toys that you’d feel safe leaving with your 14-year-old daughter”. The androgynizing of the boy band was, at least until 2000, money in the bank. However, by late 2002 the image of this milquetoast masculinity was no longer considered desirable as music groups like *NSync and Backstreet Boys had taken on a harder image and no longer found fame singing swooning lyrics that read like prepubescent blog entries. For most of America, the boy band era was over. Twelve-year-old girls no longer wanted the nice boy who crooned sweet nothings in her ear. (more…)
